Trying some new things

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but we are trying out a few things around here.

Spencer LOVES to play on the computer, to the exclusion of almost all else if I let him. He also loves to watch General Conference on TV. He will willing spend all day doing this. I'm NOT kidding.

David and Drew LOVE to play on the Playstation for hours at a time. Even though the games are innocuous (or so it seems), I've hated this because I consider video games to be an utter and complete waste of time. Unfortunately my sweet hubby and I don't always see eye to eye on everything.

I'm determined not to let them anymore. I've been reading "Meet the Challenge: Using Love and Logic to help children develop attention and behavioral skills." It talks about how TV and computer games can seriously hamper kids in the development of their attention skills.

Spencer has issues with attention and my other two have had some behavior issues in the past. After reading that section in the book last Saturday night, I begged my husband to agree with me to completely shut down the computer and TV for a month. I knew I'd have some complaints, but I also knew it had to be done.

We're a week into this experiment, and I am seriously impressed. All of my kids are calmer, happier, and easier to get along with. David came up to me the other day and told me that he likes that the TV is off because it leaves room for other things. I think I had to go find my jaw after it fell off onto the floor.

Spencer is sitting down and doing puzzles again for the first time in months. He has a gift with puzzles and used to sit down and do 300 piece ones in about 45 minutes. As he spent more time on the computer over the past few months playing innocent games on sites like starfall.com. sightwordswithsamson.com, and jigzone.com (all wonderful websites with great, useful little games and puzzles on them), I've noticed that he'd stopped doing regular puzzles. If he poured them out on the table, they'd end up sitting there forever while he drifted from one activity to another.

This is unacceptable.

I grew up in a house where TV was a very occasional treat. It was never just on during the day, and we certainly didn't spend hours in front of it. My sisters and I spent hours playing outside using our imaginations or curled up reading books. As I've looked back, I have to say that I've been extremely impressed at the childhood my parents gave me because they were so right on in so many respects. Their attitude towards TV was a big one.

I intend to adopt their attitude. For the next month, the TV and computer are totally off. Jon and I turn the computer on only after the kids go to bed. This is a bit of a problem for me because it means that my email-checking and blog-reading/posting opportunities have gone way down, but maybe that's not such a bad thing.

My kids have (mostly) quit asking me about it and seem much happier without it.

I'll be reticent to allow my kids to use them again, especially Spencer, because I've liked the results of our experiment so much already. I want to make sure that we find something that will work for everyone. It will probably some variation on time limits that I will make sure we enforce. I don't want to go back to where we were. I like where we are and where we're going too much.