In a previous post, we had some thoughts about how our kids’ gaming was impacting our relationship with them and we talked about some child development and parenting research on setting healthy video game limits.

This post is about what we learned from a wacky experiment we did to try to teach our then 8-year-old daughter to self-regulate and have balance with the video games in her life. 

At that time, we recognized that the gaming problem in our family was not caused by the video games themselves, but by a lack of balance between games and other activities. 

We’ll tell you the story about how it all turned out. But first, some context… 

Our daughter was 8 years old at the time–old enough to have some impulse control abilities (albeit imperfect). It was during the summer, which made it both easier and harder: easier because summertime meant she didn’t have homework to do every day, and harder because we were both working from home at the time and we couldn’t always be available to entertain her. Plus, we also lived far away from her friends, and there weren’t kids in the neighborhood that she could play with. 

An Aside: In our experience as classroom teachers, we frequently saw that kids are often able to control their impulses and regulate themselves more than they are usually given credit for, or the opportunity to do. We also knew that kids learn through trial and error, especially when they have adults they can bounce ideas off of, and problem-solve together.

 

The Unlimited Video-Game Time Experiment:

Our first step was for Jason and I to get clear about what we valued as a family. 

We figured out that the things that we want our children to do fall into 6 basic categories: Social, Creative, Physical, Academic, Contributing to the House, and Self-care (your categories may be different depending on your family’s values).

 

Second, each morning she made a plan for herself, choosing ONE thing she would do in each category. 

She wrote down her plan and put it up on the refrigerator. 

Here are examples of the activities she could choose from. (Your categories and activities will likely be different. This is just to get you thinking.)

  • Social: having a play date with a peer, talking on the phone, setting up a play date for the future
  • Creative: pastels, writing in her journal, drawing pictures of dragons, writing a story
  • Physical: riding her bike, swimming at the pool, roller skating, walking in the park
  • Academic: practicing her multiplication tables, reading (or homework if it was during schooltime)
  • Contributing to the House: cleaning her room, cleaning the bathroom, taking out the trash, sweeping, vacuuming
  • Self-Care: taking a shower, listing healthy foods that she was going eat for lunch or dinner

 

Third, she followed her plan, monitoring her own time during the day, with minimal support.

She played video games at any time during the day, a really important detail. This wasn’t an “if you do this, then you get that” proposition. Video games were not a “reward” for her getting her “work” done first. 

The message we wanted for her to understand was: “We think you are old enough to start monitoring yourself. We are not expecting perfection, but we do want you to work towards making screentime just one of the many valuable, useful, rewarding things that you enjoy and get done each day.”

And there was a limit: She needed to keep the same bedtime and get all the things done in her plan. The result was that she began to regulate herself. 

NOTES: This strategy could be easily modified for families with younger or older children, or for kids that need more or less support.

 

Fourth, if she didn’t get her plan done during the day we’d ask her what she was going to do differently the next day. 

This way she was building her executive function and self-regulation skills through trial and error, and trying out new strategies every time she “failed”. The stakes were pretty low, because it was summertime and she had no homework, the “worst thing” that could happen was she spent a lot of time on a screen for one day.

 

Here is what we learned from the experiment after 2 weeks:

  1. Conflicts about video games disappeared overnight. Not only did the parent-child power struggles go away, but the internal conflict that I was feeling about her video game time went away too, because she was balancing how she spent her time and self-regulating. We all felt better about our relationship because a major cause for arguments–her sneaking games and us monitoring it–had gone away. We all experienced more harmony, less stress, and more freedom.
  2. The amount of time she spent playing video games decreased. Since introducing unlimited game time, she frequently played less than she used to. This is probably because she spent more time setting up playdates and playing with her friends. 
  3. She built some executive function skills and learned to better regulate her video gaming. She had to monitor her time and plan her activities during the day. As would be expected, she did not accomplish this perfectly every day. After a couple of days in which she didn’t complete her plan, together we agreed that she’d do a day of no video games over the weekend. Without a single complaint, she chose which day to take a break from gaming. This consequence was something that we had worked out together, in a conversation, and she had some input about it.
  4. This approach–coming up with a daily plan–gave us a lot of flexibility. We can change the categories in the plan as our family changes, as she enters into the school year, and as she grows (and outgrows this level of support).

 

If you have questions or if you’ve tried something similar (or different) in your family to teach balance and self-regulation with gaming, leave us a comment in the section below and let us know how it went.