What are your household rules?

[Anonymous]

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

I feel like we have a lot of rules.

-- Food is eaten sitting down at a table, (rare exceptions are made)

-- No non-educational screen time if the sun is out, and going outside is an option.

-- Treat your siblings with respect, no physical violence, name calling, etc . . .

-- When you come home from sports practice, take a shower and put your stinky sports clothes in the laundry before you have a snack (not really relevant during covid since my kids aren't doing sports outside the home).

-- Do your chores before you play

-- If a parent asks you to stop doing something and come talk to them, you follow that direction the first time.

I could go on.

[Anonymous]

We have very few rules.

Be kind. Apologize if you weren’t. Give people space. No means no. But they all boil down to respect one another

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I feel like we have a lot of rules.

-- Food is eaten sitting down at a table, (rare exceptions are made)

-- No non-educational screen time if the sun is out, and going outside is an option.

-- Treat your siblings with respect, no physical violence, name calling, etc . . .

-- When you come home from sports practice, take a shower and put your stinky sports clothes in the laundry before you have a snack (not really relevant during covid since my kids aren't doing sports outside the home).

-- Do your chores before you play

-- If a parent asks you to stop doing something and come talk to them, you follow that direction the first time.

I could go on.

It sounds like you're a great parent.

How do you enforce the screen time rule? Do you plan to enforce it when your kids are older (I'm assuming they're not teens)?

[Anonymous]

- Sit to eat either the table or high chair for toddler.

- only throw balls. Never throw toys, books, anything but balls

- please, thank you, excuse me

[Anonymous]

Do what Mom says.

In a nutshell.

[Anonymous]

These are interesting but I'm curious about the ages of people's kids. Please add!

[Anonymous]

No shoes in the house. Food stays in the dining room. Listen to your parents. Be kind to your siblings. That’s basically it.

[Anonymous]

And they’re 8, 4.5, and 2.5.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel like we have a lot of rules.

-- Food is eaten sitting down at a table, (rare exceptions are made)

-- No non-educational screen time if the sun is out, and going outside is an option.

-- Treat your siblings with respect, no physical violence, name calling, etc . . .

-- When you come home from sports practice, take a shower and put your stinky sports clothes in the laundry before you have a snack (not really relevant during covid since my kids aren't doing sports outside the home).

-- Do your chores before you play

-- If a parent asks you to stop doing something and come talk to them, you follow that direction the first time.

I could go on.

It sounds like you're a great parent.

How do you enforce the screen time rule? Do you plan to enforce it when your kids are older (I'm assuming they're not teens)?

My oldest is a young teen who is still in middle school. The main screen time my teen wants is video games, and I keep the controllers. So, he needs to ask.

For other things, they only have access to screens in public parts of the house. We decided to homeschool instead of DL, so they use the screens for that, and they have plenty of downtime during the day, when they could ask to do something I consider educational. One kid likes to watch youtube videos about how to play his instrument. One kid loves audiobooks and chess apps. Two kids like learning how to code. Two kids like to watch exercise videos. They all like to facetime. Those kinds of things are allowed. But they have to ask and tell me what they're using it for. If I came across them using it for something else, then I'd just keep the video game controllers for a while, and they don't want that, so they generally comply. My teen is very much a rule follower, but he has a 10 year old sibling who isn't, but he's pretty motivated by the video game thing. So far, it's worked OK. We've always said that high school is the time we'd reconsider, and that will be this coming summer for my 13 year old.

To be clear, I'm pretty lenient on both what counts as "educational" and what counts as "not an option". If my oldest wants to play a game on his phone, or my youngest wants to borrow my phone, while we're driving somewhere? Yeah, they can do that. If it's snowy and they've played outside for a while and now they're cold? Yeah, they can watch a movie with some hot chocolate. If it's rainy and they could play outside but it doesn't seem like fun? I'll probably allow some video games. Sometimes, I'll make trades, like one kid has a math tutor who sometimes comes after dark. If I know he's going to miss an hour of video game time due to that, then I'll probably tell him an hour before dinner "Hey, since you won't get to play later, you can now if you want".

So, some of why it works is that I'm flexible, and they don't feel deprived. Two of them are also pretty athletic, so if playing basketball or street hockey in the driveway is an option they'll be happy. My third kid is pretty geeky. He spends more times on screens but the things he chooses are educational. Even when it's "free" screen time, he's likely to choose a chess app while listening to an audiobook.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have very few rules.

Be kind. Apologize if you weren’t. Give people space. No means no. But they all boil down to respect one another

This. Sweet and simple. We don’t have religion. Our credo is don’t be an a—hole.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have very few rules.

Be kind. Apologize if you weren’t. Give people space. No means no. But they all boil down to respect one another

This. Sweet and simple. We don’t have religion. Our credo is don’t be an a—hole.

Agreed. Our kid is still very young (3) and we don't have many rules. We have plenty of structure (a schedule that isn't really negotiable, for instance) and some obvious rules like don't run into the street, or no tormenting the cat. But mostly it's just working from general principals like this. I'm hoping we can maintain this approach throughout our lives.

[Anonymous]

The Ten Commandments have worked pretty well for us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Ten Commandments have worked pretty well for us.

Ages.of your kkfs?

[Anonymous]

You say “OK!” and you do it.