How Do You Manage Your Kids' Screen Time? Or You Don't.

I have a serious issue with excessive screen time from the onset. In fact, I'd rather our home has no television at all. But that's way too extreme. So when they glue themselves to the box at the gramps, my dad accused me of depriving them their childhood. 

They get screen time over weekends for the first six years of their [Ewan's] lives. To me, that's not being deprived at all especially when they get so much more from their childhood as compared to other kids. 

I remember when Ewan was a toddler, my mother-in-law suggested watching educational cartoons out of good intention to teach him about this world. She said there are valuable cartoon contents on T.V. that teach about animals, nature and more. My response was, "If I want him to learn what a tree is, why not bring him under a real one? Touch it. Feel it. Talk about it." I disagreed that a child learning about a tree from an educational cartoon or smart phone app beats me running his hand down that rough sturdy bark. 

Today, my children say their absolute favourite thing in the whole wide world is T.V. because they get so little of it.

By the way, kids back in my time did not have the privilege to get 24-hour non-stop programmes on TV unlike today. If I turned on the television too early, this was what I see. Count your blessings for Netflix.

Gist of this story is, I took in what they all said. So just before Ewan entered Primary One, I decided the kids will get their fair share of T.V. time on a daily basis! Wow Mom! Woohoo!

Faye will get 30 minutes and Ewan will get 30 minutes. And ONLY AFTER they worked for it in terms of household chores and/or reading/writing assessments will they get their deserved screen time. We don't work on any assessment or activity books in pre-school. Since Primary One is a whole new ball game, I decided to come up with a whole new routined kind of day for them. 

This particular hour-long screen time allows me to prepare dinner for the family. When they are done with their assigned and agreed cartoon for the day, they know to automatically turn it off [and not argue with me] then head off to play till I call them home for dinner. 

What does "assigned and agreed" mean?

I screen and approve the shows they watch daily but to make my life easier, every Monday [and Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri] of the month they watch the same cartoons but different episodes. For example,  every Monday of February - Wild Kratts for Ewan and Word Party for Faye. Every Tuesday of February - documentary. So on and so forth. I give them autonomy to decide what they would like to watch. Then, I screen the first week of cartoons before letting them repeat these shows for the rest of the month. When a fresh month begins, we sit down together for the first week again to screen the new set of cartoons they choose. [I’d like to clarify that I am okay to let them watch bad content if we stumble on one but only if I’m there to teach and correct. Not when they are on their own. If we don’t learn what’s bad, how can we ever know what’s good?]

The rule from me is: One day for a David Attenborough documentary and another day for Chinese content.

Start of this month, Ewan chose a funny cockroach cartoon for a day in February [I cannot remember the title of the show]. Meyer and I sat to watch it with them. The Verdict: Rubbish! So that’s off the list and he had to agree he will never secretly click into I to watch. We won't hover around our children when they say they promise. We just trust. I've told Faye once that I do not agree with her watching Barbie because she's too young for it. Faye whined a little and tried to negotiate a little but accepted it I know because I heard her telling Ewan she cannot watch that cartoon when he suggested it. 

Whatever screen time decision I made for them in the past i.e. weekends only, is now replaced with controlled screen time on a daily basis.

It is working really well for us all. They swiftly get through their chores towards T.V. time and I get a cleaner house [well not exactly because we all know that a 4 and 6 year old would more likely mess things up than clean], lesser fuss about getting through self-reading time and more compliance when I say, "Go shower now or you cannot sit on my sofa!" 

I've never seen them go in and out of the shower room so swiftly before *hahah* What a REWARD! T.V. is devil and T.V. is life-saving. 

All that said, I do not have that YouTube app on my smart phone. I do not believe in YouTube binging especially for kids their age. Sometimes I would sit and watch what Faye flips through YouTube and I do find them quite trashy. Especially the languages used in pirated Peppa Pig. Also, with such a small screen, it's bound to hurt their eyes!

When I drop them off at my dad's, Ewan and Faye will plonk themselves in front of that box and watch till their eyes pop. They could watch Netflix and YouTube. Obviously, I close two eyes on it no matter how much I dislike it. Gramps House, Gramps Rules. 

Until I came across this on social media:

No way! Extremely dangerous content on YouTube Kids! Is this fake news? I didn't do any research on it but it gives me a reason to tell gramps to stop letting them flip their own channels unattended. 

Not only are there bad content in YouTube programmes which I have personally picked up, I have read bad content in storybooks at the library and flagged it too. I am not a gramma guru. You probably would have picked up some grammatical mistakes in this post as I wrote it over a glass of red after a long day. But a grammatical incorrect book from a children picture book at the library? I cannot. A frightening account of cartoon this mom shared which went viral, I cannot. 

Call me anal but I do not want them learning the wrong things from T.V. programmes when I am not there with them to correct.

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