We handed out a new punishment this week. No Video Games for 30 days! You read that right, a whole month. We’ve never done this before so God help us. Help us to stay strong in our punishment. Help us not cave in, help us to resist the cries, the begging, the nagging. If you can relate, then you are a parent with a child addicted to some type of game app.
The reason for our harsh judgment call was because of our 8 year old’s attitude. We realize that it’s a new era, a new age where technology has taken over. It’s normal to have an ipad at a young age. This is fine, we are moving with the generations and new times but what we refuse to tolerate is rude or ungrateful behavior. Unfortunately our son has reached a stage (hoping it’s just a stage) where he pouts and becomes rude when he can’t get his way. The best way we feel he would understand that we will not tolerate this nonsense is by taking away what he loves the most. As it is, we only let our children play with their iPads on weekends, Friday Evening, Saturday and Sunday. Not all day but for a few hours on those days. Those are also days that we like to spend time together as a family. We enjoy having breakfast out, or we may need to run an errand and stop at a store, go grocery shopping etc. We do these things together. My son gets annoyed when we take too long, AS IF!
Trying to have a nice breakfast for Valentine’s Day we headed out to Bob Evans. My son was annoyed that we had a 20 minute wait, he couldn’t get to his games soon enough. He was pouting, burrowed his eyebrows, made grunting sounds and was acting totally unacceptable. This upset my husband and I very much. Ruined our moods and we had a grouchy family date. We’ve talked to him about this before and yet here he was again, acting ungrateful. We laid down the law, that was it. We want our children to understand that these family outings are precious, not to be taken for granted. How can you, at 8, be so annoyed at spending time with your family? I told him he needed to get his head out of the games and realize that this is reality, this is the real world. He has to partake in our moments and I felt the best way we could make him see the severity of his actions is by taking away the games for 30 days.
He will still be allowed to watch Educational Videos on his ipad during weekends, but no Minecraft, no Five Nights at Freddys, no Clash of Clans, zero games will be allowed. Already the first day, turned out to be very interesting. He dug out two old sets of small remote controlled motorcycle toys for him and his sister to play with. It’s been MORE than a year since he’s even touched those. Then he was playing with some baby skates he’s had since he was 3 🙂 . We’ve told him that for every 2 books he reads, and 2 pages of a workbook he completes we’ll take off one day. Trust me he’s not going to rush through this but he may cut off a few days from his punishment. I’m hoping the punishment will turn out to be a breath of fresh air and show him that there is more to weekends than just games and apps. Stay tuned for how this turns out.
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