My son’s first week with the new screen time regime/rules/expectations/restrictions has gone very well. He’s very compliant to the point of managing things completely by himself. He’s not upset that he hasn’t earned any of the “bonus” times because they were strategically marked as “bonus”. That’s worked out well because he thinks he’s getting more time than the prior system but in fact he’s getting less time, in structured blocks of time and he’s doing all sorts of things at home to earn it.
The system we were using before was based on completing work at school. Now, with the Adderall, he’s completing his work every day without a problem. He gets upset if he’s bothered while he’s working, even when we came to see him for Bring Your Parents to School day (citing it as the, ‘worst day ever’ when we arrived). So that’s taken care of and we don’t need to incentivize him to work.
We changed gears and have a whole list of things he needs to do on a daily or weekly basis to get credit for his number one, highest value, most important reward: screen time. We live in a transactional world, one in which his father and I spend lots of time on screens ourselves. I’m not opposed to him having screen time but we need to have some expectations and controls around it.
Today my husband and daughter left for Detroit for her vitrectomy tomorrow with Dr. Trese. My son and I went to a birthday pool party and on our return, he had spent all his screen time for the weekend but still had a window of potential time redemption tonight. So I struck up a bargain.
First, he made his lunch for tomorrow. This is something I’d like him to start to do in the future. He’ll have control over what’s in his lunch (within constraints) and it will save me making it every day. Today I helped him make the lunch, giving him some prompts and letting him make choices. He did it pretty quickly.
The next thing wasn’t on his list of “bonus” items. I had a load of white cloths and another load of the children’s clothes. If he would work to fold them with me (diligently and with focus) we could get it done in fifteen minutes and he could earn a half-hour of additional screen time. He wasn’t so sure, so I told him about one of my tricks: listening to an audio book while I folded. It keeps your mind busy and the next thing you know, the laundry is all done.
I caught him at the right time too because he had just been listening to The Wizard of Oz while eating dinner. We picked up the audio book in the bedroom and folded two large loads of clothes and cloths while he listened. He was focused, he barely had to be given instruction. He got the work done with no complaints and no distractions. And we did it together. I think he might even be interested in helping in the future because it almost seemed easy to him, done in this way. I hope he’ll want to. I wouldn’t argue at the help.
The Big Boy Update: My son has a “frenemy" at school. Sometimes they’re friends, sometimes they’re enemies. Mostly they’re enemies when their personalities clash; they actually like each other quite a lot. Today we went to her birthday party and she and my son had the best, completely best friend caliber day. They both were on our parents cases about having a play date now, like tomorrow after school. Barring that, Tuesday, yeah, Tuesday would work too.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter and Madison found a tiny frog this morning. They named it “Carrot” and made a habitat for it. She wanted to keep it indefinitely. I explained that while the habitat was lovely, we had no way to feed the frog the ants and insects it needed to survive. She told me I could catch bugs. I explained I didn’t know how I would do so and I don’t know how then to get them to the frog. She was having none of it. This evening my son and I decided to free Carrot back to the wild, what with him not looking so chipper anymore. My daughter called me when she got to Detroit and asked about Carrot. She was angry, to say the least, about his release. She cried. She said she’d never see him again. I explained he was right outside out door and I hoped she felt it was the right thing to do because I hoped she didn’t want him to die (she didn’t). But she was still mad. After a bit more crying she suddenly said, “I’m mad at you. Stupid Mom.” and then hung up on me.
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