How do I get rid of the tablet without it seeming like a punishment?

[saltshaker99]

My 7 year old DD is a very well behaved sensible girl most of the time. She has a tablet which has a 45mins per day restriction on it, and we thought this was a perfectly fine daily limit. Last month she did something deliberately that she knew was wrong, I was angry so I said spontaneously that I'm taking the tablet away for a week as punishment. We've never done that type of discipline with her before but I said it, so we followed through. That week, she was quite different. She got bored enough to do interesting and creative things. Usually once she's had her 45mins tablet time she has lots of free time left in the day still, and sometimes she comes up with something interesting to do and other times she just sort of complains. I think maybe she finds it harder to regulate herself after she's had tablet for a while and it affects how she spends her free time after it's gone off. That week without tablet for example, she found a book of how to make pop-up cards that she'd never looked at before, and made a complicated one by herself. And she pulled my old British Sign Language dictionary off the shelf and taught herself some signs. She seemed to have more curiosity that week. However, she went on and on about how excited she was to get tablet back and was so excited and happy to have it back at the end of the week.
Yesterday morning, she did the same bad thing again, so I guess the punishment didn't work! But DH and I were very happy to be able to say tablet's going away again for a week! I got home from work yesterday and she'd been home with DH after school. She had made an obstacle course for her little brother, she had made a guitar out of an egg box, and she had made a family 'Guinness Book of Records' and was challenging DH and brother to do things to go in the book! All that in 2 hours! But she's still desperate to get tablet back.
DH and I just want to get rid of it or restrict it further without it being part of a punishment. But now we've used removal of the tablet as a punishment, how will she see that NOT as a punishment? How can we explain that in a way that she would understand? And, would you get rid of it or just restrict use further to soften the blow? How would you restrict it beyond 45min daily timer?

Tell her it’s stopped working and the shop needs to repair it, it’s going to take a few months?

Yes, tell her it’s broken and will take a long time to fix - but get her some craft and science supplies to make up for it, and tell her you’ll do some of them with her. She’ll get over the tablet fairly quickly and you can really run with her interests and get her focused on other things.

Following for advice here as this is really interesting.

we have not removed them as a punishment but removed them from routine, if that makes sense.

so no daily limit, might be once a week, might be once a month.

I was previously fairly laid back about it but the massive increase in use in schools made me look at why it was needed at home. I discovered very quickly, it wasn’t. Same as you.

if it’s away at the moment, I think it stays away.

perhaps a treat along the lines of a trip to get craft stuff and lots of emphasis on the lovely behaviour you are seeing. The library can be another good one, mine love the freedom to pick each week and then that fills those bored moments. Without costing you.

lots on the news this week as well about social media and under 16s so maybe something around that. Rules are changing. Newsround will no doubt do a feature.

We just never allowed electronics or game systems during the week. Our kids could play from Friday afternoon until 4pm on Sunday. We also had plenty of sport on weekends and when they were at home, anything we owned back then had to be shared between four of them anyway.

Our youngest got very good at setting the oven timer so he didn’t miss out on his 15 minute turn of the Gameboy.

My kids similar age a year ago when i ditched ours. We discussed it as almost like a health thing? That i wanted to see what their brains were like without the screens and were they up for a challenge? Did they think they could manage it? Were they BIG AND STRONG???

basically got them hyped up about it as a challenge. That was last september and we haven’t looked back

school grades way better now too. For homework thats online i told teacher we’re not doing screens and they said fine. They learn more from just reading books.

Just tell her the truth. Kids recognize authenticity.

Dd, we've noticed you were more creative with your free time when you didn't have the iPad and theres a ton of research about how terrible they are for developing brains, so we are permanently removing your iPad. Its not a punishment. We understand youll be upset and we are sorry for that, but we've made up our minds and we wont be changing our minds. What do you want for dinner?