Ok, so there's a time spectrum for everything.
For tasks you want to accomplish, there is a minimum time you must meet to make progress.
For tasks you want to accomplish, there is a minimum time you must meet to make progress.
For diversions, distractions, and recreation, there's a maximum time after which you see a detriment to other parts of your life.
To be completely honest with ourselves, there is a max time for work and minimum time for play: too much work and you're not seeing to your life, and not enough play and what is all the work for anyway?
This goes double for kids. They won't stay engaged if there isn't a payoff, and they most definitely don't easily understand the notion that staring at a screen for too long for games and videos can have unintended consequences. Being told time is up is never anything but disappointing.
What's working in our house is an open conversation about balance. In order to get video game time, responsibilities have to all be met. It helps to have rewards that are on more than one scale. It's hard to beat big paychecks, but incremental progress should sometimes see incremental payoff. Now both my kids are becoming familiar with setting and using timers so no one falls behind.
This goes double for kids. They won't stay engaged if there isn't a payoff, and they most definitely don't easily understand the notion that staring at a screen for too long for games and videos can have unintended consequences. Being told time is up is never anything but disappointing.
What's working in our house is an open conversation about balance. In order to get video game time, responsibilities have to all be met. It helps to have rewards that are on more than one scale. It's hard to beat big paychecks, but incremental progress should sometimes see incremental payoff. Now both my kids are becoming familiar with setting and using timers so no one falls behind.
Keeping track of lots of reminders can make a calendar look nightmarish, so I've started using Keep notes with embedded reminders for kid specific stuff that happens so often it would literally change the color of my calendar.
Google Keep is like the little spiral notepad I used to have in my back pocket to jot ideas on, only now it will remind me of them after a predetermined time, and I can also share them quickly to my wife or a friend. There's an app for the phone, but Keep is a cloud app, so once it's created, it's already waiting on all my other google connected stuff.
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