More Testing, More Reinforcement

GoAnimate has become the bane of my parental existence. I am not even going to link to it. James has been watching productions of Caillou, Dora, and other benign cartoons that have been spiced up with police action, arrests, and swear words. All of which he gleefully scripts at totally inappropriate times. The breaking point came when he used the swear words during a parental disagreement and then tried to physically get into it, the way the GoAnimate cartoons do.

Result: Time out for rest of evening, no iPad for over a week, and a letter of apology. Plus, several billion conversations around "Why can't I GoAnimate? Where is my iPad? When d I get my iPad? Do they (GoAnimate) not use bad words? Why? What are bad words? Why are they bad? Where is my iPad? Do I get it back? Today?"

Things were elsewise going fairly well ... until I checked on James this morning to find he's using his old white Mac laptop to watch GoAnimate. Guess what else he is going to have to do without for a while?

He is back to watching his DVDs and I am trying to up his writing and unplugged activities. This is working right now, but in another couple years I am sure it's going to be a whole other ball game.