The Lockdown Challenge – I’ve sacrificed my phone but it’s worth it

This morning I got into a circular argument with my daughter, where I told her to go away because I was working (her dad was in the other room ready to hang out). She told me I wasn’t at work. I reminded her that I work from home. She said, ‘Exactly, you’re not at work.’ I said that I was at work because I work from home. This went on for a while.

Luckily I have invented a game to help keep my kids occupied. Inspired by Taskmaster, one of our favourite family TV shows (which is not family friendly, but we love it anyway). It’s the Lockdown Challenge. I have three friends and between us we have 10 kids. The Lockdown Challenge is a video challenge issued by one kid to another one in the group of 10. That kid has 24 hours to respond. They must perform the challenge on video, post it for the group to see, then issue their own challenge to someone else in the group. For example the first challenge was “Make up a love song to your cat, to the tune of Old Town Road, and sing it to him”.

It means giving up my phone for at least part of the day, but it’s totally worth it. I’m encouraging the kids to work together to complete and invent challenges, and to really take charge of this project. I like to frame this as encouraging their creativity and independence. An alternative reading is that I’m keeping them out of my hair as much as possible in order to maintain my tenuous grip on sanity. You be the judge.

This is the image on the Whatsapp group profile, complete with watermarks.