With school out for summer, my preschooler is either playing a video game or watching youtube for hours on end. We try to force some time away from screens but it is a never ending struggle, as screen use is the immediate, default state to return to. I find most of the youtube content worse than the gaming, but neither are all that great.
I am a parent. You absolutely can. The kid will make your life miserable about it for anywhere from 4 hours to 3 months depending on how stubborn they are.
We do it by paying attention to how the kid's doing with it, and going through a cycle. He'll periodically get sucked too far into the YouTube (or ...) swamp, and we'll notice that he's more difficult to deal with, less interested in other pursuits, and is moodier and just generally having a harder time.
We'll have a tough conversation where we lay out the situation, he'll melt down but will eventually accept that it's not working out, and we'll impose temporary restrictions until it feels like things are more under control. He'll quickly realize that going halfway is way too hard, and will regulate himself to a level much stricter than what we imposed.
Then there's a fairly long honeymoon period where he's getting some exposure but not too much. Eventually the beast slowly takes over again, and we repeat.
It's not fun, it's ugly to watch, it's hard to do, but it feels like it's working. As in, I truly believe he's learning better self regulation than I've ever had, and for better reasons.
I'm just thankful my wife is both aware enough and enough of a hardass to pull it off; on my own, I'd do things too late and too extreme, and we'd just be two monkeys reacting to each other.
dito, it's hard, but doable. We've gone cold turkey with the TV on our five year old and after a week or two he was much more tolerable and plays with legos for hours to keep himself occupied. He's still a 5-year old though, so removing TV alone won't help with that, you still got to parent / occupy him most of the time. It did however get easier to connect with him and reason about those decisions.
We still watch stuff together every now and then (or if we really need to be focused on smth), but he's in a much better mood throughout.
>He's still a 5-year old though, so removing TV alone won't help with that, you still got to parent / occupy him most of the time
Right. There's nothing quite as engaging as tv/gaming that he can just sit without guidance and safely do by himself for a few hours at a time while his parents are busy working. Probably comes down to lazy parenting.
All of my similarly aged parents- most of whom are huge gamers and nerds- have instituted some effective policies:
- Strictly limited screen time, replaced with time spent reading, playing with physical toys like LEGO and playing outside actively. Devices are physically removed from the kid's environment when screen time is over.
- Kids do not get full access to the entire content library. Approved videos and games only. Most have entirely removed the YouTube app from the kid devices in favor of Disney Plus and education-focused apps. Some have kids playing more retro games rather than current games.
The kids will complain and throw tantrums, but they're toddlers, they do that anyway. And eventually they come around. Especially if their friends (children and aunties/uncles) participate with them as well.
