My daughter just got her first phone for her 11th birthday. We really wanted to wait until she was 12, but she’s in a new school with new transportation challenges and being able to get a hold of her and vice versa before and after school became a necessity.
All of a sudden, I’m obsessed with screen time.
Not so much hers, because she’s only getting very limited use of the phone (for now, anyway.) But ours. We use our phones for too much. Reading. Checking the time. Looking up directions. Instructions. Music. As a TV remote. As an alarm clock. The list goes on and on and on.
I was listening to The Slow Home Podcast today and Brooke talked about how they have screen-free bedrooms and at least one screen-free day each weekend. She talked about how this makes her more conscious of the mindless pickups and scrolling and email checking and everything else we do that eats up hours and hours of time without us noticing.
A screen-free bedroom, or day, seems daunting to me. First of all, does a Kindle count as a screen (I’d argue that a paperwhite does not, but I’d like to hear opinions.) Second, what if I need to go somewhere. Third… wait… I think I just ran out of rational objections. I wonder if I could do this…
I don’t check my email right before bed or first thing in the morning. I don’t have a high-stress job, but I’m very good at stressing myself out. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about work often enough without it. But I do often go for “one last look” at Instagram or Facebook (even without the app, I look at it on Safari. I almost think I should get the app so it gets tracked separately in screen time so I can see how much I really use it) or or or… usually when I’m too tired and my brain won’t shut off to go to sleep.
It would require buying an alarm clock (I use a daylight alarm app and would want the same thing…waking up to light rather than noise has been life-changing) and… and, nothing. That’s it. If I had a real alarm clock, I could have a screen-free bedroom.
My argument against a screen-free day would have always been “but what if I want to write?” Answer: Pen and paper. I’ve been doing this for the last two weeks anyway and, while I’m writing more slowly, I think it’s maybe some of the best writing I’ve done (says the author prior to having re-read any of the work.) Regardless, it just feels really good right now.
Huh. Maybe this actually is doable.
And it might be a good #last90days experiment. (Which, BTW, is going great. Except for the actual workouts, because my body is still recovering from surgery. But I’m consciously doing something each day until I can actually work out every day. Today I did a 1-minute plank and a 2-minute wall sit while watching Queer Eye and I deserve a medal.)
Do any of you do a screen-free day each week? Or have a screen-free bedroom? What are your rules around screen time for yourself (not your kids.) I’m curious.
I’d like to sit down over a warm beverage and talk about this at length with you! We are pretty screen-time mindful. It began a decade ago when we lost our two television channels to television going digital. This was before we’d been introduced to smart phones or any of our kids had cell phones – the whole world has gone massively digital since then! Being tv-free (no netflix or hulu or what not) in the pre-stages of the digital / screen time takeover has really made me mindful over the years, in my home and out of it, of “distractions” that are so constant and mainstream, about interaction, real time, and so on and so on. That said, I’m guilty. I like to wake up slow and I often do my pleasure reading of daily articles online in the morning before I get out of bed. I check instagram, however I’m pleased to say I’ve broken the facebook habit! I find instagram much less of a rabbit hole to get lost down, more streamlined, simple, less spam and junk and all that – all the “sharing” of news and memes , etc. I’m able to keep my time there very efficient, no getting lost clicking from one thing to another. And yet, facebook is where I found out Michael Jackson had died! It’s where I often saw shared news for years. But all that news had become so polarized and to come with personal agenda. Reading news from a source I trust, when I seek it, suits me fine. Keeps my screen time in check. I am rambling.. really – this is a discussion to have over long cups of tea.
I think screen free bedrooms are a valuable thing. We also don’t have phones or screens present at the dinner table. It is so weird though, when our kids have a friend over, wonderful, polite kids, who I’m sure are practicing their best manners, and have NO CLUE that scrolling on their phone next to the plate of food I’ve given them might not be considered good manners. It’s not just kids, though.. my parents do it when they visit, too. I’m all about being with the real people who are present. And when someone cooks for you – you put your phone away and show some present attention, respect and gratitude. We’ve found that our parents’ generation are actually the worst. I’ve considered putting up a sign when they come over. 🙂
Last thing I’ll tack on, though – I relate. Our youngest is eleven, he asks for a phone regularly. Because everyone has them, you see. We’re in the same boat though – he’s alone at his school building now, there are very practical reasons to have phones. I’m holding out for Christmas or his 12th birthday two months after, and then I’ll be thinking about all this stuff all over again, as I have each time one of our kids has passed that right of passage into phone ownership.
Yes, I would love to have this conversation in person, too! It’s so hard. There are so many good things, and so many not awesome things, about our digital lives. And last week when we were TV free, someone in our house (an adult, not me, but not naming names :-)) spent all the time he would have been watching TV on his phone. It drove me bananas. Even though we were doing the same thing– I was reading, he was reading– the fact that he was doing it on his phone felt like replacing one screen for another. (To be fair, I was reading on my iPad, because I had Nine Perfect Strangers digitally from the library. But it was a book, not websites, which, for some reason, matters to me.)