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It’s back to school time and that means another year to tell your children to stop texting and get back to school work, or pop your head into their bedroom only to find your tween under the sheets texting. Maybe you grow weary of barking about video game play when homework or chores should be getting done. Well, before you’re completely stressed out this school year by your child’s lack of focus, we’ve got some easily actionable tips to help you protect the children and yourself against technology overload.
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1. No gadgets in the bedroom. This rule serves multiple purposes. On the one hand, you won’t have to worry about children playing handheld video games all night and once they’re old enough to experience “puppy love” you don’t have to deal with a lovestruck teen texting into the wee hours of the morning. On the other hand, cellular devices do emit radio frequency energy and it’s just a nice precaution to have those in another room when your children and their developing brains are sleeping. No proven science here, just a dads caution. In our home we have a central area which is setup like a charging station and all cellphones are placed there at bedtime.
2. Be bold and place limits on video game play during the week. If you find your son(s) easily distracted by their video games, you might try something I’ve found to be very effective in my own home: no video games Monday through Thursday. I found that my sons were rushing through their homework to get to the games. Grades suffered as a result and the kibosh was put on game play during the week. If your children are able to maintain grades and play games, you may consider placing time restrictions on non-homework related computer time or video game play.
3. Just like the video games, the texting can be a great impediment to children taking care of responsibilities like chores and homework. If you’re home with your children after school, have them hand over their phones until homework is completed. If you’re not home you can ask them to place their phones in another room (like yours, or even theirs) while they do their homework. If you have children motivated to test boundaries – and who doesn’t – you can utilize cellphone monitoring apps like Mobile Watchdog or SMobile Systems Parental Controls to check the times that messages are sent to keep children honest and inline when the temptation to text gets the best of them.
4. If you have a middle schooler who has a cellphone, another thing from my personal playbook that you might try is blocking the ability to text until the first progress report comes out. This tells your children that texting is a privilege and not a necessity and must be earned by starting the school year out strong. If that first progress report doesn’t meet whatever standard you’ve set for scholastic achievement then the texting stays off. If it does, then the child gets their texting turned back on. All the carriers will allow you to add or take off texting plans AND block texting messages from coming into our going out of a particular line at your request. Just call them up and explain what you’re doing and make sure they’ve noted that on your account in case the CSR doesn’t do it properly and you get pay-per-text charges and have to call back and have texting blocked properly. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, personally.
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5. This tip isn’t necessarily about making sure they do homework but it will help keep drama in the home to a minimum. No allowing other children to borrow your children’s video games. Children, your own and others, have a way from time to time of “misplacing” video games. This can sometimes cause a fuss between brothers and between friends, so until they’re older and more responsible with their tech devices, no loaning out games or borrowing them. Trust me on this one. It can save you a decent amount of headache if you have more than one son and save you a few dollars to replace a game if your little one is a little forgetful.
6. See our article on setting up a separate user login on Windows Vista or Windows 7 and check back soon for our “how to” for the Mac users. Keeping a separate login for your children that is focused on homework and actually blocks applications and websites which distract children when they’re trying to get homework done will go a long way to helping your little ones stay focused.
What are some of the steps you take to ensure that your children’s gadgets don’t get in the way of their grades or chores?
About Tshaka Armstrong
Very nicely done. Number 5 is something that we talk about at home all the time. Kids don’t want to think that their friends would take/keep/forget to return something, but it happens.
Definitely happens. Depending on how young you start you children with video games, they tend to lose them as well. Especially the Nintendo DS games which are very small to begin with.
Yep, those games are very small. I was thinking about this on a larger scale. I am not real fond of loaning out books or music either. I want to share with others, but somethings are too important to lose.
Although I suppose that now that we can burn CDs it is a bit easier.