London - Any parent sick of trying to prise their children’s gadgets from their grip can surely sympathise.
TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp has revealed she smashed up her sons’ iPads in front of them after they continued to play video games beyond the time period she had permitted.
The mother of Bay Atlas, 12, and Oscar Hercules, ten, said she went to extreme lengths when the boys refused to stop playing the online games Fortnite and PUBG – both of which have caused concern over addiction levels among youngsters.
Allsopp, 47, told Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine show: "This is the first time I’ve said this publicly. In June I smashed my kids’ iPads – not in a violent way. I actually banged them on the table leg."
Explaining her reasons, she added: "There is a game called Fortnite and another PUBG and I decided that we had made all sorts of rules and all sorts of times when we said you can’t play them and all those rules got broken. In the end I said, 'Right that is it, I have to physically [break them].'"
Asked how she did it, the Location, Location, Location presenter, who had her children with property developer husband Ben Anderson and is also stepmother to his two older sons, replied: "It was remarkably easy. I didn’t intend to speak about it but it’s come up now."
After causing a stir with the admission – with some people suggesting she might have been better off simply confiscating the expensive gadgets – Allsopp defended her approach, writing on Twitter: "If you found your kids with a packet of cigarettes would you say 'I won’t destroy these because they are worth a tenner but please don’t smoke?'. No of course you wouldn’t."