Can I play Mine Craft? Can I play Madden? Can we play the Wii? Can we watch a show? I’ll be honest, my wife and I got tired of hearing these questions, so we decided to change our system. We have and used devices. My kids love technology, we are not Luddites. That said, I’ve grown increasingly aware of the growing body of literature and studies that have me really concerned about devices at every level. Below is our system to try to bring a little bit of sanity to our parenting and hopefully bring some consistency. If you have kids and are reading this, you should know that our kids are currently 12, 10, and 10. We’ve been doing this about a year.
The system is relatively simple. To earn screen time, you have to do jobs to get “tickets.” Each ticket is worth 5 minutes of screen time. We give out roughly 1 ticket for 10 mins of work. To keep things simple, we have some jobs that have a ticket value already established. For example, washing the dishes is worth a ticket, but Jacob and I have decided, if they are especially bad, they earn you an extra ticket for hazard pay :) Cutting the grass is an 8 ticket job. My older two like to split that one. Pretty much anytime, the kids can go pull weeds and keep track of their time to earn tickets. This one may only apply here to us, but after I go fishing, I let the kids bury the fish carcasses in the garden area for a ticket — and fortunately for all of us, we do get some fish! We’ve decided that during the school year, tickets can only be used on weekends (we will make exceptions). In the summers we're much more lenient on when tickets can be used. I can’t tell you how much this has helped the collective sanity in our home. Mindy and I aren’t constantly answering the questions and the kids know how they can earn tickets. We think this helps them understand the value of hard work. Of course, we reserve the right to give out free screen time, but if you do that too often, you short-circuit the system. One other note, if you’re going to make a concerted effort to get your kids off the devices, it needs to follow that the adults don’t need to be glued to screens all night. Take some time to be with your family without the glow of a screen on you!
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