On weekends, the boys aren't allowed to play video games until noon. For one hour, Ian watched the clock until the minute hand finally stretched straight north. I tried throwing some clichés at him, like a watched pot and boiling, but he didn't budge.
Hey we try the pot boiling one with our little guy, too. We’ve tried to convince him that a watched pot literally won’t boil, but he’s suspicious of the physics, so it doesn’t work. I suspect that he, like E. wouldn’t accept that watching could actually dilate time.
That is a good rule. Alas, on weekends, our 17 year old actually gets her laptop out from under her bed as soon as she wakes up and begins facebooking or whatever. I have to go yell at her to get up and eat breakfast.
We’ve put an electrical timer in a padlocked box, and the cords are fed from it: games don’t work unless they have power from the box. It gets a lot of chores done…