We Tried a “Make It” Rule for Our Kids’ Tablets—Here’s What Changed (and What Didn’t)
Saturday morning, 6:47 a.m. The light outside is gray and drizzly, the kind of weather that guarantees a long, restless day indoors. In the living room, my five-year-old is crying because my eight-year-old grabbed the tablet from her hands, and the video she was watching is now a blinking loading circle. My son is yelling that he didn’t—she hit him first. The screen is smudged with three different types of breakfast film. The battery is at 12%. I am holding a cup of coffee I have not yet taken a sip of.
Normally, this is the moment I would confiscate the device, deliver a short lecture about sharing (which nobody would hear), and spin the whole morning into a petty custody battle over a rectangle of glass and aluminum. But this particular Saturday, I’d decided to try something new. I won’t pretend it was a fully formed philosophy. It was more like a half-baked thought I’d had while lying in bed the night before: What if we stopped asking them to watch less and instead asked them to make more?
So I put my coffee down and said, “Let’s do something different. We’re going to make a movie with the tablet today.”
A pause. The tears paused. The loading circle continued to spin.
“Like, a real movie?” my daughter asked.
“Like, a tiny one. Maybe with your LEGOs.”
What followed wasn’t a magical breakthrough. It was messy, awkward, and a little stressful. But something shifted, and I’ve been thinking about that shift ever since.
For the past year, the tablets in our house were basically video-drinking machines. The kids would pick up a device, open YouTube Kids or whatever sticker game they were into, and disappear into a state that was neither calm nor engaged. I know now that what they were experiencing was more like a mild hypnotic haze. Every time they surfaced, they looked groggy and a little grumpy. No matter how much time they spent, it never felt “fun” in the way that building a pillow fort is fun. It felt more like eating cheese puffs straight from the bag and then wondering why dinner was ruined.
The moment I proposed making a movie, their faces changed. There was no dopamine rush, but there was something better: confusion. My son looked at me like I’d just asked him to conjugate verbs. My daughter asked if she could just watch her show first.
I said, “Not yet. Ten minutes of making something first. Then you can watch your shows.”
That’s the rule I’d settled on: creating comes before consuming. Short, but concrete. In practice, it meant that tablet time started with one small project, and only after the project was done—or genuinely attempted—did they get to slide back into their usual schedule of cartoons and silly videos.
The first project was a train wreck, in the best sense. My son wanted a dinosaur to knock down a LEGO castle. My daughter wanted a pony to rescue a princess. They argued for a solid ten minutes about whether dinosaurs and ponies could coexist in the same universe. Eventually, they compromised: a dinosaur-pony alliance was formed, and the princess was made of Play-Doh.
We downloaded a simple stop-motion app. There are a dozen free ones; we used one called Stop Motion Studio, but honestly, any of them work the same way. We set up the tablet on a stack of old cookbooks. I was the cameraman, and they were the directors. The first attempt was ninety seconds of my son’s finger appearing in the corner, my daughter accidentally nudging the LEGO castle, and me adjusting and readjusting the lighting until everyone got impatient.
But here’s the thing that happened: they stopped staring at the screen. They started staring at the scene. They were talking to each other about what should happen next. They were solving problems. How do we make the dinosaur look like it’s roaring? What if we use toilet paper for smoke? Do you think we can make the pony fly by tilting the camera?
We never actually finished that movie. Everyone was hungry by the time we had sixteen jittery frames of a dinosaur staring blankly at a Play-Doh princess. But my daughter said, “That was actually fun,” which I’ll take as a win, and my son asked if we could do it again tomorrow, which felt like a small miracle. Then they went back to their tablet videos for a while, and that part of the day looked exactly like it always did. I didn’t expect the old habits to vanish, and they didn’t.
What I’ve learned in the weeks since is that the problem isn’t the tablet itself. The problem is the default mode. When a kid picks up a screen with no guidance, the path of least resistance is passive consumption. It’s designed that way, really. There’s no friction, no decision-making, no creative input. It just plays. And after a while, that’s not fun anymore—it’s just what the device does.
The experiment taught me to introduce a little friction, but the friendly kind. It’s not about fighting the device; it’s about asking better questions. Instead of saying, “What do you want to watch?” I now ask, “What are you planning?” or “What are you trying to make today?” The idea is to plant a seed of intention. Some days it’s a joke comic made from a photo of the cat. Some days it’s a silly voice recording of the five-year-old doing a “news report” about the dog. Every now and then, they just want to watch their shows, and that’s okay. But the question alone seems to change how they hold the device.
A few practical things we set up made it easier:
We cleared the tablet’s home screen. We removed most of the apps. Now there are one or two creative apps, one drawing app, and the video app, which is tucked into a folder on the second page. Out of sight isn’t out of mind, but it does affect the decision-making moment. The default choice is no longer “tap the colorful icon and disappear.” It’s a slightly more deliberate hunt.
We made a creation station with the tablet in a fixed spot. Instead of letting the tablet float around the house, it now lives on a small table near the kitchen, propped up on a cheap stand. Choose your word—it’s a charging station, a studio, a workbench. When the kids pick up the tablet from there, the association changes. It’s a tool that sits on a desk, not a companion that hides under the couch cushions.
We also talk about the bad days honestly. Some days the project loses steam midway through, or the app crashes, or they start arguing and I have to step in. I found it helpful to not frame those moments as failures. “We didn’t finish it, that’s fine. What did you learn?” One time my son learned that it’s actually pretty hard to film a flying pony with a tablet, and then he figured out how to make shadow puppets instead. There was value in that detour too.
I’m not saying this is a perfect system. It isn’t. The other day, my son announced he’d rather “create a snack” than a video, and then he spilled a bowl of cereal while attempting to reach the tablet. The apps are still occasionally a source of arguments. The battery still runs out at inopportune moments. And there are still mornings when I hand over the screen in the hopes of getting fifteen minutes of peace, and I don’t even pretend to regret that.
But something about the experiment seems to have stuck. Last week, without prompting, my daughter put the tablet down in the middle of a cartoon, came into the kitchen, and said, “Can we make another movie with the LEGO dragon? But this time, can I be in it?”
I’m not sure what we’ll do with the footage. Maybe we’ll keep it on the tablet forever, or maybe we’ll delete it. The point isn’t the finished product. It’s that she saw the tablet as something she could shape, instead of something that just washed over her. That’s a small thing, but in a world where screens are everywhere, it feels like progress. Or at least, a slightly less sticky version of it.
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