I wonder if it would be helpful to work in a looser time frame with the computer games? Take turns by "morning" and "afternoon" say, rather than hourly with a timer?

Ask the kids. Give them ideas.

My kids, over the years, came up with different ways of handling this. Some were complicated - but they all knew what their deal was. When my kids were younger, Sandra's family's method never seemed fair to them - they thought it wasn't fair that whichever kid got to the computer first could stay on it for hours and hours. They came up with a system where they kept a kitchen timer near the computer. If someone wanted to use it, they'd come and set the timer for an hour. When the timer went off, it was the next person's turn. Nobody ever had less than a one-hour warning and nobody ever had to wait more than an hour. The timer being set meant no arguing about when the timing started.

Pretty often, the first person would get off the computer early and call the other person to take over. Occasionally the first person wouldn't be finished in an hour and they'd negotiate to stay on - usually the second person would just say, "Okay, set the timer for another hour. Sometimes, they'd insist and the first person would comply, unhappily.

But that was just one of the ways it was handled, over the years. Mostly we just tried to work it out based on who was available when. I have to admit we didn't ever have the issue of a 7 year old and a 4 year old trying to work this out - hard to believe, but computers were simply NOT as a big a draw, then. The games must have not been quite as enticing and engaging, I guess.

-pam

As with so many other things (every other thing, maybe) in our lives, though, it wasn't that single slice that "worked," it was the whole set of everything. They trusted me because I had spent years being trustworthy. They knew there was no secret agenda, and that I really did want them to all have fun things to do, and that they WOULD get to be on the computer uninterrupted, soon.

Sandra