This is hard! Nice job giving the sessions you have given and fighting to make sense of this. [See previous two articles.]
I am writing with the help of my children, both boys, ages nine and eleven. We have tried a lot of things:
1. Their playing computer games only when it’s a social activity
2. Their getting to play in the mornings, which gives their father and me a chance to catch up on sleep
3. Giving them advance notice that we won’t be on screens during special time
4. Giving them big sessions after they have been on screens and talking with them afterward about how they were feeling
5. Working together to come up with [think of] a time limit that seems reasonable to us all
6. Spending large amounts of time playing physical games and being silly together as we turn off the games, and also in general
7. Having weekly reflections on what is going well and what is challenging in our household that include their responses to when we say, “It’s time to find a stopping place.”
8. Having regular conversations and sessions that make room for them to show us things, even if we don’t like those things, rather than keep secrets
9. Having honest conversations about where we trust them to think, where we don’t trust them, and what we’re so scared of that keeps us from trusting them; agreeing to work on our fear and fighting to trust them; and discussing where we don’t trust them so they can develop their judgment and build our trust
10. Having a limit on the weekends of one hour a day on screens
Upon reading one of the posts on this topic, all of us had the same thought—that twenty minutes isn’t enough time. With FIFA you need to improve your team, which takes a while. My older son said, “Of course they are going to want to play more. They are lying to get their game time increased. The young people should be part of the conversation about what a reasonable time limit is.”
Sometimes our special time has involved lots of screens, sometimes we’ve said no to screens, and sometimes we’ve said no and then gone back to screens. We have to keep thinking, and the key is our connection. When it looks like our sons are zoning out [leaving present time] and not staying connected, it’s time to stop the screens—but we need to have talked about that beforehand, not during the special time. At this point my older son says, “The only reason to play video games during special time is to teach my parents or discover something new.”
My younger son now says that if he plays for an hour or more, he doesn’t like how he feels afterward. “But the only reason I have noticed that is because you have let me notice.” He says that he’s noticed it after playing games for a long time and then being grumpy and having sessions.
Watching our precious boys get whammed with men’s oppression is horrific, and we want to protect them in any way we can. We can fight to be connected to them while we back [support] them to face the world and fight for their connection to the world, to us, and to themselves.
They have lied a couple of times, and I’ve found that very restimulating. They lie because they don’t feel they can tell us the things they need to. We have to discharge and make room for them to tell us those things and to show us the effect those things are having on them. Then we have to think together about what to do.