A Bloggable Offense

Quinton loves his iPad, and he loves video games. Those are his leisure time activities, which is a funny thing to say, leisure time for an 8 year old! What he really loves to do is to enjoy both of them at the same time, which is something we try to limit for various reasons. It also presents itself as an opportunity for us when dolling out discipline.

Last week, Quinton had some egregious issue for which he had to be punished. The worst thing we can do to him is to take away his iPad. Since this escalated, we had to not only take away his iPad, but also limit video games for the weekend. Because he is stubborn he still managed to get his iPad from time to time, so I took additional measures to actually take away his network access, which I can do from the wireless router. This was effective, for a time…

On Sunday morning, two days after removing his network access, Quinton had been pretty for the previous couple of days and I was considering caving and providing him network access a little early. I walked downstairs from the bedroom floor to see what was going on and found Quinton watching a show on his iPad on the living room floor. I walked over to him to see what he was doing, and asked him what he was doing, to which he responded, “watching a show.”

“Where are you watching the show? One that’s on the iPad?” I asked.

“No, one that’s on Netflix,” he responded.

Confused, thinking that somehow I had messed up on taking away the network access, I asked him, “how did you connect to the network?”

“I didn’t. I just connected my iPad to mom’s phone.”

Clearly my game needs to escalate to stay ahead of my kids and their ability to bend technology in ways I don’t anticipate. Honestly, I wasn’t even really mad - I was proud, and still am proud. It shows problem solving abilities and it shows technical know-how that I’m sure neither my wife nor my oldest son could come anywhere close to touching. Well played, Quinton. Well played…