Even though this project happened in September. I feel like this blog post came at the right time, since I have been dealing with a lot lately, and maybe not focusing as much on things that are best for my health. It’s been a topic of discussion in my house, so this gave me a chance to reach out to my parents to discuss something new, rather than things that didn’t work so well in the past. In the end, we came up with a contract, which I’ll attach a screenshot of below.

In the past, most of what I tried to improve was screens and sleep. In a way, it’s the same now, but with a new approach. Before, when my parents have tried to improve my sleep health, they forced me to bring them all of my electronics every night at a certain time. This didn’t work very well because on my end I’d be angry, and on their end, they felt bad for not showing trust in me to just put them away in my room. No one really ended up winning.

Part of the thing we agreed on this time was a balance of freedom and accountability. For them, they know that a fully strict approach doesn’t really work with me. And for me, I know that if I’m trying to make big changes, I need to be held accountable or I might not follow through.

The first part of the conversation was talking about what hadn’t worked in the past. Next, we talked about how they’d love for me to just have no screens at all, but that it’s not realistic. So, finally they brought up incentives, and that even though I’ve been tired a lot of the time, I still didn’t have much of an incentive to change things. They said they’d love something that incentivizes me putting all of my screens away before 10:30 and not touching them again until my alarm goes off in the morning. Their first thought was money, but they wanted to hear from me. I told them that with my stressful schedule, it’s hard to wake up in the mornings, especially lately, and the incentive I wanted was to take a personal day once a month in order to give myself a break.

Eventually, we settled on a weekly payout, where the daily average gets higher if I do more days in a row. If I do one or two days, it amounts to 2$ a day. If I do three or four days, it comes out to 7$ a day. If I do all five days in the schoolweek, I get 10$ per day. The other things is that I can’t ask for money anymore, and this is going to be where my money comes from. The last thing is that there will be a payout each time I read a full book. I will try.