I am the mother of three children of 6, 5 and 2 years. Before I had them, in “theory” I was very good, I said to myself: when I will be mom! Well, now that I have become, I often find myself doing those same things that I criticized from “not mom”. To manage the first two children so close to each other, I started to “park” them in front of the TV and then to make them listen to the music on the mobile phone. Then came the lockdown and rectucci to make them eat. Now I find myself using TV as the only way to appease them and breathe. I know what the damage that the technologies procure are, but then I myself use them when I seem to have no other way to calm them. They are an age in which – if I try to explain the reasons for a ban – they begin to understand. But to date when I explain the rules they seem not to understand well. What are the right words for this impossible mission? How can I make him live free time without the interference of a screen?
Carlotta
Dear Carlotta, Your children, so young, include your words and rules, but they cannot put them into practice because they do not know how to self -regulate towards everything that causes fun and pleasure. When they are so small, Words are of little need. You make him take a carousel ride and you say to him: “Only one, be clear”. Then the carousel stops and they don’t want to go down.
Everything that arrives through the screens has the same power as a magnetic field. More than words, the educational firmness of a parent who knows that there are limits that children do not know how to give themselves. And that those limits belong to the Educational responsibility of us adults.
At the same time you have to know Propose alternatives: read a book with them, play the tombola of the animals, go out to take a walk. Once a day, the cartoons of the TV screen are also fine. If you can’t do it, Ask the father for help, grandparents, a neighbor For some time every day. In this third millennium every moment of boredom and frustration of children is filled with the screens.
Except that then everything becomes a vicious circle and the screens seem to be the only resource to keep them quiet. Especially when, as in your home, there are three, close by age and full of energy. I understand your effort. But I invite you to feel authorized to say the “no that help grow”, Without too many explanations, simply by saying that yours are not the best good for them and are not negotiable. And to motivate yourself in this titanic enterprise, conscious every day reading one of the meditations in Become stoic (Mondadori), A manual that gives “a teaching a day to live with wisdom and perseverance”.
