Klara is at home. I’m sick as a dog, mulling around, reading Chirbes. N is working. Neither of us is much fun right now, so what does Klara do all day? She reads, cleans her room, reads some more, plays with her fluffy bunny toys, reads, plays with the cat, reads. We have TVs. Netflix, Prime. She could turn on the TV at any time. I never forbade it or said anything against it. But it doesn’t seem to occur to her.
People often think that it must be a constant struggle. “Isn’t it exhausting to try to keep her from watching TV all day?” somebody asked. But I never even thought about whether I should have a TV-watching policy for the summer.
It’s only hard to avoid smoking if you are a smoker. If you never got into the habit, it takes no effort at all. Instead of creating a problem and then trying to solve it heroically and failing every single time, it’s best not to create it to begin with.
Clarissa's Blog 
Can confirm. Movies out (though those cost too much now) and DVDs from the library watched as a family, games, and books, and lots of cardboard, paint, and duct tape: This is the way.
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Exactly. People act like if you don’t provide a portable screen to a kid, the kid is going to murder you in your sleep, and that’s simply not true. A kid is extremely happy and well-adjusted without it.
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OTOH I’ve seen parents try to take it away from an adolescent after allowing them to become conditioned to it for years… and I think none of us would’ve been surprised by the murdered-in-sleep scenario.
ethyl
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The possibility of using the words “screen time” repels me.
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I’ve been sending the kids out to take a walk, without me, in the mornings.
The rest of the day, they play board games, putter around outside with their tools (they used scrap lumber to build a military installation for their little plastic army men), and read. And when they run out of things to read they pick fights with each other and I set them to doing chores to keep them away from each other for a while 😉
ethyl
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My kid’s room has never been this clean. Now that it’s the summer, cleaning it has become a major form of entertainment for her. 😁😁
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I have one kid who will happily spend hours tidying and organizing his books and furniture. The other two… have to be coerced into that to avoid mold, vermin, and terrifying levels of dust.
ethyl
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Learning how to spend time doing a whole lot of nothing without ever getting bored is a life skill that should be taught to all children from a very early age.
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Curiously, earlier today I received confirmation that this is an issue for the ages. It’s extremely hot, so we went to the public library because there are not many activities to do since the outdoors is hellish. We came across a late 19th-century novel for kids. In one scene, servants are gossiping about a 10-year-old daughter of an English lord who is capable of sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap and deep in thought without needing to be entertained. The servants think she’s weird because, for their station in life, this sort of repose reads as laziness.
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