This post isn’t about the outdoors, travel, or even anything adventure-related, specifically. But if you’re a parent you may have experienced the way that screen obsession can prevent your kids from doing just about anything else. We have one kid who easily turns off the tv, xbox, tablet – whatever – and another who struggles to change activities. His resistance to outdoor activities (read about our ADHD journey here) made going on hikes, fishing trips, and mini backpacking adventures seem completely out of reach, although once we got on our way he usually had a great time!
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One of our biggest parenting regrets has been that we caved and gave our younger son a tablet at an earlier age than we probably should have. Had we known what we know now, we would have done things differently. It’s so much harder to hold off the devices when you have an older child using them, right? We knew that setting screen time boundaries was really important, but we wanted a way to use screen time to help our son prioritize his activities and there were things that he always needed to do first. In addition, we wanted him to feel like screen time was a privilege to earn, not a guarantee.
We’d tried dry erase chore charts, various kinds of trackers, stickers, and just about anything else you could imagine. Admittedly, I am not the best at consistency. I’m a big picture person, a dreamer, and the day to day minutiae can be a little…difficult for me to enforce. My parenting inconsistency was making things more difficult for him. What we needed was a visible but also tangible, physical method of tracking both priorities and screen time usage.
A box of popsicle sticks. It was life changing.
We’d had a box of popsicle sticks around for quite awhile. They’d been made into puppets and various craft projects, but for some reason they came to mind on this day when I was otherwise out of ideas and desperate for a solution. What resulted was a system that has stuck for nearly two years now, and I can say with great certainty that it ended our screen time battles.
So here’s how it works:
There are certain tasks that must be completed daily before screen time can be used, and a stick is earned with each completed task. For us they are currently the following:
- Practice piano
- Run the pup around outside for a 10 minutes
- Sweep the kitchen/living area of the house.
Each task takes approximately 10 minutes, and for each completed task our son moves a stick to the screen time jar. Each stick equals 10 minutes of screen time, so our son knows exactly how much time he has available to play, and that he has earned it.
In the beginning the tasks looked a little different. We were struggling with some really basic day to day things, like getting up and ready for school nicely, taking care of his lunchbox and school papers and getting a snack when he got home. I know some people may balk at the idea of rewarding completion of these really basic expectations, but that’s just where we were living at that time.
In addition to earning sticks for the everyday expectations, he also has the opportunity to earn more sticks by doing extra things. It might be a cleaning job, unloading the dishwasher, picking up the grass clippings in the yard, brushing the pup, etc. Really tough or big jobs would earn him more sticks, while small jobs earn less.
A few other things I’ve found to be helpful:
- Sticks cannot be lost for behavior issues. Once he has earned them, they are his and cannot be taken away. This really helped him accept his consequence and move on more quickly.
- Screen time can be paused for a day, two days, etc., as needed as a consequence, but he can continue to accrue sticks during that time.
- Currently we have a 45 minute cap on weekdays and 1 hour on the weekends. We didn’t at first, and he was excited that there was no cap and it made him work even harder!
- Have a timer accessible that your child knows how to use so he or she can be in charge of when to stop based on how much screen time they are using.
There were a few added and unexpected bonuses of this method.
On his own, our son learned to budget his sticks.
He would sometimes save them up for several days in anticipation of having a friend over, then use a couple hours at once on Minecraft or whatever he had in mind. And I totally didn’t mind if he did that – it made him want to be extra helpful and he spent less time thinking about screens in the meantime. He had a very tangible goal to work towards. Another bonus was that in the beginning we counted any screen usage as screen time (we’ve since relaxed on this).
He almost completely stopped watching tv.
He chose to prioritize his screen usage on video games, and that was ok with me.
So how in the world does this connect with our theme of Affordable Exploration? Well, you can’t get much more affordable than a box of popsicle sticks – there’s no book to buy, complex psychology to learn, or guru to follow. In addition, you can add “stick value” to anything you choose. Yesterday we went on a hot, humid, hilly, nearly 6 mile hike. That totally deserved a stick reward in my book (I gave him four). Need him to read a book that’s a little more challenging than he’d prefer? You could arrange sticks for that. Having a good attitude while doing something difficult? Trouble going to bed on time? Those could have stick value, too.
When he uses his screen time, he moves the appropriate number of sticks back for how long he played, knowing exactly what he will need to do to earn more time tomorrow. It’s predictable, helps us accomplish the things we need to accomplish, and helps him feel more independent and successful.
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Buy the sticks we use here, find some at your local craft store, or use something you already have on hand. Whatever you use, I hope you find this simple system as helpful as we have. Having the right motivator can be life changing for anyone, and I never dreamed it could be so simple.
Here’s to less screen time, and more exploring!
Emily
Last update on 2024-12-22 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API