24-hour ban on electronic games

Now that the kids are on school holidays, I could not help but notice that they seem to spending most of the time at home doing one form of video game or another. Its either an internet game, a computer game, a game from the video console (playstation or wii). And when daddy comes home from work, they rush to greet him at the door, only to grab his IPhone for more games! We hear it on the news all the time, kids becoming obese due to these video games keeping them on the couch. Although the kids are far from that, even considered underweight, I did not want them to become couch potatoes.

So I had an idea last night, I dared them not to play any of these electronic games (or what the kids call 'screen games') for the next 24 hours. It started at 7pm, just before bedtime. We started just talking in the living room, singing christmas carols. Then, at bedtime, we proceeded to make up stories until about 9pm.

The next day, they were staying home with me. In the morning, I got them involved in baking, by mashing up the biscuits for the cheesecake crust. That was a very loud, yet fun activity for them. After that, i put on a DVD of a movie they wanted to watch while I baked the cheesecake. After that, we had lunch and they started making christmas crafts. The boy even made a gift for all of us, behind closed doors as he wanted it to be a surprise! The girl also spent some time getting all our pillows on her bed, and just read a couple of comic books.

In the afternoon, they brought out the LEGO and we all started to work together to build up this vehicle. We took turns, 10 minutes each, to complete the task. I even gave them a deadline to work with, like by the time daddy gets home. After about 30 mins, we noticed that some of the pieces we missing. Too bad, we could not make the car as specified on the manual. But they did come up with another design using their imagination. We also had time to play outside while I took out the laundry. that was really great!

It was about 5pm when daddy did come home, they took a bath while i prepared dinner. By the time we finished dinner, it was nearly 7pm and they could not wait any longer. We got them to clean up the living room a bit more, and then we did our countdown .... 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 ..... its video game time! its 730pm now and all my 3 kids (including hubby) are in front of the TV again, playing video games as usual.

It was fun family experiment, glad to know the kids can survive without electronic games if needed. I'm happy to know they are not as addicted to electronic games as I expected. The only downside to it was that more mess was made by baking and crafts, meaning more cleaning up to do. Still, for me, a good outcome. Maybe I should try this 24-hr ban on electronic games again, say on a monthly basis?