This made me smile. We did this with our elder daughter (now 12). It worked and then the pandemic came where they were given their chromebooks to take home. Luckily only YouTube was allowed. But still it did cause quite a bump in screen usage. Obviously the younger daughter caught on (now 8) and decided hey I can do YouTube as well.
Since last year as things have normalized, we basically restarted a bunch of their sports activities. Both kids had reading requirements from school and both seem to be in a spot where they will read before bed by themselves. The elder one reads quite a bit, probably around 1-1.5 hrs at night. The younger kid about 20-25 mins. They still do about 5-8 hrs of screen time each week. Still too much in my opinion but they also do a lot of stuff not on screen.
I still haven’t given them phones or devices. I myself have an iPhone-6 so not much runs on it either. But as the big kid starts being more independent I think a phone is going to be necessary.
My advice, if any, is keep non screen activities and person to person activity a priority. But keep in mind that her friends may get video games a lot earlier and they do form peers online which translate into peers in person.
Since last year as things have normalized, we basically restarted a bunch of their sports activities. Both kids had reading requirements from school and both seem to be in a spot where they will read before bed by themselves. The elder one reads quite a bit, probably around 1-1.5 hrs at night. The younger kid about 20-25 mins. They still do about 5-8 hrs of screen time each week. Still too much in my opinion but they also do a lot of stuff not on screen.
I still haven’t given them phones or devices. I myself have an iPhone-6 so not much runs on it either. But as the big kid starts being more independent I think a phone is going to be necessary.
My advice, if any, is keep non screen activities and person to person activity a priority. But keep in mind that her friends may get video games a lot earlier and they do form peers online which translate into peers in person.