Progress

So it's been almost 2 weeks of this break from electronics, and I think we've made a lot of progress.  By the beginning of this week, T had come to accept that he wasn't going to be playing his games, so he found other things to do, and didn't ask for it. E continued to ask for it a few times, but was a lot less persistent than last week. One day, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they started a game of Battleship together after school! Another day, T spent hours working on an Erector Set, which previously, he couldn't spend more than 20-30 minutes on, before he got impatient and lost interest. They had a couple playdates, and I loved that they went out and played in the snow, and built with Lincoln Logs, and just generally played together. There was one playdate that T really wanted to play a certain game with his friend, and I was going to allow it, as a "special occasion", but then turns out the friend had been grounded from electronics for a week anyway! I did allow T to show his friend something on a game briefly, since T was looking forward to some game time with his friend so much, but they also did plenty of "real world" play.

They spent a lot of time this past week reading, both on their own and with us reading to them aloud.  We've always loved reading to them, and now we're getting into longer and longer books. We have so many books we want to read with them, many which are classics, that we never read ourselves (like The Jungle Book, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Treasure Island). This past week, we read Mysteries According to Humphrey, Tales of the Restoration, Owls in the Family, and a little bit of Little Britches. I feel like I'm discovering a whole new world of books that I never read! We also had 2 snow days, so they spent a lot of time playing out in the snow, building forts, shoveling, throwing snowballs, and sledding.

T said to me, "I think my addiction is broken. I'm doing things that I didn't do before and I'm enjoying them." I think we've made a lot of progress, and I think we've made our point pretty clear to them, but whether or not they will continue to be OK with choosing something else over electronics, when there isn't a ban on them, remains to be seen.