If I need to transition my son from building a cardboard village with grandma to going to bed for the night, I need to combine my time checks with some subtle threats and an Obi Wan Kenobi-like response to his three hundred or so repetitions of some variation of, “No. I don’t want to. But you said. Why are you doing this to me?”
The techniques are all pretty simple and effective. Until it’s time to get him to put down the iPad.
The time checks, subtle threats, and feeble attempts at reasoned parenting are useless. You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and you don’t bring traditional parenting strategies to a fight to wrestle a possessed child back from a retina-display, 3.1 million pixel, demonic poltergeist.
Anyone who’s been within a thousand miles of one can tell you… There is no tantrum like a Put-Down-the-iPad Tantrum.