From chaos to order: A mother's summer of screen time and schedules

After nearly two months of PlayStation-fuelled mornings and Roblox-driven evenings interspersed with YouTube gaming tutorials and movie marathons, our son is finally heading back to school. And I can’t wait to bundle him off to receive a good education.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my boy as much as the next mum loves hers, if not, more. But this summer has tested my patience.

Unlike usual vacations punctuated with trips back home and get-togethers, this time around circumstances forced us to stay put in Dubai.

I went with the flow, not bothering to fill up my child’s calendar with activities, offering unstructured play a clean canvas to work its magic. It has yielded results in the past. He was happy to power through Lego sets and puzzles before curling up with a book or indulging in imaginative play. A slight nudge and a gentle prod, and he was game for chess or crosswords.

But that was before the machines took over and his age entered the double-digit territory. At 12, thousand-piece puzzles don’t speak to him the way they used to. Neither do Lego sets that are not marked 18+. All he now craves is dopamine hits that devices can deliver and tomes that he can devour. Not a best-case scenario for someone with nearsightedness.

So two weeks into the vacation, I was clutching at straws to reduce his screen time and introduce some variety in his routine. Throwing unstructured play and take-it-easy philosophy out of the window, I drew up a schedule squeezing in productive and creative things between his favourites – in my infinite wisdom, I even slotted in time for looking out of the window in accordance with the 20-20-20 rule. Needless to say, they were ignored in typical preteen fashion, resulting in battles that ended badly – for me. He just threw his weight around and stood his ground.

Determined to save his eyes – and his brains, I started trawling the net for summer camps. They had fallen out of favour as it was becoming increasingly difficult to find good sports camps near us that catered to 10- to 14-year-olds. Take my word, it’s a logistical nightmare to get children across to camps at the other end of town when both parents are working and only one drives.

After enrolling him for three weeks in a good camp that was decidedly not nearby and leaving the driver-parent to figure out drop-offs and pickups – surely there has to be some upside to being a non-driver – I settled down to preparing for the new academic year.

Nine years of the same have made me a pro. An online shopper of the highest order, I went about it in a systematic manner, ticking items off the list, from shoes to stationery, getting sign-offs from his royal highness to make sure nothing gathered dust in a corner. A timely trip to the school sorted out the uniforms too.

All the loose ends tied up, I am more than ready for school. But there’s one thing I dread: the early morning wake-up. For most of his life, our son has had a late wake-up time as his school was barely a hop, skip and jump from home, until he moved to secondary last year and had to catch the school bus before 6.45am. Going to bed early and getting eight to nine hours of sleep, he had been coping brilliantly.

Yet somehow, towards the end of the academic year, the wake-up routine had morphed into a 20-minute elaborate exercise that involved a 10-minute snooze, a verbal request for five more minutes, another three to four minutes of tossing and turning in bed, and a final showdown with yours truly putting in a high-decibel performance. Thanks to all hands on deck he hasn’t missed the bus to date. But he has left for school far too many times without a proper goodbye than I would have liked.

I hope I can keep them to a minimum this year.

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