When Ariel was little, we printed up “movie tickets” for her, as a fun way to monitor her screen time.  One ticket is roughly equivalent to half an hour of movie runtime (although we do some rounding as appropriate).  Each week I’d hand out her tickets – I think at the time she got six – and she could spend them as she liked.  (We had to approve the movies, of course.  But she could watch one super-long movie, a couple average-length movies, a bunch of super-short ones, or whatever.)

Somewhere along the way we got away from that, and along the way her younger siblings got older.  (Funny how that happens. 😉 )  So now we have the added issue that, while they often watch movies together, they almost always fight over who gets to choose what they watch.

So I decided to return to the movie tickets.  Here’s the way they’re meant to work:

• Tickets will be doled out to each child individually, with the understanding/knowledge that probably, most of the time, they will all watch each others’ movies, too.  Because movie-watching is typically a “group activity” for them, I just accounted for that.  So the total number of tickets given out is not more television time than I’m comfortable with any one of them watching in a week.  And they do not need to use their own tickets to watch a sibling’s movie, BUT…
• Whoever is spending the tickets picks the movie.  So Ariel can spend her tickets today on a movie, and Sophia is welcome to watch it with her.  But Ariel gets to pick.  Then Ariel will probably be out of tickets (unless it was a short movie) and Sophia will be the one spending tickets the next time – which means Sophia gets to pick.  I don’t think this will eliminate all fighting, but I suspect (and am hopeful) it will cut down on it considerably.

A couple other things I did:

• I color-coded their tickets. My kids’ school supplies are already color-coded. That way I know what belongs to whom when they leave them lying around (which they do regularly).  So I color-coded the tickets to match.  This is for my own sanity, so I can keep track of who still has tickets “floating around” for the week.  This did not involve anything fancy.  I printed them out on white cardstock and colored them with colored pencils.  It would be even easier to just print them on colored cardstock.
• The big girls each got three tickets, which is roughly equivalent to one average-length movie.  (Chances are, if a movie is around 2 hours long instead of an hour-and-a-half, I’ll let them count it anyway.)  Livia got one, which is roughly equivalent to a typical preschooler-targeted movie.
• I created a couple “bonus” tickets for each child.  You can see them in the picture at the top.  Those are for use as an option for special rewards.

We thought about doing all of our screen time this way: TV, Wii, and computer.  My husband suggested assigning a point value to half an hour of each type of screen time, with more active shows being “less expensive” to encourage more time on more active options and less time on more sedentary options.  Which is a pretty good idea.

The difficulty I ran into with the logistics of that is that movie-watching tends to be a group activity for my girls most of the time, while Wii or computer are more often individual pursuits.  So I am keeping that idea “in my back pocket,” and probably will implement a ticket-based system for that in the near future, but I will probably keep it separate.

Get our printable movie tickets.

[mailmunch-form id=”757819″]