Well, our 2 and a half are doing well. Volunteer hen is freely expressing her opinions about the speed with which treats arrive.
The rooster is still dumb as rocks, but still my buddy.
The true pet hen has found a new friend.
My kid got a stuffed chicken with little chicks that can be zipped into cloth eggs, which can be taken out of, or shoved up the plush hen’s rear. Adorable.
Well a few days ago, my kid comes into the living room with the plushie. The real hen had not encountered it before.
Well, our glorious little sassosaur starts trilling and purring, and paying allll kinds of attention to this new “hen” in the house. Now, this hen and my kid have a rather dubious agreement going on where the hen will peck the kid until the kid does what the bird wants. Obviously, this is like negotiating with captain Pike in his beep-beep chair, only with more pecks and squawking.
After a few minutes of happy chicken noises, this hen waggles her tail, gets riiiight up on both the kid and the plush hen and settles in for a nap while doing those sweet little trills that hens do when they’re with their flock. Which, the apex predator normally does while snuggling with me, but the kid is too fidgety for that normally. But stuffed hen bridged that gap.
Since then, when she comes in for the evening, she starts looking around for her new buddy, and will peck the kid’s feet until she goes and gets the plush.
However! This newfound friendship does not extend to the little butt chicks. When those are present, no pecks are spared. They either go right back up their mom’s butt, or out of sight otherwise.
Yeah, I gotta echo the hassle of it.
I dunno if you had time limits or not, but if you did, and you weren’t throwing a hissy fit when the limit was up, you’d be a rare duck indeed.
It doesn’t help that gaming does turn into a form of addiction for some people, adult or not. They’ll chase that dopamine hit, well beyond what is reasonable. Hell, I know that, and I still catch myself feeling it, despite not being a dedicated gamer.
The sooner our brains start that process, the worse it can get.
Mind you, I do personally know kids that do okay with screen limits. They’ll definitely look for any opportunity to extend it, but don’t go crazy with it. The problem is that they had to learn self control to get there. And that ain’t happening at 5 for sure.
Remember, you just said “when our parents went to bed, we sneaked out of our beds” and “started playing… all night long”. C’mon, you know that’s not a healthy and well adjusted response to a reasonable parental limit. You were chasing that stimulation against your parents’ express wishes, in a way that was harmful because sleep is a vital part of brain development and overall health.
You’re relating a memory that demonstrates exactly why your brother wants to delay the bullshit. Since some kind of screen time has become essentially mandatory in some schools, he’s not even going to be able to delay it for long, but every year he does is another year that addiction to stimulation gets delayed too. Those arguments and tantrums get delayed.