How I Get My Sons Away From Their Video Games
All my kids talk about getting every year for Christmas is video games if they don’t go downstairs and find Gears of War 2 under our new flocked christmas tree I do not know how they will survive. This drives me a little crazy since I like to encourage my kids to go outside. I would prefer to get them something like new football equipment or bikes, really anything they can do outside. Oh well I guess you just learn that kids are kids. Fighting with them is just too much work.
That being said I’ve tried to find some tricks for my family and video games. I do a couple of things in an effort to force them outside. First off I limit their time every day to one hour (they can earn more). I find placing a limit is important because then they know that anything above that is a privilege. To be more fair I’ve allowed them some methods of earning more television time. That leads me into my second trick. They can get more television time by either doing chores or spending time outside. The chores is nice for me and generally has a pretty good payoff for them. I intentionally made it with the purpose of them getting around one hour of television time for every one hour they spend on chores.
The number two way they get more television time is by spending some of their time outside. When they go outside and play nice I allow them 15 minutes of gaming to every hour of outside time. Like I say this isn’t a huge payoff, but I also don’t really think asking them to be outside is a huge thing to ask. This mostly pays off for them on weekends. They spend all day outside on Saturdays and earn themselves a couple of hours in front of the television. Realistically a night of playing games and watching movies isn’t so bad after a full day outside.
Anyway I guess that I don’t mind a game or two under the flocked christmas tree this year if it has the effect of getting my brats outside and getting some stuff done around the house for me. They had better like the games they’re getting, because I know I’ll like my “gift” of one more thing to use “against” my boys.
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