Screen Time: The Punishment Fits the Online Crime

This boy is in elementary school and he did something bad today. He cut class. In elementary school! What could he possibly be doing? The parents saw the principal and learned that he was playing video games during homeroom. Of course, he was playing on his ‘emergency only’ cell phone. When asked why he did it, bluntly, he told us that he was getting his best score ever. Thankfully, he hasn’t learned to lie yet.

They could have taken away his phone, banned him from screen time at home, cancelled his play date with his best friend who lives next door, but mom and dad chose something different. For every bit of screen time that the kids do something bad, they have to do something good. Their son is now doing a charity online fundraising on www.CrowdRise.com to raise money for kids who don’t have access to afterschool programs. Mom helped him on the computer, where he would normally be playing Mario Bros. to set up his online fundraising website. She taught him how to set up his webpage, post pictures, write something about the importance his own school programs and asked him to think about why all kids should have the same amount of fun after school, and then taught him how to start raising money by doing online fundraising. They showed him how CrowdRise lets him start asking for donations to raise money for his online fundraiser. He asked if he could use his cell phone to monitor the online donations coming in. Since they didn’t take away his cell phone and wanted him to start using it for something good, they decided to trust him to use his computer and cell phone to continue working on online fundraising.

When they went to tuck him in that night, he was half asleep with his cell phone in his hand, his computer still on, with his online fundraising site live on both screens. In the morning, before breakfast, he wanted to know how much money he raised. Even though it was time to go to school – homeroom – they knew that they made a good choice. They knew that they had turned bad screen time into good screen time. Maybe if all the bullies of the schools set up anti-bullying online fundraising sites we could actually make a difference in some other kids’ lives, too. Thankfully, we’re still in elementary school and can stick to healthy topics like after school charity online fundraising sites for now.