Excerpts

– Introduction –

You want your child to listen to you when you ask him to turn off the game, phone, or tablet. Better grades are a high priority of yours, too. And while you want your children to enjoy being kids, it troubles you that they prefer screen-based activity to almost everything else. You can’t believe it, but it’s become a bedtime battle to get the electronic devices powered down and put away. You’re fatigued by how the battle repeats itself during the morning routine before everyone goes their separate ways for a busy day. Ugh. read more

– The Electronics Addition: A Good Problem –

The electronics addiction is the most common good problem that comes through my office door these days. In many homes, technology meant to illuminate the mind ends up only illuminating the living room. Incredulous parents bring their children and adolescents to my office, asking how to unplug them from their screens without unplugging the family’s technology altogether. After all, how do you keep Junior off the Internet when he knows more about how to connect to it than you do? Hmmm. It really is a problem, albeit one only encountered by those of us fortunate enough to possess these kinds of technologies in our homes. read more

  -The Reverse Hierarchy –

Whether or not you consciously thought it, what you wanted and expected when you became a parent was a chain of command that flows from parent to child. At some level of consciousness, you correctly intuited that children have three jobs:

1. School—Attending class and completing homework

2. Home—Following directions and fulfilling household responsibilities, i.e., minding parents

3. Fun—Playing

You are also correct in thinking that your primary job is to help Junior fulfill the first two, which are responsibilities, in order to access the third, which is a privilege. read more