An independence bucket list
How much independence would your child like? Have you asked? The answer might surprise you.
My sons got angry last night.
I was the worst dad ever - and that’s a euphemism. They wished me all kinds of Old Testament punishments, and more.
My crime?
I broke a ‘promise’.
Screen-free weekdays
In the Play with Purpose house, we don’t allow screens during the week. Friday night is their chance to go online and play games with their friends. After an initial struggle, they have come to accept this and weekday evenings are now calm, filled for the most part with reading, homework, piano practice and some crafting for the six-year-old.
NOTE: The six- and nine-year-olds are not playing online games! They get less time, and it’s limited to drawing on the iPad or playing simple games like Tetris. The six-year-old, especially, tires even of this and it’s not long before she’s back at the kitchen table crafting or mixing things, anything from slime (an obsession of hers) to cake dough. Even the nine-year-old has understood that screens get boring and often skips her screen time to play the piano or rollerblade down our shoe-strewn hall. In our house, problem screen-time is with the boys. It sucks them in and it stresses them. With so many of their friends online (and now at other schools where they’re no longer in daily contact), it seems cruel to cut off this communication completely, but having allowed too much in the past, we have now cut back to levels that preserve harmony in the house and leave plenty of time for the better things in life.
Ideally, I’d not give the six-year-old any screen time at all. She doesn’t care for it and wouldn’t miss it if it were gone. If she had no older siblings, there is no way that I would ever allow her near a screen. But she has FOMO, as we all do. And who wants to be deprived of something your brothers and sister are clearly enjoying? So she gets a token amount. Enough to feel like she is one of the gang.
But yesterday we were home late after school. A drop-off at a sleepover for one of the girls, a cross-country race for my second son, collecting the youngest from a party and then my wife from the station.
There was a hard stop at 7.40 for their evening 5-a-side match. The promised - and long-anticipated - two hours of screen time had become 40 minutes.
Cue meltdown.
It was my fault.
I wasn’t to blame for the London traffic, the accidents, the roadworks, the train strike, the closed bridges.
But I was responsible for not making time visible.
They felt ambushed.
That morning, looking ahead at my day, I could see that I was going to spend several hours in the car, driving from one place to the next. The children understood this too, but they hadn’t grasped what impact it would have on their screen time. If I’d explained this in the morning and asked them to come up with their own solutions, they would have felt much happier and in control. They might have said, OK, only 40 minutes tonight is annoying but we can have the rest on Saturday afternoon. But we want some extra time to make up for it!
And I would have said, ‘yes’.
Left brain, right brain
But I didn’t do that. I assumed they realised that they would have less screen time. When it finally dawned on them, they were furious.
The old me, the my-way-or-the-highway me, would have pulled rank.
We’re a family. We all have to make sacrifices sometimes. Next week it might be your party and the girls will be stuck in the car instead of playing at home. That’s just how it goes.
As adults, it’s clear to us. It makes sense to our ‘left brain’, the logical, language-based and literal part of our minds.
Unfortunately, children are more ‘right-brain’, as Daniel Siegel explains in The Whole-Brain Child.
The right brain… is holistic and nonverbal, sending and receiving signals that allow us to communicate, such as facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice, posture, and gestures. Instead of details and order, our right brain cares about the big picture - the meaning and feel of an experience - and specialises in images, emotions, and personal memories.
Siegel, Daniel J. ; Bryson, Tina Payne. The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Proven Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind
What does this mean for my Friday-night screen-time battles?
