My daughter is approaching 3 and my wife has suggested a tablet either as a birthday or Christmas present, and I’m a bit hesitant. It’d be great for long trips, but I think as a day-to-day thing it might be a distraction. It’d get Spidey and Friends off the telly though. How and when did you handle this?
My kid was about three or four. We got an Amazon kids fire tablet with the subscription, so that it’s pretty locked down, but has lots of curated content available. You set the kid’s age, and it shows relevant content, as well as anything that you specifically share from your Amazon account.
When my kid started school, there was content from the school on their website, so I side loaded the Google Play Store and installed Chrome and Gmail. It’s not necessary, but it made some things easier.
We didn’t use them, but I think there are built in restrictions that you can use, like only allowing a certain amount of time per day. I used the Google account to try to add the tablet to the Google Family system, but couldn’t get it to work in the way that I wanted.
If you do get a tablet, add YouTube Kids and disable regular YouTube. There are no ads, and the content is curated.