I think boredom is good for kids, and a school bus ride is a good place to practice it. A parent in my livestream chat has two boys, six and seven, with no phones or tablets of their own, and the youngest wants a screen he can play with on the bus.
My first answer is that the internet is for adults, not children, for technical reasons and for legal and regulatory ones. Once you buy a device with an internet connection, you end up blocking one thing after another, because many of the things it can do are designed to capture attention. Even an hour a day adds up to hundreds of hours a year. A Wi-Fi tablet with no cellular connection still needs its videos from somewhere, and most video services aren't compatible with kids, even their kids' products. YouTube Kids, for example, is not safe for kids.
Compared with watching content, even content you've filtered, I think staring out the bus window is better for a child's mental and emotional health. If he wants something to do, he could bring a book or a Kindle. My son is 11 and has a kids' Kindle with a filtered library, which you still need to check on, and he's been reading a lot of books because of it.
The parent followed up that a handheld game console would be okay, and that being bored is okay too. If he'd rather play a game, an old console like a Nintendo DS works well. We found one for our son on Facebook Marketplace. The batteries last a long time, and it's sturdy enough for a kid.
Full livestream, where I answer more viewer questions and cover news about kids and technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXv57vLtLpg
Family IT Guy helps parents protect their kids from the two biggest digital dangers: addictive algorithms and anonymous communication, and the ways AI is making both worse. Ben Gillenwater spent 30 years in cybersecurity, and he teaches this as a parent in the same trenches you are.
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