A 3-year-old in Sydney, Australia, has made headlines for downloading $50 worth of apps on her mom’s iPad.

Sienna Leigh knows her way around Steve Job’s latest tech toy, and she even figured out how to buy a $17 app.

“She uses it every day for a few hours, but I didn’t think anything of it,” Sienna’s mom told The Age. “She was just playing with it until, later, when she had gone to bed and I was checking my email and I saw that I had paid for a whole bunch of apps that I didn’t remember buying.”

How did tiny fingers figure out how to get through password-protected areas and make a purchase?

“It turns out that after you buy one app, which I had bought for her,” Sienna’s moms said, “it doesn’t ask for the password straight away, so she’s then not played the game I bought for her, [but instead] decided that ‘I’m going to go into the app store and buy a whole lot of apps.'”

This is an extreme, rare case, but most of us have seen little kids keeping themselves entertained with their parents’ iPads and iphones. Who knew Apple was getting into the babysitting business?

Just the other day I spotted two children at La Petit Baleen swimming class playing video games while their siblings were swimming and their parents were busy checking emails on their iPhones.

I’ve also seen a few young kids in restaurants fiddling with pads and phones while their parents sip wine and chat. Kids with tech gadgets in hand are everywhere: on the airplane, on Bart, at school meetings, even at the park.

It all makes perfect sense. iPads and iPhones are portable and fit into mom’s purse. It’s so much easier to bring an iPad to a restaurant rather than an extra bag full of coloring books and crayons to keep the kids busy. Who wants to crawl under the table after dinner to find all those lost markers?

I’ve certainly pulled out my iPhone and handed it to my kids in times of distress. It’s the ultimate quick fix.

But if kids as young as 3 years old are always occupied with a tech gadget in those situations when they have to wait for mom or dad to finish cleaning the house or talking with the ticket agent, will they ever learn to keep themselves entertained? Will they ever learn to be patient? Will they learn to hold their horses?

Should tech gadgets such as iPads be used as babysitters on a daily basis?