Dealing with Screen Time

Our daughter is eight. Given that my husband and I are avid readers, we had always just assumed that she would be too. We had expected it would have happened by now, but it hadn't.

She watches TV more than she should. That's our fault, we know. We're sorry. And she plays video games, which didn't exist when I was a kid, unless you count Pong. I feel strongly about raising a computer-proficient daughter, so I won't apoligize for that.

Part of the problem is our DVR. There is never a time when "there's nothing on," because there's always something good, pre-recorded and available. It makes screening TV shows easy. We control what's recorded, and we pick good quality, age-appropriate fare. So that's good. But the bad thing is that there's never a time when what's on is just too awful to watch, which was much more common when we were young.

We'd tried imposing a screen-time quota, but we got a lot of whining and negotiating, and found ourselves doing much more activities directing on the weekends than we really wanted to do. "There's nothing to dooooooooo!"

We've tried something lately, though, that's been working like a champ so far. We made a deal. For every hour of weekend screen time, there has to be a half hour of reading.

This is a lot more reading than she'd been doing. On weeknights, she's required to read for 15 minutes, as homework. But there's never been a requirement for weekend reading, and a fair number of weekends passed without any reading at all. We hate making a power struggle out of reading, because it just seems too important in the long run for her to like it.

We've noticed three good things that have come from this new deal. The first one was not unexpected. She's doing a lot more reading, anywhere from one to four hours on a weekend. At a minimum she's doing half an hour each day. But half an hour is long enough to actually get caught up in a story, so it's not unusual for her to keep reading once she gets started.

Second, she's doing other things. When she gets done with her hour of screen time, sometimes she doesn't want to launch right into her reading time. As she procrastinates, she's been finding other things to do, imaginative things, without complaining. I'm not sure why that is. It could be she figures that if she asks for something to do, I'll just tell her to do her reading.

And third, she's spending a lot less time in front of a screen. She's been playing with her dolls, and pulling out some craft stuff, and playing more make-believe. It's not like she hasn't had upwards of nine billion toys cluttering up our house all along, but now she's actually playing with them. And, of course, she's reading. And suddenly she's reading longer, harder books than she had been, probably because she actually has enough time to get into them now.

Of course, kids change quickly, so we don't really know how long this particular strategy will work. But it's working great now, so it seemed worth mentioning.