Our Favorite Tablet for Kids

The drive to Grandma’s is four hours of everyone asking if we’re there yet, and there was a stretch where we were rationing one aging tablet between kids who did not want to share. Screens are their own debate in our house, but on a long haul, a movie the little ones can watch is the difference between arriving frazzled and arriving human.

We settled on the Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids tablet, and the big HD screen is the reason it goes in the car bag every trip. It is roomy enough that two kids can actually watch a movie without fighting over the angle, the chunky rugged case has already bounced off the car floor more than once, and the parental controls let us set time limits and lock down what they can open without a nightly argument.

We weighed it against pricier name-brand tablets and the cheap no-name ones, and the Fire HD 10 landed in the sensible middle for a house where things get dropped. The bumper case means we’re not terrified every time a toddler carries it off, the controls do the disciplining so we don’t have to, and at around $115 we could stomach owning more than one. For surviving small hands and long car rides, it does exactly what we need.