A few years ago I looked into current recommendations around introducing technology to children. The academics and app developers I spoke to suggested screen time could be a positive for children, as long as parents stayed involved in screen time, and didn’t just use it as a digital babysitter.

Still, there’s a massive gulf of anxiety between academic recommendations and dealing with a real-world two-year-old, so in our house we took a decidedly conservative approach. We began introducing just one device, the iPad, to our daughter when she was close to her third birthday.

Little kids love structure, so we introduced just twenty minutes iPad time, and only after dinner. The first few days were quite terrifying. After her first taste of the iPad she talked about it non-stop; she asked for the iPad as soon as she woke up, and every few minutes after that, and when the twenty minutes were over she pleaded for just a bit more time.

But after that first week, things calmed down, and iPad time became just another part of her daily routine. She stopped asking for more time, and was even happy to skip a night if we’d been out late for dinner.

The time she has with the iPad is also fairly structured. The twenty minutes is always with me, the apps are always interactive games — no passive video watching — and we talk about the apps she uses, and what she’s learning or seeing as we go.