I’m sitting on my sofa writing this column on a laptop, while my wife (and Apps Playground co-editor) sits at the table writing a separate post on her laptop. Such is life when you run your own business.

Some evenings we sit on the sofa using separate iPads: email, Twitter, Facebook, news sites. Repeat. Sometimes the last thing I read at night is RSS feeds in bed. If I get woken up in the small hours, I struggle to fight the impulse to check my emails.

Meanwhile, when our children play on the iPad, they often wander off to do something else after 10-15 minutes – half an hour tops – and will happily abandon it earlier if there’s an adult to jump all over in the garden or a spider to peer at.

I don’t think we’re the only family with these dynamics (don’t worry, we do talk to one another without screens on our laps sometimes). Yet in wider parenting society, we talk about needing to regulate children’s ‘iPad time’.

You can see where I’m going with this. Perhaps it’s parents whose iPad time needs to be regulated (well, self-regulated). If anyone’s in danger of getting addicted to shiny tablets, it’s not toddlers or pre-schoolers.

Perhaps they should be in charge of monitoring and restricting *our* use of devices…

My six year-old has, once: “Daddy, you’re not listening to me, you’re playing with your iPad,” he said. Caught red-handed, I slapped its Smart Cover shut and didn’t open it again until after their bedtime: a shamed and penitent man.

In truth, though, that was a rarity: if parents hit the iPads with relish in the evenings, it may be partly because they’ve spent the day, well, parenting. Think of all those tweets and status updates to catch up on! WHO’S ON MAILONLINE’S SIDEBAR OF SHAME?!

With two active boys the chance to lean back on the sofa and catch up with friends, family and Kardashians on a tablet is important relaxation time. I don’t think we have a screen-addiction problem…

*eyes flicker to Facebook notifications on iPad, left hand reaches for iPhone to check Mailbox app, right hand hovers over Tweetdeck window on laptop*

But even so, it’s something to think about: children may well be the ones with the most well-adjusted approach to tablet time in the home…