I Smashed the iPad
For a long time now, I’ve had this low-grade dread about Roblox. The kind that sits in your gut like bad street food—you ignore it, tell yourself it’s fine, but you know it’s doing damage. My kid didn’t just play it. He disappeared into it. When we asked him to stop, to eat, to breathe the same air as the rest of us, it was like pulling a junkie off the needle. Anger. Tears. Frustration when he lost, when the game didn’t give him what he thought he was owed.
Everything else fell by the wayside. Toys untouched. Outside abandoned. The world reduced to a glowing rectangle. Parenting became a constant tug-of-war—me on one end, a trillion-dollar algorithm on the other. I was losing.
Then yesterday, I snapped. No philosophical debate. No parenting podcast wisdom. Just a moment of clarity—or madness. I smashed the iPad. Clean break. Crossing the Rubicon.
My wife said I broke our son’s heart. She wasn’t wrong. He cried like something real had died. And maybe it had. But standing there amid the wreckage, I felt an uncomfortable calm. Like I’d finally taken my hand off a hot stove.
Of course, this isn’t some heroic victory. Roblox still exists. It’s still lurking on our phones. But now we have leverage. A chance to phase it out instead of letting it run the house.
I’m not anti-gaming. Games are fine. Even good. But Roblox is a bottomless pit—no ending, no natural stopping point, no mercy. So we’re replacing it with something finite. Old-school. A Nintendo Switch. A console you can turn off. Games that actually end. A machine that stays home, doesn’t follow him into every pocket of his life, doesn’t outsource his childhood to strangers on the internet.
I won’t pretend it’s solved. The real work starts now—keeping him engaged, curious, bored in healthy ways. Making room for scraped knees, half-finished Lego cities, long afternoons that don’t light up or buzz. A childhood that leans a little more analog, a little less engineered for addiction.
I broke an iPad yesterday. I don’t regret it. Now I just have to build something better in its place.
~ Bai, Sunday, January 25, 2026, NorCal