According to the Bible, Moses came down from Mount Sinai bearing two heavy tablets on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments. They obviously weren’t iPads.

We gave both Isaac and Toby tablets for their seventh birthdays. Isaac’s Hudl was on its last legs, so as a reward for another excellent year at school we upgraded him this week to a new Kindle Fire.

Tablets and smartphones are as much a part of our kids’ lives as Walkmans, and calculators were a part of mine.

Days during my summer holidays at a comparable age might have started with a book or putting on one of the three(!) TV channels available. And that’s assuming there was anything actually on given that those were the days before 24-hour broadcasting, when channels shut down for significant periods of the day.

Nowadays the boys only need to pick up their tablets, as this photo from Saturday morning demonstrates. Instead of a book, Isaac was reading a Harry Potter book on his tablet. Toby was watching an old episode of Top Gear on iPlayer. The whole notion of having to buy a book or borrow one from the library or to adhere to a TV schedule is alien to our kids, who expect to be able to access anything they want on demand.

Moses needed two hefty lumps of stone to convey ten sentences. I had access to a stack of paperbacks. Our kids’ tablets can hold many thousands of times as much information and access entire online libraries. Their only worry is occasional battery anxiety.

Times change, eh?

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