Do you argue about technology with your family?

As a family we rarely argue....The only thing my fella and I have ever argued about is food. lol. Our first ever argument was over a chicken burger....We'd been for a night out and I bought chips & garlic sauce and a chicken burger. I ate the chips and sauce and he wanted the burger because I wasn't eating it.....I was going to though. I always saved the burger for breakfast...lol 

The only thing we ever have slight disagreements over is technology & electronics....Ugh! 

Technology has been named as the number one cause of arguments between parents and children at home, igniting more disputes than bedtimes, homework, chores, curfews or pocket money according to new research from insurer Protect Your Bubble.

I really think that is true! 

I love Becky my teenager to bits but sometimes I think she is addicted to her tablet.... We put a timer on her tablet and on a school night she is allowed 2 hours and on a Friday night and a weekend she is allowed 3 hours which I think is more than enough. She can earn extra time by doing chores around the house.

I have seen people at her school up until the early hours of the morning online....It can't be good for their health or their mental state...Becky is in year 10 at school and is in her GCSE years....She will be getting more and more homework to complete. I don't want her rushing through the homework just to get on to her tablet....

Another rule we have as a household is the kids do not take their tablets/laptops upstairs....I want to see what they are doing online which means they are always switched off before bed. 

The time limits doesn't stop Becky trying to bend the rules....Like I said Becky had 3 hours during the school holidays for electronics....We only have a timer on her tablet but will flit between that, the laptop, xBox and her sisters tablet thinking I won't realise how long she had on everything....I do notice! She is not happy when I kick her off electronics and make her find something else to do....

Ellie my youngest isn't left out of the timed rule but she will happily spend half an hour on the computer them go and play with her dolls for 2 hours, spend 20 minutes on her laptop then go and play with something else for an hour so it doesn't really apply to her....She hasn't reached the age yet where she is addicted to technology and I hope that time never comes....

Almost half (48%) of children have damaged or broken a piece of tech costing £125 to replace on average.

Yep! My girls have both broken their tablets in the past and had to have them replaced....What springs to mind is in 2016 a few days before Christmas Becky dropped her tablet and broke it...It was a good job she got money off my dad for Christmas to buy a new one.....We only had a little extra to pay. Thank goodness for the boxing day sales. Last year Ellie dropped her tablet and has smashed her screen. She had to make do with an old one until Santa brought her one for Christmas....

To be fair both my girls are usually careful with their electronics....Ellie does seem to go through a lot of headphones though. She has a habit of chewing on the wires. Oops.

Children are using gadgets at an increasingly young age too with kids typically receiving their first smartphone aged 11, first games console aged nine and first iPad aged eight, although – perhaps surprisingly – more than six in 10 (61%) of children under the age of four have at least one gadget.

I can understand children receiving their first smartphone when they are 11. That is the age they start secondary school.....Becky got her first smartphone when she was 11 just so I could stay in touch with her when she was walking too and from school without me....Smartphones seem like the smart option. 

Becky has harped on that she wants and iPhone because all her friend have them. Have you seen the price of them? It is more than a months rent, even for an old one! We have convinced her we are an android family...

Over Christmas Becky got a new phone and Ellie has got her old one....If Becky didn't get a new phone Ellie wouldn't be getting one until she started secondary school...Ellie isn't connected to the internet and she has £10 credit which she shouldn't really use. The only people she will phone and text is Becky, her dad or me. My dad pays about £13 a month for us all to be connected as well as him and his girlfriend and we get free calls and texts to each other with the O2 family bolt on.

Thankfully my girls have never been one for games consoles....Becky harped on for an xBox and we got her one and up until Christmas she hardly used it....She got a couple of new games which has given her some interest in it again....There was a point where I used it more to watch You Tube videos. lol

When my girls were little they had no gadgets.....I think it's because things like tablets were not the big thing, they are now. I think if I had a younger child they would use technology like a tablet. They are handy to keep children amused when travelling or just for 5 minutes peace.

Do your children have gadgets and electronics? Do you argue over them?