Parenting Book #1

I have a list of parenting books that I'm reading through. Just when I was getting settled in with school age parenting I have a tween and the teenage years are looming!

I often am afraid that our screen time is out of control and some weekends it is, but, overall "growing up social" made it me feel pretty good about our 2 hour a day time limit. I liked how this book incorporated how screen time affects your child's love tank (based on the 5 Love Languages). There are also chapters for single parents for adults to evaluate their own use of screen time.

Here's how this book made a real life impact. Josiah plays games on my phone during Aliza's dance class. He is usually the only school age boy at the studio, but one week another boy his age was there. He had met this boy and gotten to know him a little bit. So I told Josiah that when he walked in to the studio he needed to say hi to the other boy AND ask him what game he was playing. Josiah wasn't sure he wanted to that, but he did. You know what happened? Josiah ended up sitting down beside him, they played the same game and talked the whole time. If I had not instructed Josiah, he would have walked past the other boy, sat down, played his game and wouldn't have said a word to each other.

Gaming is here to stay. So are phones and every other electronic device. My goal is to teach my children how to have relationships and be sociable within this new world that is so normal to them.