Summer in our house lasted 10 ½ weeks this year. That’s 76 days. Or, if you want to get really specific, 1,824 hours. Factor in about 8 hours each day spent sleeping, that leaves 1,216 waking hours of fun and sun. Of those, our children spent a grand total of 12 hours and 24 minutes in front of a screen.
When we first set out on this little venture, I expected some resistance. However, as I revealed in this post, my kids were actually enthusiastic about the idea. Did we have difficult moments? Of course we did. Hardest by far was the 8 days we spent without air conditioning, which just happened to be eight of the hottest days we had all summer. The appeal of lying in front of a TV with fans blasting cool(ish) air in their faces was very, very hard to resist. For all of us. I will admit that on the fifth day we caved. It was just too hot. Hiro wasn’t the only one Baymax saved that night!
For the vast majority of the summer, however, the kids didn’t give the idea a second thought. They filled their time in other ways, and seemed perfectly happy to do so.
To be honest, the only one who seemed to have any difficulty with this whole process was me. Yep, the one who started it all. Before this summer, I did not realize, or perhaps wasn’t willing to recognize, just how much I rely on screen time to get me through the day. When the kids got grumpy, when my son started on a line of questioning that seemed to never end, when our toddler wouldn’t stop crying and nothing, and I mean nothing, seemed to improve her mood, my first instinct was to put them in front of the TV. Or to hand them the Kindle. Or to find a fun website for them to explore. But I couldn’t. Talk about an eye opener. Turns out, this summer wasn’t just about the kids finding creative ways to fill their time. It also challenged me in a big way.
So, looking back, was this whole screen free concept worth it? Absolutely. I watched our kids, all four of them, grow a little bit closer this summer. They found new books that they could all enjoy. They invented new games that had them running, climbing, and jumping together. They worked as a team completing more crafty projects than we have space for. Would this have happened either way? Maybe. But, realizing that they are all getting older, that probably sooner than we’d like their interests will diverge and their desire to spend great amounts of time together will fade, this summer without the screen couldn’t have come at a better time.
I was hopeful that, once the end of summer had come and gone, the kids would remember the past few months for what we did did, rather than for that which they weren’t able to do. As I prepared to sit down and write this post, I asked all four of them for their best memories of the summer. They had about a billion of them. The best part of the interview, however, came at the end. I asked if they were glad we decided to spend a summer screen free. My 6 year old looked at me, incredulous, and said, “We didn’t watch TV this summer?…Oh, yeah, I guess we didn’t”.