Katherine Heigl Is Letting Apple Products Raise Her Kids

By a show of hands how many people hate Katherine Heigl. Both of my hands are held very high at the moment like I’m at an Alien Ant Farm concert in 1999. There are 99 reasons to hate Heigl and how she raises her kids is another one. Katherine came out as another one of those uninvolved parents that lets an iPad raise her kids because it’s easier. But she wants you to know that their ridiculous amount of media consumption isn’t the end of the world. Probably because the first two aren’t biologically hers anyway. Adopted kids are like trial kids. If excessively watching Peppa Pig and playing Candy Crush ruins them for life she can always point out that their real parents couldn’t have raised them better since they were never around.

Heigl’s on her parenting experiences:

“The girls are really into iPads. It’s not good. I need to curtail it, though I have to say, so much of that use is reading,” says Heigl, 39. “They’re reading, they’re playing educational games. I don’t allow them to scroll through YouTube videos and stuff; I put some limits on that.”

“But it’s not as mind-numbing as we all are afraid it is,” she adds of screen time.

One recent incident put the situation in perspective, as Heigl’s daughters and teenage niece Madison were sitting around the living room, engrossed in their devices.

“I was like, ‘None of us are connecting or communicating,’” she recalls. “And then I went, ‘Oh, wait a minute — Naleigh and Madison are playing Words With Friends against each other, so essentially they’re playing Scrabble, just without the board on the table. Adalaide is coloring on her iPad, Josh is reading the news and I’m reading a book.”

“We’re all doing things that we would be doing to entertain ourselves, we’re just doing them differently than we did them 20 years ago,” the 27 Dresses star points out. “It’s okay. It’s not the end of civilization as we know it, I promise.”

Once you notice that there’s a problem, you should work on a solution to correct it, not justify it. Can you really call yourself a family if everyone’s face is in front of a separate screen all of the time? But traditional family guidelines are meant to be strayed from when your actress of a mother only adopted your sister because raising Asian kids from foreign countries was just another celebrity status symbol, like owning a Birkin bag. Except, unlike an “out of style” ostrich leather Hermès pocketbook, you might get in some legal trouble if you decide to sell a kid when you get tired of them.

Photo Credit: Backgrid USA