Last year I went on holiday to Italy. It was a big deal – it cost a lot of money and it was the first holiday we’d had abroad as a family since my daughter (then 3) was born.

Being on holiday and being in a very hot country, we didn’t want to entertain the idea of doing much cooking, which meant we at out a lot. Any parent knows that eating out with a youngster can be a challenge; restaurants know it too, that’s why they give out crayons and colouring sheets.

In Italy they don’t and I hadn’t come away particularly well equipped either. The few books and toys I brought with us weren’t enough to occupy my daughter after the fiftieth go, so we relied on a game that we knew she loved – entirely age appropriate, a lovely game in fact, except that it was on the ipad. Not ideal.

But! It did the trick. Ms P would become engrossed and that meant Mr Happy and I were able to chat freely, relax, decompress – all those things you want to do on holiday without being nagged, without hearing whingeing and so on.

And before we knew it we were relying on that game. Every time a bit of a challenging situation presented itself, we’d whip out the ipad in the full knowledge that it was our get out of jail free card. It meant we could slurp spaghetti in peace, and enjoy the view. Lovely.

What we were actually doing was replacing one behaviour with another – neither being all that fab. We were also being incredibly selfish in expecting our child to put up with sitting still and being quiet in a restaurant in a hot and new place (far better would have been to engage her, offer breaks from the table on so on…but we didn’t because we were on holiday and we looked for the ‘quick fix’).

Eventually we came to the realization that this ipad thing wasn’t a great habit to keep feeding, and we knew it needed to come to a stop pretty quickly before she became totally addicted and we became 100% reliant on the thing to solve all behaviour issues known to man.

So, like lots of parents who become aware of a problem, we decided to tackle it head on. “We’ll just take the iPad away from her,” we declared. “That’ll sort it out!”

Did it? Course it didn’t! She kicked off in a big way the moment we started imposing rules; spectacular displays of resistance and grumpiness. And you can’t blame her – one moment we’d been letting her have unfettered access to it and the next we were applying rules left right and centre. Just who in the hell did we thing we were?! Cry, Cry, stomp, whinge, chuck stuff about theatrically.
So how did we get out of this pickle?

We set boundaries in the full knowledge that we’d meet resistance, and with full commitment to follow through. Every time.

We started by addressing the issue with Ms P. She was fully able to understand when we said ‘We think we need to think carefully about how much time you’re spending on this game. You can still play it, but we think you need to do it a bit less. What do you think?’

In addressing it with her, we were able to reassure her that we weren’t expecting her to go cold turkey, but that there’d be some rules imposed that she’d need to stick to.

I wanted to restrict the iPad to 30 minutes a day, tops – not the 2 or 3 hours it had become. But I somehow needed to work back from those 3 hours to get to my 30 minute goal. So I halved my expectations – starting with restricting it to one hour only.

We set a timer (because it’s so easy to say ‘one more minute’ which then turns into ten or fifteen if you get distracted by something) and we enforced the rule, without exception.

Because she’d known some restriction was coming, and because she was able to play freely for a pretty decent amount of time, the handing back of the iPad wasn’t such a chore. Yes, we met resistance, but we persisted, and each time she handed it back, she received lots and lots of positive feedback about how good she was to hand it back, what a grown up girl, how sensible, how proud she’d made us and so on. Once she had a taste of that, the pleasure she got from being showered with love for doing the right thing, far outweighed the alternative path of putting up resistance and feeling upset when it was taken away anyway.

Gradually, over the remaining period of the holiday, we trimmed down the time to the half an hour goal. Once, during that remaining week I went to the ice cream kiosk and surprised her with an ice-cream. “This is because you’ve been really grown up and sensible about using the ipad, and I want you to know you’re making the right choice when you give it back nicely.” It made her beam.

These days Ms P rarely has the iPad – maybe once a week, if that, because she simply doesn’t ask for it. She’s much happier doing other stuff, because we give her a lot of praise when she chooses other activities to get stuck into instead.

It’s so so easy to go down a path because it seems OK, and suits you at the time, to later find out it’s a complete doozy of a parenting path to go down, and that, actually, you’re stuck. You’re not a bad or a lazy parent for getting stuck. You’ve reached that point because boundaries have been pushed and pushed and no longer resemble what you started out with.

The important thing to remember is there is always a way out; you can go back, as long as you are willing to address the situation, set a goal, impose the rules, give positive feedback for following the rules, and stick to them. Always.