As a mom of kids who love video games and movies, well anything with a screen I have to come up with a balance for our life. If I let them they would be on a screen ALL DAY!!
I had come to realize that screens were becoming an addiction to our children. They were forgetting that there was more to life than video games and movies. They would sit and watch the clock until screen time!
So on December 31 I made the announcement at dinner time.
We are taking a month off of screens.
My announcement was met with a little crying, a little joy, and little wondering what they were going to do for the whole month!
A friend asked What I meant by screens.
What I mean is anything with a screen!
NO TV
NO Tablet
NO Computer
NO DS
NO XBOX
Next question I was met with was All of you?
Well no not really.
My husband must use his computer for work and school. I have to have access to my business page Crawley Creations. Also we don't throw tantrums when we aren't allowed on a screen. But we decided to limit ours also. We decided that instead of watching a movie in the evening we would play games. Card games, board games, sometimes we just sat and talked.
We have exactly one week left of our no screen policy, and it has been a great month! I was amazed at how much they found to do. They played Lego's, they read books, they played with trains, they colored, and they listened to audio books. and they didn't complain about not having screens. In fact I asked them to tell me if they were going to write a story about our experience what they would call it and they said A month of Peace (no prompting on my side) hence the name of this post.
We were definitely not perfect. they watched one movie at a friends house while the dads were babysitting, David may have spend a lot of time playing a game on his friends phone once, and Malachi may have played a friends tablet until it died while waiting for Martial arts. But our normal rule was an hour a day. so that was pretty minor!
oh yeah and one day David and I broke down and watched a movie, but one movie in a month is not to bad! And we have binge watched Arrow until 1 am on the first so we could finish it up before we gave up screens. Hey! I said we weren't perfect!
So what next?
Well we decided to not allow screens on a daily basis. The kids are much more focused on school with out them and it just overall made out house more peaceful.
Our plan is to allow 30 minutes of educational screen time on Fridays if there school has been completed for the week. They also will be allowed one hour of game/movie time on Saturdays as long as they have completed their school and chores for the week.
We will be flexible and occasionally we will sit down in the middle of the week and watch a show but, over all we are better off with out so much screen time.
Be sure to let me know your opinions on limiting or not limiting screen time.
