The Reward of Screentime
By Rachel Hoeing
Do you give screentime as a reward in your house? Or is it something that your kids don’t use at all? Or is it something that is allowed whenever they want it? By screentime, I am referring to TV, computers, X Box, smart phones, etc.
In our home, I’ve got one child who couldn’t care less about most electronic devices. She is ten, likes to watch TV, and will jump on the iPad every once in a while. Other than that, she isn’t very interested. My 7th grade son, on the other hand, loves some X Box, computer, and just about any electronic game he can get his hands on. He could easily pass an entire day in the darkness of our basement while paying NBA 2K and Destiny. For this reason, screentime is a perfect tool for me to use as a reward to reinforce his positive behavior.
As a rule of thumb, my children are not allowed any electronic devices during the week unless they have a school assignment that needs to be completed on the computer. So, no iTouch, no X Box, etc. Television is allowed after dinner and only if all homework is complete. Neither of my kids have a phone, so this rule is fairly easy for them to abide by. They also both love to play outside and spend the majority of their afternoons with the neighborhood kids. In all honesty, if there are sports and homework after school, there isn’t much time left for electronics anyway.
On weekends, they both have screentime privileges, and it works like this:
Television is allowed at any time. They both usually watch when they wake up and maybe late in the day, but don’t usually abuse the privilege, so we don’t have to put too many rules on it.
My daughter can use the iPad, computer, and iTouch pretty much at her own discretion. It is rare that she spends a lot of time on these things, so I don’t have any hard rules for her. (She has other fun activities that we use for positive reinforcement!)
For my son, we struggled at the beginning of the year with lack of effort in academics. For this reason, screentime has been perfect leverage for him. We get on the school website on Friday afternoon to check my son’s current grade averages and figure out how many hours he has earned for the weekend. We look at the five core subjects and his grades at that time. For each A or B, he earns an hour of screentime. For each C, it is neutral. For each D of F, he loses an hour. So, if he had two A’s, one C, and two D’s, he would not earn any screentime. Since we have implemented this reward system, he has not let any of his grades slip below a C, which has made us all very happy!
Every family is different and every child is different, so my idea may not work for your family, or you may need to tweak a few things here and there.
I would love to hear from our readers! How do you monitor screentime in your household? Does too much screentime present a problem for your children? What tips do you have for other families?
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I do something similar with my son. He’s younger so I can’t use it as reinforcement to keep his grades up but the promise of getting some time to play a game on his Kindle has worked wonders in getting him to do things that used to be a huge struggle. My daughters aren’t into electronics as much as he but I still can use the reward of playing a game on their Kindles as a motivator at times.
This is so timely for us. We are in same predicament with our daughter who takes FOREVER to get her homework done. She likes to take a million breaks which involves checking her phone.Whenever our kids get in trouble, screen time is the first thing they lose. Our challenge is how do you punish/reward for getting homework done in a timely fashion. It eventually gets done and the workload varies. It’s hard to measure (especially if grades are good). I recently heard how Kelly Ripa makes her kids dock their phones as soon as they come home from school, and I’m considering doing the same thing by letting her get the phone back as soon as homework is completed. I have a feeling it will be a never-ending battle!