Screen time...

Let’s talk about screen time and electronics. We recently laid out some new ground rules in our house as the summer free for all just wasn’t working. It wasn’t a literal free for all, but obviously when summer hits my kids do typically have access to their electronics a bit more then they do during the school year. With that, we needed to firm up some new ground rules to keep all of us accountable. 

I knew that through our family share plan there were ways I could better monitor their usage and what they were doing but in total honesty I hadn’t taken the proper amount of time to navigate through all of that. When I was sharing with Ali some of the issues we were having she reminded me about the parental controls area my iPhone offers. Of course I had already set up age limits and blocked certain content, etc but what I had not taken the time to do was familiarize myself with the options of setting time limits and downtime. Did you know you can set a time limit on specific apps or websites? Now, with setting up these timelines, it’s up to them to appropriately manage their allowed time before they reach their limit. After I set up the new timelines, of course we discussed the new ground rules as a family and also talked about what the consequences were for not following. 

I probably should’ve taken time to do this sooner (rather than just trying to manage it myself) and this may not seem like much and it’s by no means a perfect method but implementing some more concrete ground rules and utilizing the timelines with the family share area on my iPhone has taken some of the daily stress out of our house. If you haven’t used it yet or looked at it in a while, take a peek and see how it might be useful for your house. Hope it helps!