Klara’s school had no class on Thursday and Friday.
On Thursday, I took her to work with me in the morning, and then N took over because I had a budget meeting. It’s mega hot, so no outdoor activities are possible. He took her to an entertainment center and the bookstore.
On Friday, we played dolly hotel, cooked together, and then I took her to the library and the kids’ gym. Then we played balloon volleyball. N finished working and joined the dolly hotel festivities.
Today, I have an event at work, so we are going to the farmer’s market, then to my event, and then to the book fair in town. After that, we will come home and clean together. In the evening, we are going to the Y.
Tomorrow we have a visiting priest at church for the Sunday service. Then we have the Fall church picnic. After that, I have my livestream, and N will be entertaining Klara at the trampoline park.
Of course, it would all be easier if we didn’t have to hide indoors from the heat. In the endless summer months that last well into November, we have to come up with indoors activities daily, and that does become daunting.
Those Netflix shows are garbage but they aren’t what’s causing the trouble. Or rather, the reason why they have such an importance to children isn’t that Netflix cunningly ties them to a device. No child with more fun options will choose to stare at screens.
Clarissa's Blog 
Pre-habituation, yes. But keep their brains on them long enough and it becomes a hard habit to kick.
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Absolutely. People create this problem by sticking gadgets into kids’ hands at age 10 months and then don’t know how to solve it. When the only thing that works is not to create the problem in the first place.
I HATE the expression “screen time” and vowed never to use it in my family. And followed through. Bickering over “screen time” doesn’t happen to us.
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Us as well. Once you see how a parent-shaped hole in a child’s life plays out, it is hard to unsee it.
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No intelligent child with more fun options will choose to stare at screens.
There is a heavy correlation with intelligence here, IMO: bright kids can make their own fun, and this opens up a huge array of fun alternatives to screens… and even if they do get temporarily roped in now and again, it becomes repetitive and boring after a while. But to a dull kid… nothing they can come up with on their own can compete with the flashy flashy squeaky bright variety onscreen, and even imaginative friends become second-class companions. The repetitiveness doesn’t register, or doesn’t ever become really irksome.
It was the same with books, when we were children: you could rank the kids in any class, with a great degree of accuracy, by their leisure reading. The dull kids did not read for fun, ever. The mid kids read endless repeats of the same plots, with the same amputated vocabulary, in series like Goosebumps and Babysitters Club, or if they had Evangelical parents, the Mandy series (shudders). The brighter kids had usually read one or two of those and completely lost interest and combed the library shelves for something, anything, that looked more engaging.
The threshold for captivating the imagination at 90IQ, and at 130IQ, is not the same, and this applies to screens as much as it applied to books.
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This is true but it’s a vicious circle because through a screen fixation low-IQ kids add emotional disregulation and physical problems to what already is a dull brain. And it’s only worse from there.
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“add emotional…and physical problems”
this x100. I had two neighbor friends, girls, different houses, when I was a kid. We were all the same age, and lived practically next door to each other, so we all played together, from about age 5 on up– close enough for our moms to watch out the window while we went to knock on the neighbors’ doors. “Can A come out to play?” Friend A was not terribly bright, was in the LD class at her school, but it didn’t signify. Nothing about your report card prevents you bicycling around the neighborhood or playing Barbies or Restaurant or running about in the sprinklers in the summer, which we did. We weren’t spending our time reading Proust or anything. She was nice, that was all that mattered. There was some weird in her family that I couldn’t pin down. Her parents seemed never to be home, and the couple of times we saw her dad, he seemed grumpy. Mum was nice enough, just… mostly absent, though I think she was often home. They had a huge add-on to the house that effectively meant the parents lived in a separate wing and we hardly ever saw them. To this day, that house layout makes me uncomfortable.
Friend B had divorced-and-remarried parents, lived with her mom and stepdad, who were both very decent, very present parents, usually busy about the house with one thing or another, often planning or training for some ambitious hiking trip– they were ex-hippie nature granola types, the wholesome kind, not the pervy kind. Friend B was an A student, graduated with all the honors, from the local IB program.
Anyway, we were pretty constant playmates on weekends, summers, and our performance in school was irrelevant because we all went to different schools. Then, when we were all 8 or 9, Friend A’s family got a fancy cable TV package deal, and she got her own TV set, for her bedroom. She was very excited, and invited us over a few times to watch TV with her. We obliged at least a couple of times, but it was not much fun, and the rigid schedule of television shows didn’t fit our haphazard availability to play. Also, you can’t watch TV and ride a bike, and we still wanted to go to the park. But after the TV, she didn’t. Want to go to the park, that is. We still knocked on her door, hey can A come out to play? No, Green Slime Funhouse is on in 20 minutes and I don’t have time. After that, we couldn’t pry her loose to ride bikes, or play outdoors, and even playing at her house was strained by her slavish attachment to the TV schedule. Eventually, we stopped trying. The TV won.
Friend B grew up to be a science teacher. Solid marriage, couple of nice kids.
Friend A… did not fare well. Massive weight gain, loser husband, the works. Moved back in with her mom, brought kid and grandkid along.
The weirdest part of that whole thing is: her parents and my parents are still neighbors and talk. Friend A has an entirely different version of that story. She remembers it, of course– the three of us had been constant companions for years, and then… suddenly we weren’t. But she doesn’t remember why it happened. She says we abandoned her because we thought we were too good for her, and still, nearly thirty years later, harbors some resentment about it. 😦
We were never too good for Friend A. We were grieved that she liked Green Slime Funhouse more than she liked us, and were unable to shoehorn a friendship into the little gaps between favorite shows. And we certainly didn’t have the skill or wisdom to do an addiction intervention with our friend. Her parents maybe could’ve done it, but they didn’t.
And that was just cable TV.
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I’ve taught enough dull-witted kids to see this, take away their tablets and phones and they cannot do anything to entertain themselves. Growing up, my older brother and I would write and act out stories based on cartoons and books we liked and then branched out to original work, then we started writing fan fiction and then original stories.
He currently writes fan fiction about the anime RWBY and original stuff based on a dystopian future inspired by the undubbed Japanese anime he adores, world building and military history. I’ve written YA, fantasy, historical and modern fiction and it all started because we both have active imaginations and above average IQs and parents who didn’t want to spend money on toys, we had to entertain ourselves
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My little brother and I had a whole crazy range of weird games– we had a friend who often dropped off odd “craft supplies” she’d carefully saved (she was a hoarder, my mother felt that by always just saying ‘yes, thank you’ we were helping in some small way to relieve the burden she had of saving everything)– cardboard tubes, empty spools, half-used notepads, interesting pens, cigar boxes, that sort of thing. We’d raid the bag for “office supplies” and we’d set up some nonsensical business and start issuing receipts and paying each other. We’d draw maps of our neighborhood and label all our friends’ houses. Something with pirates. I had a collection of matches and stub candle-ends and we’d go play at being arsonists on the brick barbecue. We were extremely careful arsonists, and never once set the yard on fire 😉 We played at ‘archaeologist’ and excavated square test pits in the backyard. We found a spoon (that we’d lost digging in the yard the year before) and a shiny glass bead. We experimented on the roly-polies, who did not appreciate being painted. They died, poor things. There was one terrible year when we decided to manufacture perfume out of the azaelias. Jars and jars of pink flower mash turned putrid in the yard. Smelled good to start with, anyway.
How did we ever survive without tablets and phones?
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