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Media Minutes
Want to motivate and encourage your kids to spend more time reading, practicing instruments,
achieving academic goals, making healthy choices, or helping around the house, all the while
spending less time on entertainment media? Consider media banking. Here's how it works.
With this system kids earn media time by engaging in tasks that you value. Our family established
an incentive program that rewards our kids for reading, practicing music, and spending
time on a list of predetermined academic activities. Our kids earn one half hour of entertainment
media for every hour spent engaging in these activities. They can elect to "spend" that
time right away or "bank" them for extended play at a later time.
Our son Trevor here wanted to spend a few hours playing computer games with one of his
friends so he spent eight hours one day reading a book so that he could bank four hours of
media time. I should mention that Trevor is not a "natural bookworm." Just last year we
had to sit down and read books with him one-on-one. The beauty of a media banking system is that
you can tailor the activities and media time to fit your family’s goals. Spend some time
brainstorming what activities you would like your child to engage in, then establish a
media time for each activity. Get creative. It is also helpful to make a chart that is
easy for your family to use so everyone can see how to earn minutes, how many have been
accumulated, and how they were spent. As you can see, we set up activity guidelines
for this program and then we added rules within each activity as well. For example, to encourage
our kids to read new books we set up a one-to-one ratio for those books, and to discourage our
kid from reading his favorite book for the sixth time, we lowered the ratio to four to
one. Start using media minutes today.
You can find more information about using media minutes linked on our website, as well
as some helpful printables and customizable banking sheets for your child.
Thanks for watching Tek Effect. I’m Dusti Howell.
Check out my other videos for media safety tips that you can use at home and join me
next time on Tek Effect.