It’s holiday time for my boys at the moment, they have 2 weeks off, and the usual go-to is to just let them run Feral and enjoy themselves right? Well this year their interests have shifted to games, the likes of offline minecraft (my kids are not allowed online), trail makers and marble world. All games that encourage critical thinking, problem solving and imagination,which is a bonus for my boys who love this kind of thing. But I have noticed that if I don’t keep a close eye on the clock it can turn into hours long marathons and then starving hi gey kids with a bit of a grump.

Especially with SPD, the overstimulation can be quite detrimental to C’s tolerance of his triggers. With this in mind we have to pro-active with timing. Breaking it down into hour slots with long screen breaks in between, and, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, loadshedding is helping a great deal. (trying to make the best of a terrible circumstance of no power during portions of the day).

When tthe power is off, there are no screens, so chunks of 2 to 4 hours a day of just plain play, building Lego and drawing makes up for the amount of effort we have to put into measuring the screen time.

I hope this tactic can help some of you when it comes to monitoring screen time, without making it a guilt trip, sometimes I just let them have a long time on the weekends, but mostly it’s broken up over a day, during school time though, they are only allowed Netflix after 16h00. So that keeps the gentle routine of school homework and extra murals well paced for big emotions during the week.

Xx

Kim.