The author and her family attempt to go five days without TV or the computer, relying on screen-time strategies from experts and tips from FamilyFun readers. Will they survive? Tune in and find out ...
I cannot claim that my announcement that we would be going screen-free was greeted with enthusiasm. My 9-year-old son, Ethan, paused mid-swing in a Wii tennis match, clutched his controller with white knuckles, and started to cry. Beneath her huge headphones, 13-year-old Hannah stopped tapping on her laptop long enough to roll her eyes. "Even Facebook?!" she asked in genuine horror.
Despite what the kids thought, I was not doing this to torture them. My husband, Dan, and I had decided to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for five days this past spring to take a frank look at the role screen time was playing in our family's life. Sure, we tried to follow the oft-cited guideline that kids should have no more than one to two hours of computer games or television a day. But our totals had been creeping up.
We didn't have cable, and our fuzzy reception meant regular TV was not the big issue at our house. But my kids love video games, have an impressive DVD collection, and delight in endlessly watching YouTube videos of hamsters dressed in little hats. Turning on the computer had become their preferred way to unwind after school. For our part, my husband and I had been spending too many evenings clutching our laptops in order to catch up on work and e-mail, our screens literally shielding us from the rest of the family.
We're hardly unusual. A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children and teens spend an average of 4-1/2 hours a day with the TV on. Add in time given over to texting, computer games, MP3 players, and the like, and a child's daily media use averages a whopping 7-1/2 hours. That's a lot of time not being used for reading, playing outside, staring up at the clouds, or talking about the weird thing the teacher did that day — the staples of my own childhood. "Every hour spent watching TV is an hour not spent doing something else," agrees professor Barbara Brock, author of "Living Outside the Box: TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets." I hoped our experiment would let us rediscover some low-tech pleasures and reconnect as a family.
