I'm looking for ideas about limiting TV and computer game time. I don't want to get into earning the time.
Coming on the heals of "How to make your children obey," this conversation should be interesting. Awfully tough to engage in rational discourse with a 4yo who has a crack-habit (video-addiction). In our house, this area has always been very authoritarian.
Somehow we have managed to avoid letting the 500-channel crack dealer into our home. No satellite or cable... and since we are in the sticks, no broadcast TV either. That really helps in restricting viewing.
We do have a great collection of movies and classic TV shows, though, and they can pretty much choose from anything we have.
The limits have no rhyme or reason to them... sometimes its 30 minutes, sometimes as hour. Most of the time, nothing. And, because the TV is not an ever-looming, glowing presence in our home, it's not such a big deal.
When they start whining about TV, though, I explain that this whining is most likely a result of them having watched too much, and this leads to a Dad-the-Tyrant-imposed moratorium.
As both kids are now old enough to functionally help with laundry, that is the trade-off -- they can watch, but the laundry gets washed, dried & folded.
Computer time is meted out in a similar fashion. Our older child trades off ALEKS progress for free CPU time. He's currently working through a variety of our older adventure-style, problem-solving games. Our son also loves the computer-based word games like Bookworm, Scrabble, Boggle, etc. And as long as they focus on this stuff, they get little griping from me.
I don't think you need to worry about the "trading" aspect, though. Trading, bartering, and earning one's way through life ain't necessarily a bad skill to have.
They get most of their TV time when my mom babysits.
Ain't this the truth. I am stunned by how much TV our parents watch (both sets)... but looking back, it's really no more than we used to watch. (The content, though, is *quite* different. Ugh.)
