Using Electronics on the Homestead

I hope everybody enjoyed the homestead character graphics that I’ve been putting on social media this week. Remember to share those and think about what homestead character means to you. I know many of you have heard about the tragedy that happened in Texas this last week. I know I hugged my kids really tight and remembered why I’m so happy to have them home. Several years ago, when we decided to pull our kids from public schools and start homeschooling was right after a really bad school shooting. And we found out that our kids’ teachers were actually pad locking the kids inside the classroom, where she had the only key. I know that she was just doing everything she could to try to protect our kids, but it scared me that if the shooter was ever inside the classroom, our kids wouldn’t be able to get out either.

Or if there was a fire, they wouldn’t be able to get out. I know that everyone’s just looking for the best solutions and as a hunter and a Patriot, I’m not giving up my guns anytime soon. But I do believe there’s a mental health issue in our nation that really needs to be addressed. That being said, I’m not interested in going into politics. I know that I personally can’t stop the next shooter, but what I can do is stop another family from having to go through this. So if you are ready to homeschool or know someone that’s considering it, I will link in the show notes, my free, no strings attached worksheet and guide to help somebody start homeschooling today. I don’t ask for an email address, nothing. I just want this to get into everybody’s hands who possibly wants it and know that I’m available to reach out.

I’m not an expert in homeschooling. I know that I’ve been there, I’ve done it. I wasn’t raised as a homeschooler, so I’ve can definitely give insight on both sides. And I hope that if somebody is scared to send their kids back to school, that they will reach out to me or use the information that I’ve put out there to possibly protect their family from this tragedy. I don’t want it to be all sad because I have an interesting topic to talk about this week and that is electronics. So I am talking about electronics on the homestead and our homeschool with our kids and how I use them. I think as a modern homesteader, a lot of times we get looked down on for using electronics, that it’s a highly debated topic with some people. Their View is that if you’re a homesteader, you shouldn’t be using anything.

And honestly, I see electronics as the tools that they were designed to be. I’m definitely in that generation where I grew up talking on a house phone with a big long cord wrapped around the whole living room. And now today, I have my cell phone with me at all times. I couldn’t run my businesses without it. And I definitely have a different perspective on my kids with electronics than I feel like a lot of modern day homesteaders have. We’re kind of gray, we’re neutral and not neutral. We are in the gray area. We’re somewhere between no electronics at all and just letting our kids have them all the time. And I kind of want to talk about what that means and looks like for us as modern day homesteaders. We have power. We’re on the grid and we buy from a lot of the systems that we choose to buy from or partake in. I definitely take advantage of all of the household kitchen, appliances and gadgets that I possibly can.

You know, there’s an abundance of modern day homesteaders that have made great livings from online businesses. I have an online business myself. They use social media to market their homestead products and to have a community of networks in social media that rural people don’t necessarily, wouldn’t have another way to connect with other rural people. When it comes to farmers, farmers use electronics, like you would not believe. There are so many things involved in modern day farming that goes to electronics to track weather, look up commodity sales, order hard to find supplies. I mean, I remember as a kid living in Iowa for a couple of summers. There was this guy we knew who had, a corn farm, had thousands of acres of corn and every morning, he was in his early nineties, he’s logging into his big mac computer just to be able to check the commodities and know what price everything is and to know whether he should sell that week or not.

Many of the equipment that farmers use to plant and harvest run on such high level computers that I couldn’t even begin to tell you. I mean, they use GPS and satellites. The technological advances are mind blowing and they’re really cool to see and hear about. With this homestead idea of going away from these systems, I think that the electronics that are available to us, if they are used as the tools that they were meant to be used for, and that they are growing into, I think that they are, they can be really wonderful things. Now, when I’m referring to cell phones, these are a whole other beast. In fact, I have a love-hate relationship with my phone. It is necessary for my businesses. Someone was having a conversation with me the other day and they said, “Could you run your businesses without your phone? “

Well, I guess the answer is “yes,” but it sure would be different. It would go back to 20, 30 years ago when people didn’t have cell phones and everything was done via landlines and faxing. And I definitely wouldn’t be able to run my businesses to the ability that I can now and be able to keep up with the other people, colleagues without the phone that I have. Now I will be very honest right now. I use my phone for all sorts of entertainment, but at the end of the day, I get to this later on, when I check my screen time, probably 80% of what I do on my phone is business and 20% is entertainment. So on that note, I probably spend as much time reading on a weekly basis as I do using my phone for entertainment purposes.

However, being able to have my phone in front of me to do research for my businesses and constant communication definitely makes it where I spend less time engaging with my family and more time researching. That is a positive for my businesses, but not a positive in my personal life. And I also know how it feels when, say, my husband or my kids are playing games on their phones and not engaging me when I want the attention that I feel I need as well. Now, my opinion with kids with phones is definitely different than my opinion with adults with phones.

Sometimes I wish that they didn’t have access to them at all. I know that I have that control, but I also know that they need to be exposed to these types of electronics and understand how they work and understand the safety of them before they go out in the real world and have to use them all the time. So I take this time to teach them how to use them in moderation and to be comfortable with them and know how to work them. When they’re with me all the time and not having outside influences in homeschool, they do the majority of their work out of their books. They have laptops for school when they’re doing computer learning and typing type programs. And for entertainment, they have TV, phones and tablets based on their age.

I don’t encourage video game systems at all. Although we do have a couple, we have a rule that they have to have all their chores done and two feet of snow on the ground before they even touch the PS4. And usually they only get it out if they have friends over it’s a holiday or something. As far as cell phones, our rule used to be that you have to be in high school and you need to have a need for it such as a job or really involved in extracurriculars. We recently decided to change this rule for our 13 year old daughter, because she’s, for one thing, very mature. She also babysits our two younger kids a lot, and I needed a way to contact her and be in communication with her that wasn’t always just our landline phone. I needed to be able to send her text messages when I was busy at work.

And she also helps me with my businesses a lot. So I needed her to be able to have access to some of the social medias like Pinterest. I don’t let her be on Facebook and Instagram or Snapchat. In fact, we honestly don’t even let our 17 year old have Snapchat, although he’s 17. So he might have it anyways, but we do monitor and we really work on teaching that self-regulation. We do so by having our 13 year old daughter tell us her screen time a couple times a day. What this does is it makes her see how much time she really is spending on her phone. And we have her look at what she’s actually doing with that screen time, but she easily redirects. So if we’re like,”Hey, you’ve been on your phone three hours. Maybe you should consider something else to do,” no arguments, no problem.

She sets her phone down and goes and gets out some coloring stuff or craft stuff, or comes up with a project with her brother. She’s not a problem when it comes to that. Now her twin brother, unfortunately, does not get those same privileges. I feel bad that as a twin, I got her a phone at 13 and I did not get him a phone at 13, but the bottom line is he’s just not mature enough. In fact, he’s our one that has high functioning autism, and unfortunately that comes with a really addictive personality.

And usually his only addictions are electronics, although sometimes it’s baseball and carbs, too. So we kind of battle that one, but we have a real problem with him when it comes to electronics. I mean, he stares at the TV, no matter what is on. It could be Cocomelon, Mickey Mouse, it doesn’t matter. If he just walks through the living room and sees the TV, he stops and stares. You can’t even talk to him. We’ve tried taking it away and he just sneaks it. We can’t completely ban every electronic device from the house. He’s so bad about it, that if we take everything away, where he can’t even watch TV, he’ll sit and play with his digital camera, turning it on and off until the battery dies just to be able to have that electronic something happening for him.

We’ve talked with our therapist about it and honestly they say zero, nothing at all, no electronics, but we really feel like, again, we’ve said with our other kids, we want to teach him moderation while he’s still at home so that he doesn’t leave the house in a few years and not be a functioning member of society, because all he does is stare at electronics. So we work with him on a daily basis. We aren’t fans of earned electronic time. It’s just something else for us to track and another place for him to be sneaky. So we really work with him on self-regulation and sometimes it’s just not even about the earned time. If we tell him, “If you do an hour of chores, you can have an hour of computer time,” he follows those rules and doesn’t have a problem with it.

It’s that he will just stare at anything electronic. He just can’t control himself and that comes with autism. So I recently bought a book. It’s called, “Is Your Child Addicted To Electronics, 30 Days of Healing and Recovery for Your Child and Your Family,” by Nathan Driskell. I will link it in the show notes. I don’t know what this person’s background is. I don’t know what their take on anything is, but we are looking for anything that might help us right now. I don’t know if it’s gonna be the right method for an autistic child versus a standard child that is addicted to electronics, but I’m excited to give it a shot, especially because it is not just about taking it away or earning it. It’s about healing and recovery for the whole family, not just for that specific child. Currently, it’s just sitting on my desk, so I hope that I learn it by osmosis, but I’ve got a lot of things going on. 

Some positives though, because I feel like there’s such a downer on electronics and I did cover some of the positives with adults, using it on the homestead and as a tool and in agriculture and how it has expanded agriculture. But with the kids, there’s some positives, too. They are, my twins are 13 years old. They are so excited to be able to start learning some graphic design, some video editing. My autistic son loves coding and the fact that they like to do some of these other things is just awesome. So basically, all in all, I am not anti-electronics. Our homestead can be run easier with them, and we know how to do without them. I think our kids should be taught how to use them and how to respect them.

But what I really, really do believe is that kids are not entitled to electronics, that they shouldn’t come before chores. They shouldn’t come before other positive activities. We encourage hard work as well because it does what I keep talking about- it builds character. I covered a lot on building character last week on the show. So if you get a chance to check that out, go ahead and head over there and do that. Remember I also write homestead homeschool curriculum for preschool through about fourth grade. And there are tons of activities for kids and adults out there in this curriculum that will give the kids something else to do and something else to be interested in besides electronics.

If you’re wanting to keep them off electronics this summer, go ahead and use code summer22 and get 10% off of the first hundred purchases of the curriculum. Give your kids some great summer learning. The middle school version will be out soon. I would say even the preschool through fourth grade version could be fun for younger middle school kids over the summer as some activities to get them excited about homesteading. So I feel like I rattled on a little bit in this episode, but I just hear so much about electronics. I wanted to put our stance out there and give someone else something to think about. I know that I would not be able to run my businesses without the amazing programs that I have, I am excited to teach my kids these same programs, and they’re actively asking for it. It’s keeping them off of the games, the social media, the video games. The video games are horrible.

I’m not saying that I’ve never played a video game or that I don’t even tell the kids like,” Hey, you’re bored. Go play a video game for a little bit.” But when I see some of these kids that are so addicted to these video games, it’s really scary for me. So take this opportunity while your kids are home to teach that moderation and to do so by modeling yourself. When my daughter checks her screen time every day, I check mine at the same time and we compare, my husband also does it. He compares at the same time so that he can show, we can each show where I work on my phone and he uses his more for entertainment and we can compare what our daughter’s doing and she can learn that moderation with us. So again, if you guys know anybody who wants to homeschool, reach out to me. I hope everybody has a great kickoff to their summer. 

Thank you for joining me today at The Homestead Education. I hope that I have given you something to think about this week. To help others find me, please comment, and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram at homemade revelation. Do you have questions that you’d like answered or just want tosay hi, please email me@helloatthehomesteadeducation.com until next time, keep growing.