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There is a certain look that you get when you know your child is possessed by something bigger than he is. You know the one, the blank stare with the eyes that burn through your head when you ask him to stop.
The Geekling is 4.5 years old. When I was pregnant I expected that screentime would eventually be an issue, but I wasn’t expecting it to hit us so early on in his life. Now when I ask him to put down his Dad’s iPad or turn off the TV, I sit waiting and fully expecting to see his head to start spinning a la Linda Blair.
I don’t think we allow him too much screen time. He watches about ½ hour of TV a day (and he’s not actively watching), and plays the odd game, BUT all in all that adds up to close to 4 hours a week which sounds like a big number if you consider that’s half of my work day.
It seems almost impossible to stop it (and yes, I realize that some of you will say that I’m weak for allowing ANY of it to begin with), but screentime has become a way of life. My friend Karen said in her blog here that “Parents of minors of any age right now are navigating brand new territory,” which is exactly true!
Our generation is the first to have had TVs and Computers in the house as an option other than running around outside and playing, and this newest generation is bombarded with technology daily. Heck, even the Geekling has a computer in his junior kindergarten classroom that they get to practice keyboarding and mousing on.
All that said, we have come up with a few ways to cut down on the exposure and meltdowns related to screentime in our house that I thought might help you as well.
Get a timer – you can play the video game or watch TV until the timer goes off. But, once that timer goes off, the screen goes off too.
The 70/30 rule - 70% of the time screens run what you the parent wants it to, be it educational games or television programming, homework review etc. The other 30% of the time the child can watch what they want, but still within reason (in our case 70% of the time educational games, 30% could be race car games – which I still censor.)
Earn your screentime – For every chore done you earn X minutes of approved screentime.
Set rules for YOUR screentime as well - (this one is one I reaaally need to force my hypocritical self to stick to). If they have to limit their usage, we should as well right? It’s only fair!
In our case it’s our house and our rules. If the Geekling isn’t happy with the rules for screentime, we unplug the TV, throw the video game in a box and tell him he can have it back when he’s ready to follow the family rules. He might put up a fight, but hopefully he’ll grow up to understand the benefits of screentime.
There IS a list of cons to any amount of screentime, obesity being the latest, but there are pros too. How many of us learned our numbers and letters with the help of Elmo and Big Bird?
So, how much screentime do you allow? How do you feel about our new generation having so much exposure?