Calm at the restaurant table without multimedia devices

My guiding principle in raising my girls is to limit multimedia devices in the first years of our children’s lives. I think they offer few benefits and bring more disadvantages and dangers. I am of the opinion that children in their early years do not need multimedia devices for their basic development, intelligence, and virtues. But I also believe that the right time to use such devices does come. But here we are talking about little queens; that is, about the first seven years of our girls’ lives.

I’m not trying to be clever. I’m just trying to show you that kids don’t only calm down while watching a cartoon or playing a game, and that there are other ways to calm them down and get them distracted for a precious hour or two when needed.

One such example is lunch outside the home, in a restaurant. For the sake of other guests in the restaurant, we should not disturb others with our presence. Our children should sit quietly at the table, not run wild, not be loud; we should wait quietly for our food and eat our meal in peace.

Our family likes to go to restaurants, we like to treat ourselves to excellent food and cooked lunches according to the wishes and tastes of each of us. So we quickly started looking for tricks on how to eat lunch together with two little girls without too much stress.

In addition to basic hygiene items such as nappies, tissues and moisturising wipes, extra underwear, water, etc., we always carry an LCD digital tablet for drawing and writing with us. The tablet is attractive, solid, durable, thin, precise, with an additional pen, with an erase button, a convenient size to fit in a children’s backpack, and is a necessary accessory or toy for every family. It allows accurate drawing, writing, playing tick-tack-toe, writing lists, colouring. Each of our daughters has their own tablet and they always take it out of their backpack enthusiastically, and start creating, comparing drawings, colouring, and observing the blending of colours on the screen.

With this tablet, we have reduced many moments of restlessness at the table in a restaurant, in the car, in the doctor’s waiting room, when visiting the grandparents, having a drink with friends and similar situations.

Let’s encourage creativity through play, put down our smartphones, talk, laugh, and be an example to our own children and others in the room.

20. 11. 2020