I do indeed 'solve' this issue by buying more devices, which is what Apple wants and is a disincentive to them fixing the core issue, so yeah, I'm contributing to the problem.

I used to have the big iPad Pro while my kids had the old busted iPad whatever-it-was. But they were like (to paraphrase), "Fuck you dad, that busted shit loads YouTube hella slow, we want yours!"

So I ended up with a busted old iPad in a drawer, my kids having the big iPad Pro, and I got myself the new smaller 10.5 one. They know they can't use that one, but they accept it because theirs is bigger and not noticeably slower or worse for the things they do.

Also, just to ward off more "bro, do you even parent?" comments from people with no kids: No, I don't let my kids use the iPad whenever they want. No, they don't get to watch TV and eat trash whenever they feel like it. They do chores and read books. Woo hoo.

But, anybody with kids will tell you: trying to implement a you will never, ever, under any circumstances, use my phone policy is completely insane. It will make your kids life worse, and it will make your life as a parent a LOT worse.

Oh shit, this United flight is stuck on the tarmac for an extra 180 minutes, and all our new coloring books are already done!

Buddy, I know you're tired, but this is a funeral service for good old Uncle Jesse who suddenly and tragically died, we really need you to hold it together so we can deal with your little brother who is definitely not...

(Et cetera times 1000 pls use your imagination...)

So in these instances, you really want to be able to hand your phone to your child. And if you do so, every piece of data you've stored in the cloud is at risk. And you just can't have critical business data on your phone. Which limits how useful the phone can be to you.

It's like having your own real, biological Chaos Monkey.

And it can be humorous. I laughed when my wife bought a new MacBook and during the very first 10 minutes of setting it, somehow pressed 'th' and had it auto-expand into 20 paragraphs of Japanese text. She was like, wtf, and handed me the machine... boom! Another 20 paragraphs of Japanese text (seemed to be a cooking blog post).

What I guess happened is:

1. somehow, some kid managed to copy a blog post

2. then they managed to somehow get to the "Text Expansion" settings on one of her iOS devices

3. then, they somehow managed to create a new shortcut for "th" and paste all the blog content into the shortcut expansion text area (didn't even think that was possible?)

4. the cloud did its cloud thing and now my wife can't type "the" on any of her machines

That's just a guess as to how that happened. But shit like that happens pretty regularly. The Chaos Monkeys also managed to delete my favorite photo of my wife — I only noticed because it was my favorite, so who knows how many non-favorites they've deleted. The weirdest shit shows up in my photo stream. I have thousands of notes consisting of variants of 'afhdsf8aiyfoew9ry4t340822u9rtf20悪悪悪'. And I can't find this super-super-important receipt in Evernote... another heinous data-loss Evernote bug, or.... the Monkey???

So yeah. Just because you'd like to hand your phone to your child safely does not necessarily mean you're a shitty parent.

If Apple had multi-user on iPhone, or even just a limited Guest Mode, it would get close to completely solving this problem.