Tips for Managing Screen Time

Sitting mindlessly in front of the TV or video games for endless amounts of time has been a problem we have been battling in our house for a few years now. Some of my kids would literally sit in front of a screen all day of you let them. Yes. They really would.

We have employed various strategies to help put limits of the screen time. And might I just comment on how the term "screen time" keeps growing to include more and more devices and avenues for our kids to participate. In our house we have an array of devices the kids like to use. Most of them are "family devices," but our oldest has an iPod that she bought with her own money. It's a lot to try to monitor and limit.

But limiting screen time is something I'm willing to battle over in our family. Did you know that studies show that after 10 hours of screen time per week, children's grades begin to decline? It's not so much about the screens themselves being bad for our kids, it's the things they're not doing while they're spending all that time in front of the screens that becomes a problem. They're not playing, imagining, creating, building friendships, reading, helping out around the house, discovering hobbies... (The Read Aloud Handbook)

Here's what we have found that is working for us:

For summer or weekends:

1 TV show or thirty minutes of screen time in the morning.

1 hour of screen time after lunch (while I take a nap).

1 show or thirty minutes of screen time in the evening.

School days:


1 hour of screen time after lunch (while I take a nap).

1 show or thirty minutes of screen time in the evening.

I let my kids carry unused screen time over to the next day if they want. But their max is 2 hours in front of a screen at one sitting, and they can only carry over hours from ONE day. 

We have only been using this system for a few weeks now, and it was a bumpy start. I was getting a lot of comments from the kids like, "OH, I thought I turned on the TV at 12:30, not 12:00. Oops!" or "I thought you were going to tell me when my time was up." There was a refusal to take any responsibility for keeping track of their time. I was so frustrated about it all that I was looking into devices that attach to your TV or video game systems and keep track of viewing time for you.  But they were expensive and each device could only attach to one unit, it didn't seem like a viable option for our situation.

Then I saw these little timers (pictured at top pf this post) on Amazon. They seemed like they might do the trick. They sit on a base, and you set the timers on the base, not on the timer themselves. Then the timer can be put on your wrist (there's a strap), or clipped on your pants and taken wherever. The timer buzzes on both the timer itself as well as the base. So my kids don't have to watch the clock and keep track of their minutes, but they are getting a sense of how much time they are actually sitting in front of the TV. And I don't have to nag. They can ask for a timer when they want to use their screen time, and they know it's time to turn it off when the buzzer buzzes. 

The other day one of my kids said that the new time limits were helping them not want to watch so much TV anymore. And it seems to me this is indeed true. I gave them one free day this week before school starts, and told them they didn't need to use the timers or anything; a couple of them turned the TV off themselves after a bit and went outside. This isn't to say there wasn't complaining at the beginning. I was told it wasn't fair and wasn't enough "tiiiiimmmme" multiple times. 

I'm sure this is no fool proof system. And the timers we bought got mixed reviews, sounds like they sometimes stop working after only a short bit. Of course, other kinds of timers could work as well, I just like that I can keep track of the kids' time at the same time as them, and they can't screw up much of anything on the timers while using them.

I have no affiliation with the maker of these timers featured, and I'm not being paid to write this post.

Mommy Confession

My son will be turning two soon. With two new Watsons on the way, a week where I don't HAVE to be anywhere, and the prospect of no more diaper washing (we do cloth), I decided to go ahead and spend the week doing intensive potty training. It seems to be taking (knock on wood).

BUT being cooped up in the house all week with a toddler that I have to watch like a hawk (so he doesn't forget to go to the potty when he feels the urge) means I have let him watch A LOT of PBS Kids. It's been my only sanity saver. There's only so much playdough and puzzles Isaac can handle... or Mommy can handle for that reason. We've been reading books, but he hasn't been willing to sit for very long and listen this week. Plus, we've had some really close calls with some of our books nearly getting drenched when nature called. Yikes!

I'm already planning our outings for next week now that we're getting a handle on this potty thing. We'll be breaking free from the house, and from the TV!

A PBS gem I discovered this week though: The Electric Company. Had never watched it. Love it! It's not Isaac's favorite (kind of targeted at a little bit older kids), but he's warming up to it.

We're watching the above video right now. As I type this. :)

What's your Mommy/Daddy confession this week?

Fostering A Love For Reading: Part 3

Turn Off The TV!!

Did you know?

1. Television is the direct opposite of reading.
2. For young children television is an antisocial experience, while reading is a social experience.
3. Television deprives the child of his most important learning tools: questions.
4. Television interrupts the child's most important language lesson: family conversation.
5. Television encourages deceptive thinking.
6. The vocabulary of television is lower than nearly all forms of print.

~ Jim Trealease, The Read Aloud Handbook

Today's tip goes hand in hand with part 2 of this series: Have Books Everywhere. What I mean is, it doesn't do a lot of good to have books everywhere in your house if you always have the TV on. If your child is anything like mine, TV watching causes them to go into a zombie like trance that makes them completely oblivious to their surroundings - good books and all!

That's not to say my son never watches TV; I wish that were the case (Note: the photo above is of our TV and our videos). But we do let him watch a little bit of a video every morning while we shower and get ready for the day (I don't get up early enough to do this while my son is still asleep). And we have recently instituted family movie nights once a week (though my son doesn't usually sit long enough to watch the entire movie).

That's pretty much it for TV in our house (while our son is awake). We do not have a working TV in our main living area, so there is no temptation for me to turn on the news or daytime television while we playing or hanging out. This is not as torturous as most parents imagine it might be!

Jim Trealease's The Read Aloud Handbook has some great info on the effects of TV watching, as well as suggestions for combating the TV addiction. Here are some of his suggestions, along with some of mine:

• Set some limits for TV watching. For example: No TV on school nights, or no TV during dinner.

• Listen to the radio (we usually have NPR on most of the day in our house), or books on tape. I usually find this more entertaining than mindless TV anyway. You might be surprised as well! Works in the car too; substitute audio books for DVDs on long car trips.

• Absolutely no TV in kids bedrooms. No matter how old they are.

• When the TV is on, turn down the volume and turn on the closed captioning. Voila! Now you're reading while you're watching TV!

• If all else fails, remove the TV... or make it non-functional. You won't miss it as much as you imagine. Essentially that's what we did in our home. We got rid of our dish package and switched to basic cable via an antennae. After the change we no longer got any channels on our downstairs TV and our DVD player is not compatible with it. You can't watch TV if there is no TV to watch!

WordWorld

PBS has recently launched a new show for youngsters called WordWorld.. Now, please understand that I am not advocating television viewing for young children. I would obviously much rather see a child reading, playing, or listening to music than watching the boob-tube. But if they're going to watch something, it might as well be something good, right? Sounds like WordWorld might fit the bill...

I haven't seen WordWorld myself yet, but I'm very intrigued by what I have heard about it. From what I can gather, they spell words out on screen, and then once the word has been read, it becomes the object that it represents. For example, after they have spelled and read the word "truck," the letters morph into a picture of a truck.

I read a press release about the show, and there is more to the show than morphing words (or so they claim), but again, I have not seen it myself yet. I plan to set up the DVR so I can check out what all the fuss is about. I doubt it will ever take the place of Between The Lions in my heart, but maybe it will come in a close second.

Let me know if you've seen the show, and what you think of it. Especially if you have children that have watched it!