Earlier this month, a paragraph in a comment piece on the Independent’s website really got my goat.

The piece was about kids running up big bills on in-app purchases without their parents’ knowledge, and had plenty of sensible things to say about why parents should be aware of what apps their children are using, and teaching them why buying virtual items without permission.

Then it all went wrong in the final paragraph:

“I’d keep any child of mine well away from these time wasting games anyway. All the evidence shows that the children who go on to do best and achieve most in life are the ones who read books in their spare time. So hide the iPad and take them to a bookshop or library. It’s a lot cheaper.”

Oh. Oh dear.

Yes, free libraries – which are precious and threatened things – are cheaper than paid apps. But paid apps tend to be quite a bit cheaper than physical books, which makes me wonder how much App Store experience the writer has in this field.

And while I’m not as up to speed on the evidence mentioned, I’m more than happy to believe (or hope) that children who read books in their spare time are setting themselves well for the future.

It’s the “hide the iPad and take them to a bookshop or library” that bothers me, because it plays into a wider view that a.) children’s education and entertainment is an either/or thing: books or apps, reading or games; and b.) that apps and games can’t help kids to develop valuable reading comprehension skills in any case.

The first of those is something I’ve encountered when writing about children’s apps for The Guardian (one of my proper freelance jobs when not working on Apps Playground). People often pop up with tart comments suggesting kids should be riding bikes, reading books, playing with dolls etc instead of “staring at screens”.

My children play with apps. They also ride scooters, build brick towers, stroke slugs, trundle toy cars, draw pictures, knock over brick towers, paint, kick balls, catch balls, throw balls at parents, make monsters out of plasticine, make pretend cafes selling leaves to the stroked slugs, play Top Trumps and YES, read old-fashioned paper books.

I’d suggest the same is true of the vast majority of families where there’s a tablet and/or smartphone being used by the children. Apps and screens don’t just sit alongside other forms of reading and play either: play often spans all these things.

So, my six year-old likes animals: he hoovers up animal encyclopaedias, looks for minibeasts in the garden, draws spiders, watches Barney’s Latin America and David Attenborough’s Africa, and runs around pretending to be a tiger – but also plays with animal-themed apps and demands to be shown hippos on YouTube via the iPad. The device fits in with other forms of play rather than replacing them.

But the second view hinted at in the Independent article’s conclusion is that for a child, reading books in their spare time has to be done with, well, books. My view is that it can also be done with apps.

There’s a very good guest blog-post on Nosy Crow’s website from earlier this month by literacy innovation researcher Sheila Frye, who’s been studying how using apps affects children’s reading comprehension skills.

Nosy Crow makes children’s apps, yes, but they also publish physical books, so I wouldn’t expect them to be biased in favour of either, but they do come across as a company that thinks very hard about how children read – see this interview I did in 2011 with managing director Kate Wilson:

“Wilson talks about the idea of ‘the known text’ – children learning a story and reciting it from memory, even if they can’t read the actual letters and words on the page. ‘It’s the building blocks of reading, and at least as important as phonic knowledge,” she says. “They are understanding how stories work and internalising that.'”

Anyway, the new blog post by Sheila Frye talks about her study of children using some of Nosy Crow’s apps, and her efforts to find out whether their reading comprehension is actually boosted by the interactive aspects of an app:

“The notion of active reading is crucial. Readers have to consciously make sense of what they are reading and not just sit back and passively receive information. Successful comprehension requires readers to be able to think about their reading – an act of metacognition that leads readers to build connections, make inferences, synthesize, determine what is important, visualize, and generate questions. It goes to say that from a reading and cognitive processing standpoint, the more involved readers are with stories, the more likely it is that they will comprehend.”

And Frye goes on to talk about the possible downside of children getting distracted by interactivity and thus understanding the story less rather than more. So her conclusion is less ‘apps are amazing!’ and more ‘we need to study apps more to understand how they affect children’. Or, without my paraphrasing:

“It is still to be determined if interactive eBooks support readers in the area of comprehension. Consequently, there is a strong need for researchers AND designers to better understand how interactive eBooks could serve as cognitive tools to impact reading comprehension and knowledge building, and explore how particular features of an interactive eBook may serve as digital tools for higher-level literacy learning.”

Anyway, yes. Based on my own entirely-anecdotal evidence on a not-exactly-scientific focus group of two children, I think that good apps can be great for children’s reading comprehension skills, and that using them doesn’t mean you stop reading printed books with your children, whether shop-bought or library-borrowed.

iPads aren’t the threat to ‘reading’ that their critics often think. And I haven’t even talked much about apps that start to encourage writing – or rather storytelling – with this week’s Sago Mini Doodlecast just the latest example of an app that encourages children to make up their own stories.

Children’s games with less-than-ethical approaches to in-app purchases are a genuine problem, but there are lots of ethical apps out there that, while they may not focus on reading specifically, are marvellous in their ambitions to help children learn through play.

Don’t hide the iPad, then. Use it with your children, AND read books with them, AND take them to bookshops and libraries. Arguments pitting apps against books rather than ‘good apps’ against ‘bad apps’ aren’t the best way to approach the challenges of parenting in the digital age.