I spend a lot of energy trying to keep Leo away from over-stimulating screens, so it probably sounds strange that I never board a plane without an iPad in my bag. But the contradiction only exists if you assume all screen time is the same, and after years of watching my own son on flights, I'm pretty convinced it isn't.
The first reason is simply practical. When you travel with a three-year-old, you are already carrying a car seat or a stroller, snacks for delays, spare clothes for the inevitable spill, and your own bag on top of it. There is no room left for the toy bin, the stack of picture books, the coloring set, and the activity workbook you'd normally spread across the living room floor. An iPad replaces all of that in something the size of a paperback, and it can become any one of those things depending on what you open. That compactness alone is why it earns its spot in my carry-on before almost anything else.
But the real reason I trust it comes down to what he actually does on it, because not everything on that screen behaves the same way in his little nervous system.
Videos and most games are the ones I watch closely, because they're the ones that get him overstimulated fastest. I don't know exactly how your child reacts, but mine has a pretty consistent pattern: somewhere around thirty minutes into a video, or often much sooner with a game, he starts to get wired in that unmistakable way, quicker to snap, harder to redirect, and almost guaranteed to melt down the moment I try to take the device away. That's the exact dynamic I'm trying to avoid, and it's also exactly what most "kids" apps and channels are built to produce, since a kid who's a little overstimulated is a kid who keeps watching.
What surprised me is how differently he responds to a handful of other activities on the same device, ones that somehow don't hijack that same dopamine loop.
Drawing is the one we use most. Almost any simple drawing or sketching app works, and he can sit with it quietly for a long stretch without the frantic energy that videos bring on. There's no score, no timer, no reward popping up to pull him back in, just a blank canvas and his own hand moving across it.
A guided maze or puzzle app sits in that same quiet category, which is actually why I built Denny's Maze in the first place. He works through a maze at his own pace, there's no music pushing him along and no celebration screen begging him to start another one, and when he's done, he's just done. No fight, no "one more."
The camera app has become a favorite too, in a way I didn't expect. Handing him the iPad and letting him take photos of his own feet, the seatback in front of him, or my tired face gives him a sense of control that a passive video never does, and it tires him out in the good way rather than the wired way.
Music does something similar, just in a different direction. We use a music app to listen to audiobooks and stories, which keeps him settled without a single flashing thing on screen, and on longer flights we sometimes open something like GarageBand so he can bang around on a virtual instrument and just experiment with sound. There's no win condition in either case, so there's nothing pulling him to keep going once he's ready to stop.
Reading and comic-style apps round it out. They ask for the same slow attention a paper book would, just in a format that fits in the bag along with everything else.
None of this is about screen time being good or bad in some general, one-size-fits-all way. It's about the fact that a half hour of drawing and a half hour of an algorithm-fed video game are not the same half hour for a three-year-old's nervous system, even though they both technically count as "iPad time." Once I started paying attention to which activities left him calm and which ones left him wired, the packing list got a lot simpler, and so did the flight.
If you're curious how I actually score apps on sounds, animation, rewards, and brightness, I put together a full comparison of low-stimulation apps for toddlers that walks through it in more detail. These are the same criteria I use before I let anything new onto his iPad.