12 January 2025 www.goodnewsfl.org Good news • South Florida Edition PARENTING Last month I received a phone call from a parent asking my opinion about Play Station 5 and other forms of video games. The mother calling asked, “Don’t these video games become addictive and cause kids to waste many precious hours of time? We bought a Play Station 5 for our kids for Christmas, but I’m thinking about taking it back. I’m also thinking we should not have these temptations in our home.” It is not the devices that are the problem. The problem is some games that children play are very unhealthy and unacceptable. (Pay attention to the rating system.) On the other hand, sports and other games can be fun…especially for a parent and child to play together. (However, the parent will never be able to win!) My children get so far ahead of me in Mario that I am forced into a bubble. When this happens they repeatedly ask me to “just stay in the bubble mom, we can go faster that way!” Modern-day toys teach modern-day lessons The second issue of hours being wasted can and should be turned into an opportunity to teach life lessons. Parents need to give their children the opportunity to learn to use time limits, whether it be phones, tablets or gaming systems. For example, if a family sets up the boundary of gaming time will be a total of 4 hours for the week. This will force the child to decide when he will play. Knowing that he has a preset amount of time to play games will teach them to delay the gratification and save it for the weekend rather than use all of the game time at the beginning of the week or the first afternoon. He will have to learn to schedule his time rather than just sit for hours at a game because he is bored. If the child violates the hours rule (and he will because he is a child), he loses the game for the next week. It is his choice and his responsibility to check in with mom and dad, and also his responsibility to keep the time schedule. It is the parent’s responsibility to keep an eye on the clock and enforce the rule. It is also the parent’s responsibility to use modernday toys to teach a much-needed modern-day lesson. Are you managing or training? Some might ask, “Wouldn’t it be easier just to avoid the game altogether? Why go through all this trouble?” To avoid these training opportunities means choosing to be a Managing Adult in your household rather than a Training Parent in your home. The job of parenting calls us to “train up our children in the way they should go/” Some of the places our children will need to go in life include time management, delayed gratification and saying “No” to one’s own desires. We have used an old phrase improperly. When you hear someone say, “It is about time!” you take it to mean frustration over something being late. This old phrase is truer than we can ever realize. Life is really about “time”. Life boils down to how you spend your time, what you accomplish, and what time you budget for healthy recreation. Life also boils down to what time you spend alone with God, and what time you give away for God. Life is about time and the management of our time, rather than the mindless wasting of the time allotted to us. Role model time management It is also up to us as parents to role model this in our homes. That may cause us to step back and evaluate how we are managing our time. For me, it is so easy to get lost in the world of social media and not realize how long I have been on my phone. Setting boundaries for myself allows my children to observe that I have a timer on my phone and when that goes off the phone gets put down. Or when we are at dinner the phones are put away. Role modeling time management for ourselves speaks volumes to our children. Our children are growing up in a world that is increasingly placing demands on their time. There are numerous things they can fill their lives with every hour of the day, but they cannot do it all. If we do not teach them to budget their time they will miss out on the things they are supposed to do…things they were really meant to do. Use this year’s Christmas gifts to teach the important lessons they will need…and take this new year to evaluate your own time management! When it comes to living a life that is pleasing to God, it is certainly about time! Visit parentingonpurpose.org for more advice from Dr. Bob Barnes and Torrey Roberts. - Dr. Bob Barnes and Torrey Roberts - Sheridan House Family Ministries Give Children the Gift of Learning Time Management
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