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.

Silver Lining

This is the gloomiest Spring I can remember. We've had sleet and hail and freezing rain and snow, for Pete's sake. The other day I was at the Y and the guy behind the desk, a guy who is always cheerful and upbeat, was singing Christmas carols. If you ask me, that's looking pretty damned hard for a silver lining.

A Good Marriage

I spent the day with my dad on Saturday. It was nice - we spent enough hours together that we got past the "headline news" style of talking, and actually connected in a way that we've been too busy to do for too long.

And here's one of the interesting things we talked about.

He told me a little anecdote about a time recently when he and my mom were watching the news together. In one of the stories, they interviewed an older wife who said something like, "My husband wanted to talk to me about something. He had such a serious look on his face that my first thought was that he was going to tell me he was leaving me, or that one of us had cancer."

In fact, the husband was going to tell the wife something about a third person, whom this story was about. But that's not why my dad was telling me the story. It was my mom's reaction.

She turned to my dad and said something like, "You know, if you wanted to talk to me about something serious, it wouldn't be my first reaction that you were going to leave me."

It took me a minute to process what my dad was saying, and why he was saying it. And then I got it. That little statement of my mom's was a pretty amazing tribute to the strength of their marriage.

It made me reflect on how lucky I am. As individuals, my parents are both terrific, and I'm lucky to have them. But I've also been lucky to have been a child of that marriage. I have no doubt at all that my marriage is as successful as it is because there are so many ways of being successfully married that are second nature to me, from having lived in a home with a successful marriage. And it doesn't hurt any that my husband's parents have logged more than 50 years too.

I'm not saying that their marriage was always happy. I'm not saying mine is either. But it sure is healthy, and strong, and terrific. Way to go, Mom and Dad! And thanks.