Minecraft with Love and Logic

Our boys have been intensely interested in Minecraft for around a year.  With cousins and friends who play Minecraft and the strange world of Minecraft parody songs (e.g. the Lady Gaga "Poker Face" parody "Creeper Face"), they've played a tiny bit and talked a bunch.  We recently gave them permission to buy the game.  It turned out they had enough saved between the two of them to buy one instance of the game, so they're sharing it.  The photos at right depict how happy they were to finally get it loaded on our family computer.

[Notes: 1) Very similar shirts are a coincidence. 2) Note the pride of place of Teddy's Seahawks football he bought with his own money.]

We don't have pictures of our faces when we discovered that Minecraft explained Charlie's slow progress on his science project.  It's that time of year in sixth grade, and both Paige and I had spent time helping Charlie structure his project and think about how to execute and document his experiments about the effects of adding drag to paper airplanes.  When he would show us his draft or his work product for what seemed like large blocks of time working on it, we found that he'd produced far less than we expected.  It kept being incomplete and we kept prompting him with the next step to improve toward a good result.  We went back and forth between a) sympathetic head-shaking about how hard it is to structure a full-on, open-ended, serious science project when a young man hasn't done that before, b) blaming the teacher for not giving enough instruction and c) blaming the boy for just not being able to focus.

When his mother woke up from a Saturday afternoon nap and went to check on him, and found that he was in the exact same place in his science project as when she'd fallen asleep, she asked him what was up.  First he said he “spaced out,” and when she replied that it had been a long time and he hadn’t made progress and he needed to tell her what he had been doing, he admitted that he’d played Minecraft during that time. 

He did own up to it when confronted.  That's what the cusp age of 11 looks like: devious enough to play video games instead of working on homework, but not so devious as to lie about it when he knows he's caught.  

It was an affront, though.  We felt like we really had to come down hard on this because we'd both been expending such effort to shepherd the science project along without doing the work for him.  We also looked back at the assignment packet for the science project and realized that if he'd been consulting that all along, he should have been able to make much better progress than he did ignoring it.  It wasn't the teacher's fault, after all.  We contemplated different lengths of Minecraft embargoes and settled on a month.  He was a little surprised at the length of time, but we hope that it really gets his attention.  We executed it by having him tell us his password and creating a new one until his month is up.  This seems to be a digital rite of parenting passage these days.  

This is more of a punishment than a consequence to use the language of Parenting with Love & Logic.  It is, however, a punishment that hits right at the disobedient behavior.  We hope that the next time he's tempted to play when he's supposed to be doing something else, he remembers that we can take it away.  In fact, still on our agenda is a discussion with him about how tempting it is to lose oneself in a digital escape rather than keep plugging away at something that bores, taxes or tires us.

An unintended benefit of this is that little brother gets to keep playing while big brother is grounded from Minecraft.  That means he can jumpstart his skills and creations, which can only help the never-ending race-without-a-headstart that he lives every day being four years younger.

This all broke last weekend.  When people asked Monday how my weekend was, I told them that my oldest child chose that weekend to become a pre-teen.  As the car chinks its way up the first incline of the parenting-a-teenager rollercoaster, I'm grateful to share it with a partner with whom I can work together on the bewildering new challenges.  Please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle until it comes to a complete stop.

Love, Logic & Debt

A while back in this space, I reviewed the well-known book Parenting with Love and Logic.  That book's parenting techniques focus on allowing your children to make their own choices (where possible) and let them live with the consequences.  While most parents I know who've read it like the principles in the book, the examples can feel unrealistic.  For example, my friend who lives in an "up and coming" neighborhood with busy thoroughfares chuckled at the notion of letting his squabbling kids out of the car to walk the last half mile home as a "natural consequence" of bad behavior.  When I find practical ways to implement Love and Logic, I get excited.


Here's an experience I'd like to share; it takes some explanation to set up.   Sometime last year, Paige discovered the Moonjar, a three-part bank that helps teach kids that money has different uses.  We got one for each boy as a place to put his allowance.  The three parts are Spend, Save and Share, and it even comes with a little passbook if you want to track the amounts in each over time.  Currently, Charlie splits his $1.50 allowance evenly between the three - his idea - setting aside 50 cents to spend, 50 cents to save for gift buying and bigger occasions and giving 50 cents in the church offering each week.  Teddy splits his $.60 allowance 30 for spend, 20 for save and 10 for share.

A few weeks back, the boys had both built up a little pile of money in the Spend chamber of their Moonjars.  They decided to go together and buy a larger pack of Pokemon cards than either could afford on his own and split the cards proportionally to the amount each invested.  It's their money; it's for them to spend.  This transaction passed muster.  After the purchase, however, Teddy was left with around $.43 in his Spend. That Friday was dress-down day at school, a fundraiser for the yearbook.  If you give a dollar, you can dress down; otherwise, you're to wear your school uniform.  Since the boys get an allowance and have money of their own, we've had them pay their own way on dress-down day.  Teddy went to his Moonjar and found that he only had the 43 cents, and he was really bummed.  He wanted to dress down and asked if he could borrow the money.  I told him that he could borrow it under these terms: I would take 40 cents from him that day and then cut the 30 cents he would usually put in Spend out of his allowance for the next 2 weeks in order to pay me back.  He took the offer.

I wish I could say that he learned clearly about paying off debts and the restrictions it places on other spending you'd like to do.  Instead, he kept thinking of other things he wanted to buy, and I kept having to remind him that he now had 3 cents in his Spend chamber.  He engaged in some magical thinking about how he could probably buy some things for 3 cents.  The best learning moment probably came at the next dress-down day (the yearbook needs a lot of money) when I decided not to lend him a dollar again.  He had to wear his uniform when his brother and other friends dressed down.  


It will take more learning opportunities than this one, but I appreciated the Love and Logic framework and a chance to execute it.

Must-read parenting article - interesting to non-parents, too.

As I read Lori Gottleib's aricle How to Land your Kid in Therapy from the June Atlantic (yes, I'm months behind reading the Atlantic), I was blown away by the analysis.  I've seen the patterns she describes in parents, young kids and young adults and heard a lot about them from others.  Gottleib, though, nails the explanation behind how we found ourselves in this position.  She culls discussions with parenting experts, sociologists, teachers, her own life experience and her therapy practice to explain why kids with perfectly happy childhoods don't always end up as perfectly happy adults.


It features the  Most Delicious Pull-quote Ever by Jeff Blume, an LA family therapist:  "If a therapist is telling you to pay less attention to your kids' feelings, you know something has gotten way out of whack."

Topics covered include:
-trophies for every kid in the league
-noncompetitive sports (oxymoron!)
-parents who won't leave campus when dropping off freshmen
-how a lack of community in general casts the parent-child relationship very differently than a few generations ago.
-how too much choice can be bad for kids.  Parenting with Love & Logic has to be used in moderation, too.

Must read, people.