Is your child's use of electronics stealing the attention from you family?
What did kids do before computers and text messaging and MP3 players?
As someone who grew up in this day and age I don’t know if I can answer that question. Can you?
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, kids 8-18 years old spend close to 7.5 hours a day with entertainment media like texting, web surfing, listening to music, and watching TV.
I admit to spending a good deal of time with entertainment media. When I wake up I check my phone and check my e-mail. When I walk to class I sometimes listen to music. When I use my laptop to take notes, I sometimes surf the Internet.
I can understand how some parents can get upset. Where’s the family time?
If you’re struggling to get your kids to cooperate and spend more time with the family, here’s a simple way to deal with the situation…
Turn it off!
Start with dinner. Make it a rule to be technology-free when everyone’s eating around the dinner table, and go from there.
How do you get your kids to “turn it off?”
Just Turn It OFF [Examiner]
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
We used ‘TV tickets.’ They worked fairly well for us. You allot the kids so many TV tickets per week. Using them as they see fit, they would be able to watch 2 hours or so per week of commercial TV. (Public TV was unlimited. And we didn’t have cable….why torture them with unlimited channels they can’t watch?) I remember my son, at 6 or 7, telling someone how much he enjoyed TV….you learn so much. He actually thought that was its purpose. True, we found out years later that the kids had cheated around the edges a little….they’d found a way to counterfeit the tickets or whatever, but even so, it’s a policy I’d repeat in a heartbeat.
That was before some modern media, though. It’s more complex today.