A month ago, my boys thought iPads only worked on airplanes. In light of the growing body of research about the dangers of kids and mobile devices, I was in the Anti-Tech-for-Young-Kids-Except-For-TV-Because-Hey-I-Gotta-Stay-Sane camp. So when my son’s school informed us he’d be receiving an iPad for Pre-Kindergarten, I was apoplectic. I had spent Sam’s entire life teaching him that iPads were evil.

I wouldn’t even utter the word “iPad” when it arrived. It’s a “learning pad,” I said, “and it only works during school time.”

So you can guess what happened after Sam had spent just ten minutes is his first Zoom meeting. “Dad. I can’t look at the screen anymore. I have to turn this off. You know screens are bad for me.”

Gulp.

I’d spend five years railing against something that we would need to rely on for the next several months, if not longer. The joke was on me. Suddenly I didn’t feel so high on my horse as Mr. Fishing and Golf Dad.

What I had perceived to be an advantage for Sam had now become a disadvantage, at precisely the time he needed to feel a sense of efficacy and belonging: his first experience in school. This reinforced a lesson I’ve been learning and relearning over the last six months: Embracing change, even when it goes against the very core of my being, is inevitable, and it’s probably healthy.

What I used to think was surrendering my values is now simply accepting reality.

Every day Andrea and I alternate between encouraging Sam to engage in this bizarre online Kindergarten world (25 5-year-olds singing “The Hello Song” with bad audio, for example) and telling him it’s okay to take a break. We want to instill the importance of education and of honoring commitments, but we also know a 5-year-old should probably put down the screen occasionally to wrestle with his brother.

So whether it’s Sam on his iPad, your 9th grader blaring his French horn in front of a Chromebook camera, or your 6th grader working on a project without ever meeting her group members, remote learning is forcing all of us—parents, educators, and students—to surrender what is ideal for what is real. It’s a hard lesson, and one especially young people often don’t learn until much later in life, but the optimist in me believes they will all be stronger for it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shut off the learning pad.