Two years ago, I arrived at the end of my rope with my 8-year-old daughter’s screen time.
Throughout her life, my husband and I closely followed pediatricians’ advice around screens. Starting around age 6, we allowed our daughter Rosy to watch Netflix or YouTube for about an hour each day. We rarely let her viewing go beyond two hours, as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has long advised.
Several years later, I found that I was struggling harder and harder to pull her away from devices. She would beg for screen time all day. When the timer went off, our thoughtful and helpful daughter suddenly began acting like a rude toddler. She yelled and fought with me. Sometimes, she would run around the house at 9 p.m., crying or begging for “one more episode.” One night, she curled up into the fetal position and hid under her desk, whimpering. I had to coax her out by rubbing her back gently and talking to her in a whisper.
This is so ridiculous, I thought. Why do we go through this horrible ritual every single night? So two years ago, I made a resolution: For the entire summer, our family would go screen-free.
No iPad for Rosy. No social media for me. No video games for my husband. No streaming platforms for any of us. We could text and call friends as much as we wanted, but outside of work, we would use no screens.
I initially worried we would fail miserably–or that we would succeed yet feel miserable. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. After a week, my daughter started to do things that I never expected. In the afternoons, she played outside voluntarily until dinner. One morning, I walked into her room and found her still in her pajamas, reading a book—and wanting to keep reading.
Getting rid of the screens wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, it was fun. Why? Because I had the tools and strategies to impose the policy successfully and overcome the pull of products intentionally engineered to addict children and captivate them for as long as possible. And you can too.
Let me explain.
