Allsopp: I smashed my children’s ipads after they broke screen time rules
‘Pointless, addictive, violent games which destroy imagination and family life and leave a generation terrified of boredom’
IT IS the perennial battle with which every parent can identify: how to limit children’s screen time without causing a Third World War.
But Kirstie Allsopp, the broadcaster, took things further than most when she finally snapped and smashed her sons’ ipads against the kitchen table.
The 47-year-old described how she was pushed to the limits when Bay Atlas, 12, and Oscar Hercules, 10, were playing video games outside their permitted time.
“This is the first time I’ve said this publicly,” she told Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine. “In June, I smashed my kids’ ipads. Not in a violent way, I actually banged them on the table leg.”
She added: “There is a game called Fortnite and another, PUBG. We had made all sorts of rules and all sorts of times when we said you can’t play them and all those rules got broken. In the end I said, ‘Right that is it, I have to physically (break them).’”
Asked to show how she did it, she replied: “It was remarkably easy. I didn’t intend to speak about it but it’s come up now.”
The wealthy presenter was later forced to defend her actions amid accusations that she did not appreciate the value of money and deemed desirable items such as ipads “trivial” and “replaceable”.
“This has nothing to do with money and everything to do with pointless, addictive, violent games which destroy imagination and family life and leave a generation terrified of boredom,” she wrote on Twitter.
“I stood up to an unhealthy influence in my home. If your parents don’t teach you that there are boundaries then who will? At some point in everyone’s life they learn what happens when they go too far. Lesson learned and a much happier summer as a result. This is about the value of trust, and the value of people over things.”
Her stance also attracted praise from sympathetic parents. Sara Thornton, the broadcaster and weather presenter, said she “completely agreed” with Ms Allsopp, describing how she recently threw her teenager’s ipad down the stairs. She is likely to find allies in Liz Truss, chief secretary to the treasury, who locks her daughter’s phone in a box to restrict screen time, and Matt Hancock, the culture secretary.
Ms Truss said earlier this year: “I’m known as the phone jailer in our household. The best method is physically locking it away.” She said while the social media companies had some responsibility to enforce age limits, it was also the responsibility of parents to monitor what their children were doing.
Mr Hancock has spoken of the “genuine concern” surrounding the amount of screen time children clock up and the negative impact it can have on their lives, suggesting that the government could impose screen time limits.
The admission is not the first time that Ms Allsopp has attracted controversy over her parenting choices.
In June, she was forced to defend her decision to sit her children in economy class while she and her husband, Ben Andersen, flew in more expensive seats.
She said that upgrading her sons’ plane seats would be an “absurd waste of money”.
Ms Allsopp sai: “Obviously this wasn’t the case when they were little, but now they are big enough to sit separately, they do. Club class should be a huge treat you’ve worked hard for. If kids get used to it, what do they have to work towards? It seems like an absurd waste of money and very spoiling.
“I suspect Gordon Ramsay and I can’t be the only ones to think this.”