WE, I am afraid, have a system addict on our hands. Our two year-old daughter is currently in the grip of a serious obsession with our iPad and we have only ourselves to blame.

When her grandfather first presented it to us, loaded up with Peppa Pig books and a little game, we marvelled at it and encouraged her to have a go. She was shy and reticent to touch the screen – as you have to do to work these things – and preferred that myself or her father baked a cake for Peppa’s birthday party or flicked through the pages of a storybook whilst she watched in wonderment.

How things have changed. Now, often her first word of the morning, after ‘breakfast’, is ‘iPad’. After one long session on it when she was unwell, she became a mini master at the thing, and currently is its commander in chief. It exists solely as a store for the many games which she gently cajoled us into purchasing before we knew what we were doing - unlike the company Toca Boca, who really  know what they’re up to.

She came upon their robot game, wherein a young child can put a robot together from junk parts and then move it around a simple course towards a magnet, and progressed along the slippery slope to their hair salon, house, train and so on. 

They’re ingenious, I admit, and it’s quite fun to watch her ‘cutting/dyeing/blow drying’ the hair of a poor cartoon lady, ‘cooking’ or ‘vacuuming’, ‘sweeping leaves’ and ‘ironing’. But there’s a part of me that is really very worried about the whole thing.

Whilst I must come to terms with the fact that she has been born into a generation for whom elaborate technology will be more and more part and parcel of everyday life, I hate the thought of her being sucked into a machine for long periods.

My brother grew up spending many, many hours alone in our office at home playing one of the world’s most popular online games, World of Warcraft, and I recall constantly shouting at him to go outside or at the very least join reality for a while.

I know that my daughter is learning things from the computer, including vocabulary, colours and the names of vegetables, and I don’t want to spoil all of her fun, but, I think it’s in danger of becoming an unhealthy obsession. Despite the tears and the tantrums, and agonised cries of ‘where iPad?’ while a little person rolls around the floor in agony, I’m going to try to stay strong and continue to ration her technological passion for as long as I am able.