TV Tokens: Teach Your Kids to Limit Their TV Time On Their Own

Sometimes I feel like I’m locked in a never-ending battle with the TV. My kids will whine and whine constantly to try and break me down and get me to let them watch another show. I try to limit their screen time to two hours a day (which seems like a ton) but man is that hard some days. Things around the house always seem to go more smoothly when the kids know their limits and the house rules, and we definitely need those when it comes to the screen (Netflix is my nemesis, seriously).

Last year I came up with TV tickets as a way to limit their viewing time and those worked reasonably well, but I got tired of printing out tickets (or writing out tickets) every day. Plus the tickets were using up a ton of printer toner so I needed to find a better way. I wanted to find something durable and permanent so that I could reuse them every day, but also so that I could customize them to cut down on the chance of forgery (my daughter became quite a dedicated forger when we used paper tickets).

I decided to use plastic poker chips: they’re cheap, they come in a box of 100 so I had lots of spares for mess-ups or other projects and they’ll be durable. Plus they come in three colors so I could color-code them for each child. In our system each chip is worth 30 minutes of T.V. (“one show”) so each child gets two – if they each watch each others’ shows it is two hours of screen time, but sometimes they don’t do that for whatever reason and that cuts down on the T.V. time. I also made two bonus tokens – if they have an excellent day behavior-wise I have the option to give them a bonus 30 minute token but that’s not a regular thing. Of course if your kids are less devious than mine or you toss out the rest of the box of poker chips then you really don’t even need to label them – just assign each kid a color and you’re good to go!

The tokens were super simple to make. I used PicMonkey to create images for the labels on each side of the chip. I started with a blank PicMonkey image, cropped it into a square and then used a circle overlay and stretched it to fit the size of the square. I then changed the background of the overlay for each separate chip color (green for the blue chips, purple for the red chips and blue for the white chips) and added text for each chip as well. I have a 3/4″ craft punch, which happened to be just the right size to make the paper labels for the center of the chips (you could just freehand cut the circles with scissors).

1) Plastic poker chips, 2) Mod Podge, 3) your token images printed on paper, 4) craft punch or scissors. Not pictured: paint brush.

Now there is probably a better way to print the images out so that you can attach them to the chips, but this is how I did it: I opened a text document and inserted each image into it, then resized them to be a bit more than 3/4″ in diameter, saved and printed it out. I punched out the images using the punch and then used Mod Podge to affix the circles to the poker chips.

Clockwise from top left: Put Mod Podge in the center of the poker chip; Add the paper image; Cover the image with more Mod Podge; Let dry.

The Mod Podge took about 20 minutes to dry and I only used one coat. The directions say you can seal it with acrylic sealer to keep it from feeling tacky but I didn’t need to do that – they dried clear and glossy and smooth. So far we’re back on track with the new system and it really works to cut down on the whining and begging since they know that when their tokens are gone they’re done.