I Was Losing the Screen-Time Battle...Until This!

I want to talk to you today about one thing that will make or break your homeschool and that is screens in your home school. It's easy when the kids are little and everyone's together, everyone's doing the same things and you want to live this wild and free screenfree lifestyle. It's easy to spend all your time outside to say no to screens, but as kids get older, it changes and things are a little different. So, I want to share with you the screen time plan that is working in our homeschool that has been working for a while. If you're new, hi, my name is Sher. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom to 10 kids. My husband Nelson and I have been married for 25 years and this is our 16th year of homeschooling. We have kids ages 20 down to two and we've been doing this for a while. I love encouraging other homeschool moms here on my channel and I also have a blog arlifehomeschooling.com where you can find tons of resources, free copy work, book lists, uh ideas for life skills, everything that I've learned. I just share freely over on my blog. I want to provide a resource for moms that is practical and encouraging. There can be so many distractions in homeschooling, but when you add screens into it, it just takes it up one more notch. And it really is easy when the kids are little to control this and to make sure that we're giving them the childhood that we want for them to have, which is limited screen time and just as much exposure to nature and the real world as possible. It just gets trickier as they get older. Things change. And I know for us, we want our kids to have access to all the great knowledge that is on the internet. We want them to be able to use that to learn, to grow, to make money. And we want them to be communicating with their friends. And so their world expands as they slowly grow. And I think this can be really intimidating for a lot of moms, parents. It was for us. We were pretty much the first in our generation to navigate this. There were, that's not completely true. There probably were some parents that were about 5 years ahead of us. But with our oldest, we were going through this with our set of friends basically by ourselves. There weren't people in our circle that were ahead of us to look to very much to get ideas of how to navigate it. And so it was very intimidating. And I recently had a mom ask me here on my channel how we work with screens in the high school years because that's up and coming for her. And so I'm just going to be sharing with you what is working well for us now and what we've settled on after a couple years under our belt. Our approach in the younger years with our younger kids is to limit their screen time as much as possible. So, in our home, um the [clears throat] the TV is off pretty much most of the time unless it's a movie night. Um we don't have that running all the time. And then we have passwords on all of our computers. So, if kids want to access it, they need someone to put a password in for them. And that person is me. And our older girls know the passwords as well. So, um that's just helped us to be able to limit it. In addition to our TV being off, we limit all kinds of video games, we actually have days that are completely screenfree. So Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday are what we call screen days. And on these days, our kids, and this is according to age, they get a certain time limit that they can be on to play games that we have picked or games, you know, pretty much any game as long as we've seen it and we think it's okay on our phones or on the computer. So, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday are the times where they can have that limited screen time. We set a timer and they get on, they can do it. And the other days are screen free days. So unless they need it for school, and I'll get into that a little bit more in about our homeschool. Unless they need it during the day for their homeschool work, they are off screens that day. Now, this of course we have family movie nights. Usually every Friday night is a movie night. And then in the evenings when I'm making dinner, I will often have my younger kids turn something on to watch so they can just enjoy something while I'm cooking. My husband and I are talking. It's just a nice downtime for us. But that is the basic rule. As our kids are in the younger years now, when I look at their homeschool day for kids that are young, I really try to limit how much time they are on screens. Um, this is just something that's really important to us. I, you know, I know it's different for every parent, but when they're young, I just know how important it is for them to have face-toface conversations to them, for them to be imagining and playing with raw materials. So, this is something we've really limited in our homeschool during the younger years. There's a couple things that they do on screens. One is their geography. It's called satara.com. And for this, they get 10 minutes a day. >> [clears throat] >> And uh so they set a timer for 10 minutes. They go on and they um it just asks you to label different countries and different continents and it's something that's fun and quick. They've learned so much through it. So that's one thing we do. And then on another day, so these are never on the same day. Some days they have geography and then another day it's 10 minutes of a foreign language. And then also for typing, our kids that are learning typing, um they again set the timer 10 minutes and I try not to have these 10-minute segments on the same day so that you know they can stack them and that could turn into 30 minutes of screen time. I try to have them on different days. The other thing that we use for screens in our homeschool um on a regular basis is their history program which is Veraritoss Press self-paced history program. It's excellent. And one thing I haven't shared before in my videos when I've talked about how we use Veraritoss Press is that especially after the time change when it gets darker earlier, I often will not have our kids do it during the school day because I want them to maximize the amount of time that they're outside. So, um, I'll have them skip their history during the school day and then after dark when everybody's coming back in and sometimes right before they watch their little show while we're making dinner, I'll say, "Okay, guys, go do your history now and then after you're done with your history, you can watch your show while daddy and I make dinner." So, that's just worked out really well for us. And other than that, our kids are not our younger kids are not on screens during the school day. As kids grow older and they get into middle school, 12, 13, this really does change. And the way it changes first usually is with email. The kids want to have their own email so they can message their friends and then they often get chat groups within those with using their email and they want to message friends. And these are things that we want them to do. Our kids friendships are so important to us, but it can very quickly and easily just be a time zapper. And we've noticed um especially when we were first delving into this that kids will just waste so much time messaging mindless things and it can just totally consume their time. So we learned very early on that we need to put some limitations on this. And another thing we've learned as our kids get older is that we want them to be learning skills online. There's so much that you can learn online. And our kids have used Pinterest, Canva, YouTube, um all these things to make money. They've used them to learn and develop new skills. So, this is one area that really changes as our kids get older and we want them to be using their time online to develop their skills and their passions. So, I'm just going to lay out for you how we use screens in the high school years with our kids. And I want to say right off the bat, this is something we're comfortable with. And every family has to decide this for themselves. You may have a completely different set of circumstances. Uh your kids are completely different than ours. We are working with the children in our home with my husband and my personality with our comfort level. And this is something this we this is a plan that works really well for us. When you're doing all this for the first time, you're looking around at your peers. You're looking at everyone that's ahead of you. And it's really hard to make these decisions about screen time, about phones. We want to do what's best for our kids. But after you have seen a couple kids and and seen the fruit, not only in your own kids, but um you know, everyone in your circle, I think it gives you a lot more confidence to make decisions without fear. We have seen enough that this is our level of comfort. These are the kind of problems we want to handle. So you kind of pick your problems. You pick if you want to have the problems that come with giving them a lot of freedom. And then you also pick the problems that come with not giving them as much freedom, which is usually just them not always liking your choices or understanding your choices at this age. I personally think as they grow older, they'll appreciate it. Um, so you pick your problems and I think the older you get, the less you really care what everyone else is doing and the more you just care about doing what's good for your kids. One of the first things that we decided with our oldest was to wait to give him a phone until he was 16. And this was a really hard decision to make, believe it or not, at the time because a lot of his friends were getting phones at like 12 and 13. And um it seemed like we were holding out for a while. And then by the time he was 16 and definitely now that we have some more older kids and more experience, I am so glad I'm so glad that we held out until 16. One thing I have noticed as soon as kids get a phone, they have less and less incentive to read because they have so much information at their fingertips, which is also good like I mentioned before. But my kids have always, most of them have been voracious readers. They read for fun, for pleasure, because they don't have access to screens when they're young. And as they get older, once they have a phone, um that kind of deep reading where you're taking in uh information that is harder to process, that typically slows down. So waiting until they're 16, I um I think is just really helps you hold on to that a little bit longer. At 16, they have a driver's license and they are working, so it changes things a little bit. Now, when our kids get a phone at 16, we also are getting a Gab phone. So, if you're familiar with Gab, Gab is a phone, looks just like an iPhone, but there is no internet access. So, you can have uh a GPS, you have texting, um there's a you can look it up. There's a ton of things that you have access to, but you don't have internet access. And our thinking is they have the internet at their fingertips at any time they want it at home. They don't necessarily need to have it on the go everywhere they go. And again, this comes down to something that we're comfortable with. What kind of problems do you want to have to deal with? We absolutely love the Gab phones and um thankfully there are more and more of their friends that have Gabph phones and I think that has just um made it a little bit easier than it was at first. Um at first it seemed like everyone was like giving their kids iPhones and the more information that's coming out, more research, I think more and more parents are choosing this option. We love the freedom. Our kids have access to the internet anytime that they're here in our house where they have accountability, but they don't have it at their fingertips wherever they go. So, um, this has been something that has just been a great fit for us. Now, of course, as kids get into the high school years, they're using computers more and more during the day for their schoolwork. And these are just a few of the screen time rules that we have that have really helped us. And I want to say from the very beginning that my kids have broken these rules sometimes. Like they haven't always followed them. Our kids are normal kids. This is something we're always working through. This is the standard we've set. But um you know obviously screens can be really challenging for us as adults and even more so our kids. So these are things that we're always working on and but my kids are normal kids. The first one is phones need to be in for us it's in our kitchen drawer during the school hours. So um they can get up they can check their phones before school starts. They can check their phones after school is over, but and sometimes I am a little lenient during lunchtime, but typically during the school day, they are not supposed to be on their phones. And this is complicated because some of our kids like to listen to music in their AirPods. I wouldn't say I I draw a pretty hard line on this, but I have occasionally given some grace and some leeway just if they are working really hard, if they want to listen to music and that helps them focus. So, but for the most part, phones are just a huge distraction and if their phone is there, they will just be messaging their friends all day long throughout their schoolwork and it's so so distracting to your school day. So that is just something we're always working on. Another one is that when they are on the computer, which they are on the computer a lot more in high school because they have they go to a co-op for some of their classes, not all of them. And so they need to get on there, see what their teachers have assigned. They communicate with them sometime, but the rule is they need to be only on school related subjects on the computer. So no email, no chatting with friends. They need to be focused doing their work. And then we also want them to ask us when they want to get on YouTube to research something. And um I'm fine with them being on YouTube learning all that they can learn, but I just don't want them mindlessly scrolling through and watching real after real or just wasting time. It should be intentional. It should be productive. And another thing that gets a little tricky is that when you have older kids, you also have younger kids that are sitting around watching all of this. and I don't want my younger kids to be in front of a screen all the time. So, that's why we've really uh we're always working to streamline it to only be on your school subjects. And quite honestly, there's not I I don't haven't found a way that there's just like a simple solution for this. I have to monitor it constantly and I am asking my kids or looking at their screens. Of course, we do tell our kids that uh we don't like them taking computers up to their rooms. We don't want a situation where a child is by themselves with no accountability. So, they're always in like the living room or at the table or whatever, but only on school subjects. I'm often asking my kids, "Okay, it seems like you've been on the computer a lot. what can you just go through and tell me exactly what you've done and what you had to do yet? I know all your work isn't on the computer, but we are slowly handing them over to be able to make better and better decisions. So, um I think they need regular accountability with us and we need to be checking in with them. Now, of course, these rules and guidelines are so easy to just talk about, to even write out, much harder to enforce. And that's why I think we need to be checking in with our kids. But kids don't always follow these. And even myself as an adult, it's, you know, let's be honest, it's challenging to have discipline when it comes to screen time, even for ourselves. So for our family, the consequences if they cannot follow these simple guidelines during our school day, they lose their screen time for the day. they lose their phone for the day. The internet and screens are a privilege and we remind our kids often when we were kids, we did not have the internet. We found ways to entertain ourselves and I know we're living in a completely different world, but um this is how we're helping our kids develop healthy habits for screen time. One other thing that complicates things even more is social media. So, I'll just tell you what we've done. And we've actually changed this a little bit. We have waited till our kids are 17 and a half or 18 to let them have social media. Um, social media changes everything. Uh, it complicates things even for adults. So, it's just something that we did not want to interfere with them in their most formative years in the years where they're teenagers and they're just growing and changing so much. So, we wait until they're 17 or 18 to get them help them learn that world and just walk them through it. But also um one thing that we have changed is we really would like our kids and this helps with the Gab phone not to have social media on their phones. It's one thing to have access to it at home where you can get on when you have accountability around you but there's just a huge difference when you have that phone everything's so accessible and you can just live in this alternate world all the time. I think kids really need a break from that. They're not mature enough to handle that level of influence at all times in their life. So, not having social media on their phone, that is something that's really important to us moving forward. Um, I think it gives kids may not love it, but it gives them a lot of freedom that maybe and hopefully they'll appreciate as they grow older. When we were just delving into this world of having older kids and navigating all the screen time issues, we were really concerned about all the bad things that are on the internet. And that is a serious thing to be concerned about. We had a lot of conversations with our kids about everything that's out there and the dangers and trying to protect them as much as possible. But the one thing we totally did not see coming was the distraction that phones and screens bring to our family life and to our homeschool. That totally sideswiped us and we had to find something that worked for us. So these are the basic uh guidelines that we have here in our family for our kids. we don't do everything perfectly. Um we're always having to check in. In fact, you know, every couple months we will sometimes reset and just say, you know, I feel like we haven't been sticking to what we said and we've kind of become lax in this area. Let's just we need to just like talk with everyone again. We need to reestablish what the guidelines are, start again. So, I think it really does help to do that every now and then. And it's just really important that we are helping our kids develop healthy habits with teens. It's crucial that we're talking with them. We've had long conversations with our teenagers about screen time. And in the end, our heart for them is for them to see that we really love them. We want to protect them not only from some of the dangers on the internet, but especially we want to help them develop healthy habits and to use screen time, to use their phones, to use this technology to be productive, to be increasing or improving their skills and their knowledge level. So, I hope this was helpful to you. If you have any ideas, tips that have worked for you in your homeschool, I'd love if you leave a comment below and just keep this conversation going. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms.