For the last six months or so, I started to become more and more frustrated with my family's dependence on all of our electronic devices. My husband and I carry smart phones, our daughter uses and old iPhone like an iPod, we have a desk top computer, two tvs, and an iPad. Compared to a lot of families we know, that's actually pretty mild. But we were in many ways a very tech dependent family. When our three year old woke up, he would come get the iPad and watch kids videos until we were all up, too. And my older two kids were always asking to be on their various devices as soon as they were up and moving in the morning. I found that I would check my phone almost constantly throughout the day to sit and stare at things I had already seen or really could care less about. If I needed to give one of my babies a breathing treatment, I would grab my phone to stare at to entertain me until they were done. My husband and I would lay in bed at night to watch some of our shows that we watch together, but we would both have our phones out messing with them the whole time we were "watching" the show!!! Seriously, please tell me we are not alone in this?! Is there anyone else out there who is just totally fed up with it?!
That's what happened to me. I talked to the kids and told them that we were going to have a week long media fast to kick off Summer and then we were going to drastically change the amount of screens we used after we finished and remain pretty close to screen free for the rest of Summer. That was the initial plan. Things haven't gone as smoothly as I hoped lol, but I'll get to that later.
So for a whole week, the kids and I went totally screen free. My hubby hasn't jumped on the screen free bandwagon...he uses screens all day for work so that would be impossible, but we are still bugging him to give them up at home and he has definitely cut back a ton. The week we went totally screen free was so hard. My kids had to learn how to entertain themselves and I had to learn how to break the habit of staring at my phone. Ella and Noah were such good sports. I couldn't believe how gracious and mature they were about the whole thing. Most kids would have been so mad, but they were so understanding and even proud of all the fun things they came up with to do instead. I told them that this life is so precious and that I didn't want us to waste any of it. It's such a short time that they are in our home to raise. I just want to be present!!! I don't want to miss it because I'm looking at something on my phone that can wait. When one of us would get really desperate wishing we could get online or watch a movie, we would just pray. We prayed that we would want to know more of Jesus as badly as we wanted some technology in our life. That we would have that same kind of hunger for Him instead and that we would grow closer as a family.
I took these pictures on the last day that we could have media and although they're ridiculously adorable...I think you will see that the pictures without screens have so much more connection between the kids. They have been having so much together!!
I was really worried that we would have all sorts of breakdowns and tears, but the crazy thing is that I don't think a single tear has been shed?! Even Owen just found other things to do. I think that has been something that's made me so passionate about keeping life less cluttered with media. If you tell your kids to go play...guess what...THEY GO AND PLAY! And they find so many fun things to do. I have had so much joy in watching them play together and actually having time to play myself since I'm not as stressed and overwhelmed because my stuff gets done when I'm not distracted by my phone all day. It's so great!!
I'm going to do another post about our struggle after we finished our week long fast to balance allowing screens back in. So be sure to read that one and comment because I'm really curious to learn how other families balance this in their home..
No comments:
Post a Comment