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Winning as a parent
Apr. 20th, 2020 10:04 am It doesn't happen often, so I plan to celebrate.
Rose has spent most of the time over the past 3 weeks on her computer. It's been disquieting but also pretty normal. It's her preferred activity and displaces so many of the being a human activities that I both really hate it and feel completely sucked of the energy to do anything about it. There were occasional glimmers of hope - she made cookie dough spontaneously one day, and we could always get her to come and hang out with the family for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I also really loved the DnD campaign that finally got started after being talked about for months.
Last week school started and I wanted to get a bit more motivated to get her into a routine, so we had the win last week where we listed what needed doing that day and she did 2 of them and then had enough and withdrew back into youtube. On Friday we didn't really get anything done.
On Saturday, I thought a bit more and decided that I would make a list of the activities I wanted her to do more of and that for each activity she would earn 30min of computer time. The winning part (for now) is that she has turned into a computer time hoarder. Yesterday she "earned" 9 hours of computer time and she's currently reading a book (30min=1hour) after finishing 2 classes worth of school work while sitting at a desk (2.5 hours), wearing pants, coming for a walk, eating breakfast with us and playing a musical instrument for 10min (2hours). When I commented on the hoarding approach she told me that she was planning to avoid using her computer "unless she really needed to".
I expect that she will get to a point where she is comfortable that she can be on the computer as much as she likes and will then stop. But I think she will also run down her time and realise that maybe there is a balance. Let's see!
Rose has spent most of the time over the past 3 weeks on her computer. It's been disquieting but also pretty normal. It's her preferred activity and displaces so many of the being a human activities that I both really hate it and feel completely sucked of the energy to do anything about it. There were occasional glimmers of hope - she made cookie dough spontaneously one day, and we could always get her to come and hang out with the family for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I also really loved the DnD campaign that finally got started after being talked about for months.
Last week school started and I wanted to get a bit more motivated to get her into a routine, so we had the win last week where we listed what needed doing that day and she did 2 of them and then had enough and withdrew back into youtube. On Friday we didn't really get anything done.
On Saturday, I thought a bit more and decided that I would make a list of the activities I wanted her to do more of and that for each activity she would earn 30min of computer time. The winning part (for now) is that she has turned into a computer time hoarder. Yesterday she "earned" 9 hours of computer time and she's currently reading a book (30min=1hour) after finishing 2 classes worth of school work while sitting at a desk (2.5 hours), wearing pants, coming for a walk, eating breakfast with us and playing a musical instrument for 10min (2hours). When I commented on the hoarding approach she told me that she was planning to avoid using her computer "unless she really needed to".
I expect that she will get to a point where she is comfortable that she can be on the computer as much as she likes and will then stop. But I think she will also run down her time and realise that maybe there is a balance. Let's see!
