Screen Time

At a certain point, my wife and I began to use the removal of "screentime" (watching tv and tablet use) as a punishment. "I'm going to count to five, and if you're not brushing your teeth..." I don't think this was terribly effective—as any parent knows, the "counting to five" technique just lets your child draw it out when you don't want them to draw it out. What you really ought to do is a time out as soon as the child doesn't listen, but of course that makes things take even longer in the moment, even if in the long run it will supposedly have a better pay off.

It also had the problem of creating an expectation of screentime. Whereas screentime had been a thing for lazy weekend afternoons and the occasional after-school pre-dinner moment, once you are threatening to take it away, that implies the default is the existence of screentime. Furthermore, it also decouples the moment of punishment from the moment of the action, and in three- and five-year-old cognition, it's still pretty important for consequences to immediately flow from action. Not getting the screentime in the afternoon because they didn't brush their teeth promptly nine hours earlier isn't very effective. And finally, the moment of taking it away often makes things worse; now they aren't brushing their teeth and they're mad at you.

So I had an idea: could I flip screentime around? Could I make it a positive reward instead of a negative punishment?

I got an Etsy seller to make us a bunch of wooden tokens with "SCREEN TIME 30 MINS." engraved on them. So no longer do we threaten to remove screentime for negative behaviors; instead, we reward them for positive behaviors. If the morning routine is executed with a minimum of cajoling, then they get a screentime token. This also lets us reward other behaviors; Son One did a chore with no fussing the other day as soon as I asked, so I gave him one for that.

I think overall it's been to the positive. There are now firmly established limits on screentime, which is also a positive—something we had lost over the past year or so. A couple days ago we did have a situation where, having spent all his screentime tokens over a three-day weekend, Son One became quite upset in the afternoon that he hadn't gotten one that morning. He hadn't been terrible for the morning routine, but I had felt like he had required one too many reminders. This prompted an hour of whining!

We'll see how it continues. Son One in particular does well with systems; the main issue I have right now is if I say things like, "You're moving too slow, so you don't get a screentime token," that puts us right back where we started, so it's a little tricky to create that association between the behavior we don't want and the consequence.