👩👩👦Our job as the adult is to decide the boundaries around screen time. This includes when it is available, where, with whom, and what content is allowed. Our kids have one main responsibility: have feelings about these boundaries.
🤔Kids are allowed to not like our boundaries. They’re allowed to complain. They’re allowed to be bored. Kids push boundaries as a way of ensuring we will be consistent with our boundaries. We know this. When it happens with bedtime or leaving a park, we don’t blame bedtime or parks. So when it happens with video games, we can recognize this is a developmentally appropriate (if frustrating) behavior.
🤷🏻♂️Why is it so important for kids to be allowed these feelings?
🤯 because if we treat boundary pushing around video games as a big deal, then video games will become a big deal.
🧠if we want our kids to treat video games like any other part of their lives that they can manage responsibly, we have to treat games like any other part of their lives. That means treating complaints about screen boundaries with the same neutrality we would treat complaints about bedtime or going to school.
🛑Obviously this doesn’t mean all behavior is ok. We don’t have to tolerate yelling, name calling, or any other boundary testing we aren’t ok with. But we can treat that as exactly what it is: feelings being expressed in an inappropriate way. We can leave screens out of the equation when holding boundaries about behavior, and doing so helps keep video games neutral, prevents them from becoming a big deal, and places the emphasis on our children and their choices of behavior
🤣This post is meant to be funny; there ARE ways to involve kids in screen time decisions like letting them choose from pre approved content options.
*DOR is the work of Ellen Satter and originally applied to feeding. I find it such a helpful framing that I like to apply it to screens.*
