Carol McGiffin came under fire from viewers for calling her co-stars parenting skills into question on Loose Women after Katie Piper admitted that she lets her children watch tablets during long journeys.
As Tuesday's host Ruth Langsford introduced the topic 'Are you an iPad parent? Katie said she felt it was important to be 'transparent' with her many social media followers and said: "You can't have and do it all and we have this thing in our family where, if you we travel - planes, cars, trains whatever, we let our kids have a tablet. We've got Minions on them, their homework, their maths stuff and we let them do that."
Reacting to Katie's admission, ITV anchor Ruth quizzed: "Is that for your benefit or theirs? Is it because you don't want to hear them? Or is it them so they're not going 'are we nearly there yet?' because they're bored." Katie told Ruth it was "mutually beneficial," adding that she does encourage her kids took outside at the environment they're travelling through, adding: "But nobody wants to look at cows for two hours up the M3!"
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The latter statement prompted a strong reaction from Carol, who shook her head and responded: "Excuse me. Do as your told! This whole thing that kids have to be distracted and kept busy all the time and they can't be bored on a car journey for a few hours and look at the nature, look at the trees and try and play I Spy..." Fellow Loose Women panellist Kelle Bryan told Carol: "We do do that; we look at the cows, we look at the trees and they enjoy that and then I say 'now read a story on this,' or whatever on a device and then they watch a movie and then that journey is over. I've enjoyed it, they've enjoyed it."
Having just as unfavourable a reaction to Kelle's explanation as Katie's, Carol fired back: "Portable telly? I'm sorry it's a pacifier, it's like a dummy. Give the kid a dummy in the back, keep them quiet," as Kelle protested: "No it's not. It educates them and it entertains them." Not backing down Carol added: "Mostly parents give their kids things to distract them because they're too busy on their phones."
Trying to calm things, host Ruth read out messages from viewers, many of whom had been having their say on social media, with one far from impressed Twitter user posting: "Agree with @KatiePiper_ don’t pass judgment on other people for giving their kids iPads! Judgy Carol has no idea! We’ve 2 non verbal autistic kids who use iPads, cos a) it gives me a f**king break & b) the only way they’ve started using language is cos of their tablet!"
Also strongly against Carol, another reacted: "You can tell Carol doesn't have kids!" while, siding with her a third tweeted: "I'm with Carol on this kids spend too much time on tech"
