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The strict removal / cold turkey approach doesn't work.

Anecdotally, it works fine if implemented up front. If initial expectation is "1 hour/day after school between 2pm and 6pm" and you stick to it, it works. The problem is letting devices usage become a problem in the first place.

And the dynamics do change as the kids age. I'm referring to younger kids (preteen and younger).

My friends who struggled with this couldn't understand that they never made their kid responsible for policing his own time. If he went 3 hours instead of 2, he got a talking to (if they even noticed) and was back on the next day. For a while he was really good at apologizing because it got him what he wanted. Any time he didn't do what he was asked to do he would just say he was sorry and get away with it. His reward for being ignorant of his actions was clear, and his punishment was abstract. His parents were exhausting themselves trying to stay on top of things, and so twice a year they would overreact (no screens for a week!) which also blew up on them.

My suggestion was pretty simple IMO: The 2 hours a day is a budget, not a rule. If you went 3 hours today, then the consequence is that you only have 1 hour left tomorrow. If you went 6 hours, then guess what, you get 0 hours today and tomorrow. Straight mathematical consequences even a child can predict. They tried it for a hot second (even letting him bank up time for later, which he found enticing - do a paper tonight, play for 3 hours tomorrow!) but couldn't stay on top of it.

So this kid also learned that rules are flexible/inconsistent, and you can just keep asking for exceptions because his parents had no discipline to teach him. He ran into some trouble in high school because of this. The real world often doesn't care about reasons, they want results.

We tried the budget approach, and for us it just leads to endless discussions, especially when we wanted to do something that interfered with their screen time (eg. they didn't want to go to the pool or visit grandma because then they wouldn't have time for minecraft).

I personally think that a bit of leniency works better than totally rigid rules.

But it's of course still a constant struggle, because what works one week doesn't work the next, as the kids are going through different phases all the time.

It's always a tradeoff between keeping rules simple enough that "you know the rules" can foreshorten a long and exhausting exchange, and them trying to language lawyer the simple rules. Especially since part of growing up is constantly testing boundaries.

This plays out almost as often at work. Most of the time it doesn't amount to me seeing the person as a big kid playing grownup, but that's happened a few times. At least in the work situation I've come to see this as a subsection of the Rule of Three, which I call the Rule of Two - It's okay that everything is an X except if it's a Y. Once 'Z' comes into the picture you need to refactor to come up with workable rules again. I am not aware of having a similar narrative with children or pets, although I seem to be on the cusp on one with children.

Being consistent is the hardest of the important things for parents to do.

Being inconsistent basically turns you into a Skinner box for your kids. Or as one parenting coach I knew used to say "You don't see people sitting zoned out in front of coke machines, just slot machines."

A corollary is to create rules and structure that it is easy to do consistently, even when stressed out.

Absolutely. She could not figure out why she was tired all the time. It's because you try to discuss everything with your kids, lady. I got tired just watching it.

Edit:

The other thing is that sometimes you have to punish yourself in the short term in order to prevent long term problems. On your way to a sequel to your favorite movie, with prepurchased tickets, the consequences for doing something egregious in the car ride to the theater are going to have consequences for you as well. "Dealing with it later," detaches cause and effect which even adults struggle with.

At the very least, no snacks for them, maybe last pick for seats. Even if you usually split your favorite snack with the kid. At worst maybe you turn around and go home. Because otherwise every car trip for the rest of your life is going to be like this, and some day you're going to wish $100 was all it cost to solve the problem.

>Anecdotally, it works fine if implemented up front.

Parent of a young child, can confirm your anecdote with my anecdote. My daughter's screentime has always been strictly enforced, so there's nothing to "cut back". She reads a lot of books in her free time without complaint.

This, I was one of those in 56k era. My dad walked to bathroom to piss at 2am and still saw me in front of computer, and boom! cut the rj11 wire into 10 pieces. Next day I bought a new wire, and this time he didn't cut the wire but put a bug on a modem splitter by slightly took off a copper inside a little, it looked like it's connected but it's not. I fixed that. Next time he just told my mom to deal with me instead .. that is a short version of the story.

Haha, back in those days my mother could just pick up a phone in another room, and it would disconnect my modem from the internet. Maybe that was just an issue in how my own home's POTS line was installed, but it would infuriate me so much to have to restart that HUUUUGE 30 minute / 10MB download (probably of a naughty pic), that I'd eventually just give up and read a book or watch TV.

We got a second phone line once we kids started doing the same thing to the parents.

> The strict removal / cold turkey approach doesn't work.

This is an over-simplification. Briefly losing privileges is not an intrinsically-bad thing, and (to your point about being open and transparent) will not affect "your relationship of trust" if it's a well-communicated consequence that's not a surprise, and not done in anger.

Yep I agree with you. Was mostly referring to overreactions / overstepping rather than these open boundaries being broken and it being a consequence intrinsically understood by both.

Counterpoint: we were open minded parents who wanted our kids to be familiar with technology, and found out years later, through therapy, that our 9 year old daughter had found murder porn (that they believed was real) and was mainlining that every night. Take their phones at night, at a minimum.

there is a solution, distopian kind of surveillance, that is never used against child's interests(by child's definition) except very strict predefined set of rules, and there is an opportunity to give them a variable lesson: when they are old enough tell them about surveillance and how hard it was not to misuse it, about every case of your wrongful use of surveillance, and that this kind of technology cannot be used unless the powerful one loves the survailed one more than anything(which means it's unacceptable Ina general society)

that's a bold idea that should not be used by overly emotional not well disciplined people

Not to mention that plenty of us can probably relate to parents not understanding what we were doing, making the "cut the cable" approach even worse for the relationship.

My family didn't take me seriously regarding self-learning anything (especially programming) until someone they seemingly trusted more told them the same things I had been telling them for years.

It used to be pretty frustrating to be trying to learn something and be treated like I was just wasting time on gaming. All it did was make me great at doing things under their nose and unwilling to discuss anything I did or was interested in with them.

So yeah, teaching your kids boundaries while allowing them to be self driven is probably ideal.

Just teach them to be responsible in their use. It can be done at any age, I'm sure it's just people treat cjoldren like dogs or something instead off little humans.