I Stopped Giving My Son Screen Time for a Week
What happened & how we all might benefit. Plus, an announcement
About a week ago, my husband and I decided to eliminate screen time for my son. We felt like, despite our efforts to set boundaries and structure around it, he had become too reliant on getting his TV time.
So we told our 2.5 year old son the TV was “broken” and gave him no screen time for a week. Initially, it was a little rough but after a day or two we noticed several changes.
So what did I notice?
Bedtime became significantly easier. No more tantrums about going to bed. No fights about brushing teeth. In fact, he actually decided that he no longer needed to cosleep with me and decided that he wanted to sleep in his own bed!
He became more creative with his toys. I noticed him starting to figure out new ways of playing with his toys that he hadn’t done before. He also started to become interested in old toys that I thought he wasn’t interested in anymore. I also noticed that he started getting interested in toys that he expressed no interest in before, like his puzzles.
He started being more concerned about his relationships with others. He wanted to snuggle with me a lot more. He wanted to talk about his friends and, when he couldn’t see them, that he was sad and wanted to see pictures of them together.
He became interested in potty training again. After we failed miserably on a “getting potty trained in 3 days” attempt a few months ago, my son became very avoidant of the potty and showed no interest in trying again, so I backed off. However, once he had no screens for a week he suddenly started showing interest in the potty again and wanted to try without any prompting from me.
His tantrums reduced. Now when I was out of crackers when he wanted them, it was less of a big deal than it was before. He seemed to be more able to regulate his own emotions compared to the days when he watched TV.
He wanted to be outside more. So we went outside more and he got more exercise, because, thankfully, it wasn’t a rainy week.
He started taking afternoon naps again. As the days started getting shorter back in November he stopped taking an afternoon nap and started going to bed earlier. Since he stopped having screen time, he started taking an afternoon nap again — and he may actually be sleeping a little more!
In a world where we are now so reliant on our screens, I don’t think many of us are realizing just how much it is impacting us. Does it impact your sleep? Does it make it harder to wind down at the end of the day? Does it impact your ability to focus? Does it impact your short term memory? Does it impact your motivation to socialize with others in your community? Does it impact your creativity?
I’ve seen so many people on social media this week complaining about social media in light of this whole TikTok ban (and the quick reverse). But how many of us have run this same kind of experiment on themselves? How many of us have cut ourselves off from our own screen time for an entire week and seen how we are? What changes? What doesn’t? Do we even know who we are without getting our screen time?
It might be time to step into that unknown and see what unfolds. We might find some benefits in reducing screen time in certain areas of our lives while in other areas of our lives we might be lacking something. The results are going to be a bit different for each individual person, but we just can’t know for sure until we take the time to experiment with it.
After all, many of us (mostly us millennials and younger generations) have been living with social media for a solid 20 years now. That’s a very long time. In addition, we don’t just have social media nowadays but we also have the internet as a whole along with streaming services and cable TV (for those who still have it).
That’s a lot of screen consumption. How much of it was really worth it? Was it enjoyable? Was it helpful? Was it nourishing? What type of content supports and helps you and what doesn’t?
Perhaps these are some long overdue to questions that are worth answering to discover what helps you feel the best… and what helps you feel the most free.
Freedom… I’ve been sensing that that’s the thing that many of us have been longing for in various ways but most of us haven’t been able to actually name it.
A lot of things are dysfunctional right now — social media, our economy, our infrastructure, the US government, the US healthcare system, etc. are all incredibly corrupt and it creates a lot of unnecessary human suffering every single day. What inevitably emerges from all of this dysfunction is a feeling of being trapped and as if we have no other choice.
What so many of us long for is freedom to live our lives the way we want to.
Freedom to choose how we wish to live our lives.
Freedom to leave a job if we so wish.
Freedom to make a career change without fear that we can’t financially afford it.
Freedom to create what we feel inspired to create.
Freedom to find a new way of living.
It is for this reason that I am changing the name of this publication from Being Human to Liberated Soul. This will be a space to help us explore and discover new possibilities. It will be a space to think about and discuss what’s working, what’s not and what could shift, both internally and externally, in order for us to create a better future. It will be a space to help you to tap into your own intuition and creativity so we can collectively create a better world for ourselves and the generations to come.
Content I’ve appreciated this week:
Darcy Dudeck’s discussion of the collective consciousness in The Matrix and the Collective Consciousness.
Ganga Devi Braun’s We Belong to the Living World.
Kerala Taylor’s Permission to Feel Anger.
The postpartum trauma plot by Amanda Mortei
Kirstin Power’s We Don't Need 'Self-Help,' We Need Support
Brett Scott’s Against the Factory Farming of Creativity.
What a beautiful experiment with your little son. We chose to go screenfree. It accelerated our connection and learning with everything else.
"After all, many of us (mostly us millennials and younger generations) have been living with social media for a solid 20 years now. That’s a very long time"-- Indeed, I can divide my life into pre- and post- iPad (and then the like), it's been fraught. Thanks for sharing, Jennifer.