Dear Sarah of Last October,
You're currently standing in the kitchen in those gray Lululemon leggings—the ones with the mysterious bleach stain on the left thigh that you keep swearing you'll throw away but never do. It's, like, 6:43 AM on a Tuesday. Your coffee is already cold because you left it on top of the microwave again. Maya, who's seven going on seventeen, is hyperventilating over your iPad, screaming a string of letters that sounds like a military launch sequence. Leo, who's four and completely feral, is entirely naked, standing on the kitchen island, demanding frozen waffles. Absolute chaos.
I'm writing to you from the future to tell you to put the coffee down, take a deep breath, and grab the iPad before she figures out how Apple Pay works. Because you're about to enter the Clash Royale phase, and honestly, it's a dark place.
Right now, Maya is yelling about a baby dragon. In your sleep-deprived, pre-caffeinated state, you're probably thinking, Oh, how sweet, she wants a little plushie or a new bedtime book about a mythical creature. No. Don't be fooled. She is talking about a digital sticker. It's called an emote. And right now, her entire social standing in the second-grade hierarchy hinges on whether or not you can figure out how to redeem this stupid string of letters on a website you've never heard of.
What the actual hell is an emote anyway
I know you're confused, so let me just brain-dump what I've learned over the last six months of hell. An emote is basically an animated emoji that kids spam at each other while they're playing this mobile strategy game called Clash Royale. They don't even say words to each other anymore, they just send a picture of a cartoon goblin rolling its eyes or whatever.
The one Maya is losing her absolute mind over right now is this green dragon thing that licks the screen. She keeps calling it her "baby d" which, first of all, sounds ridiculous, and second of all, why are we paying for this? Well, wait, the joke's on us because this specific one is actually free, but the game makes it so incredibly complicated to get that you end up wanting to just throw your credit card at the screen to make the whining stop.
The code she's screaming is BLOWTHEMAWAY. There are other ones too, like FIREFIREFIRE and ANGRYFURNACE, which honestly sound like things I mumble to myself when I'm trying to cook dinner. The whole thing reminds me of those tamagotchis we had in the 90s, like this weird little e baby that lives in your phone, except you don't even get the satisfaction of feeding it. You just log into this Supercell ID thing—which took me three tries and a password reset because I kept using Mark's email—and you type the code in, and suddenly a cartoon dragon licks the inside of your iPad screen. MAGIC.
Mark, by the way, is completely useless during this entire era. His official stance on the game is, "Babe, it's fine, it's a free app, just let her play." He literally said this while standing in the kitchen eating a handful of dry Cheerios and contributing nothing to the morning routine. Men. Anyway, the point is, don't listen to Mark. Because the game is "free" the way a timeshare presentation is free. They hook them with the cute little baby characters and then suddenly your kid is begging for fifty bucks in gems to buy a pixelated wizard.
Dr. Arlington's confusing opinions on flashing lights
So, because I'm an anxious wreck, I brought this up at Leo's four-year well-visit last month. I was sitting there on that crinkly paper that makes you sweat, trying to keep Leo from eating the complimentary tongue depressors, and I asked Dr. Arlington about screen time.
He kind of sighed and pushed his glasses up his nose, and started talking about the American Academy of Pediatrics. Apparently, there's some rule about limiting kids Maya's age to an hour a day, or maybe it was two hours? The science is honestly super blurry to me because I was mostly focused on prying a cotton swab out of Leo's fist. But Dr. Arlington said something about how these games hijack their dopamine receptors with all the flashing colors and the micro-rewards, basically turning their little frontal lobes to mush. I mean, he didn't use the word mush, but that was the vibe. He said it interferes with their offline play and sleep cycles, which I definitely believe because when Maya plays for more than forty minutes, she turns into an absolute feral goblin who can't be reasoned with.
We're supposed to be encouraging tactile play. You know, actual objects in the real physical world that don't require a WiFi connection or a password with one uppercase letter and a special character.
Desperation and physical objects
So in my desperation to get her off the iPad, I started leaning hard into the dragon aesthetic, but like, in real life. If she wanted a baby dragon, fine, we were going to do it offline.
I ended up getting this Mono Rainbow Bamboo Baby Blanket. I know, I know, it's supposed to be a swaddle or whatever, and I originally bought it to have a nice, aesthetic background for photos of Leo that I never actually take. It's got these really pretty, minimalist terracotta arches on it, and it's made of bamboo so it's ridiculously soft. But Maya completely commandeered it. She took this eighty-dollar organic blanket and turned it into her official "baby d cape."
Honestly? Best money I've spent. She runs around the backyard in the mud with it, jumping off the patio furniture and roaring at the mailman. It washes out perfectly every time, which is a miracle because bamboo usually intimidates me, but this thing actually gets softer. The earthy tones mean it doesn't look like cheap plastic neon garbage when it's left on the living room floor, which is a massive win for my mental health. Whenever she starts whining about Clash Royale, I just tell her to go put her cape on and defend the backyard.
I also bought the Gentle Baby Building Block Set hoping they'd both play with it together. They're fine. They're these soft rubber macaron-colored blocks with little animals on them. They're completely fine. The main benefit is that when I step on them in the dark, I don't scream and wake up the entire house. But mostly Leo just throws them at the dog, so, whatever.
The panda that saved my sanity
The real surprise hero of the great screen-time war has been something completely unrelated. With Maya constantly playing her game, Leo was getting super anxious and cranky from being left out. He's four, so he doesn't really understand what an emote is, he just knows his sister is staring at a glowing rectangle and ignoring him. He started chewing on the sleeves of his shirts again—a habit I thought we broke last year. Gross.
I was digging through the bottom of the diaper bag looking for an old fruit snack and I found the Panda Teether Silicone Chew Toy. I bought it months ago and totally forgot about it. It's this little panda with bamboo details, 100% food-grade silicone, totally non-toxic.
I handed it to Leo just to see what would happen. You guys. He immediately started gnawing on it while watching Maya play. It's designed for infants, obviously, but the flat shape is perfect for his little anxious hands. Instead of destroying his collars, he just sits there quietly chomping on this panda. It's totally safe, it doesn't have any of those weird chemical smells that cheap plastic toys have, and I can just toss it in the dishwasher when he drops it on the driveway. It's my absolute favorite thing we own right now. We call it his "focus panda."
Just survive the morning
So, Past Sarah, here's my advice to you on this chaotic Tuesday morning: Get the iPad. Go to the Supercell website. Type in BLOWTHEMAWAY so the little green thing licks the screen and Maya feels like a legend at school today. Then, immediately go into the Apple settings and require a password for EVERY SINGLE in-app purchase. Don't skip this step, or you'll be eating rice and beans for a month.
And then? Turn the iPad off. Send her outside with her blanket cape. Let Leo chew on his silicone panda. Drink your cold coffee. You're doing fine. The baby dragon phase will pass, and soon she'll be obsessed with something even more confusing and expensive.
Love,
Future You
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My messy answers to your frantic late-night Google searches
Because I know you're sitting in the dark right now trying to figure this all out.
How the hell do you seriously redeem the Clash Royale codes?
Okay, so you can't just type it into the game app, which is infuriating. You have to go to the official Supercell online store on a browser, log in with your child's Supercell ID (which you probably have to create for them, good luck remembering that password), and find the little box that says "Redeem a Store Code." Type in the letters, hit enter, and pray the servers aren't down. The emote should magically appear in the game. It's a massive headache.
Is it really safe for them to be on this game?
This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. The game itself is just cartoon violence—like, a knight hitting a skeleton with a sword—but there are clans and chat features. I immediately turned off all the chat stuff I could find in the parental controls. I don't need a 40-year-old named DragonSlayer99 talking to my seven-year-old. Just lock down the settings and keep the iPad in the family room where you can see it.
What happens if they accidentally buy a bunch of gems?
Cry. Just kidding. (Kind of). If you didn't set up the password protection like I told you to, they can easily rack up a hundred bucks in a single click. If it happens, you've to contact Apple or Google Play support immediately and claim it was an unauthorized child purchase. Sometimes they refund you, sometimes they don't. Learn from my panic attacks: go into your phone settings right now and toggle on "Require Password for Purchases."
How do you get the iPad away from them without a complete meltdown?
Honestly, warnings don't work. Telling Maya "five more minutes" means literally nothing to her because time is an illusion when you're staring at a screen. I've to physically transition her to something else. I usually start baking something that smells good, or I bring out the blanket and tell her the floor is lava. You have to break the trance with a physical, real-world distraction. Or snacks. Snacks always work.
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