I can't believe it's already back to school time. Kidlet started 4th grade this week, and that marked the end of our Screen-Free Summer experiment. For those who haven't been following along, at the beginning of summer we decided that kidlet would have no video games, iPad, or computer time this summer. He could watch TV and movies with us as a family, but that would be his only screen time. (Get links to all the previous posts at the bottom of this post.)

The summer has gone so much better than I ever could've hoped for. The experiment ended up being not just great for the kiddo but for us too. We have introduced kidlet to a bit of our 80s childhood--we watched "old" movies (The Back to the Future movies were his favorite), we played endless games of UNO and rediscovered board games we'd forgotten about (hubs and I now are slightly obsessed with Upwords), kidlet and I watched a bunch of The Goldbergs (sticking with our 80s theme, lol), and so many more things (frisbee, library visits, flag football, guitar lessons, kidlet learning to cook with me, etc.)

So what were the outcomes of the experiment?

Some things kidlet did that I know wouldn't have happened if we hadn't gone device-free:

He got completely into his guitar lessons. I don't have to prompt him to practice. He goes to his guitar and practices daily because he wants to. In fact, he did his first concert this past weekend and in only three months, he was picked as lead guitar on one of the rock songs. He was so great!
One day he decided that the video game he really wanted to play hadn't been invented yet, so he took a stack of looseleaf and started drawing up his plans for the game he would invent, each page was another screenshot of the game.
He got into devising and decorating a calendar for each month to plan his activities. (see photo of the calendar in this post) So now at the beginning of the month, he maps out all the fun things he wants to do, chooses movies for the movie nights, and selects meals he wants to help cook.
He fell in love with UNO. I have lost count of how many games we've played lol.
He's discovered a love for audiobooks (via the library visits.)
He inspired my husband and I to take our own hard look at ourselves and our smartphone/internet time.

And what about the things that prompted us to go device-free in the first place?

Kidlet's motor tics, which had gotten pretty bad toward the end of the school year, have almost disappeared. Every now and then I'll see a small one appear, but it's so subtle that no one but me or hubs who know him so well would even catch it. It's a dramatic difference.
Kidlet had started getting grumpy, irritable, and defiant with us on a regular basis, which was outside his normally sunny personality. That whole attitude/defiance thing has disappeared. Not to say he doesn't have his moments. He's a kid. But it's rare and short-lived. This has probably been one of the biggest changes. His general mood has just been happier and more relaxed.
Kidlet's preoccupation/desire for the video games and devices disappeared in about a week. The spell can definitely be broken.

In fact, the device-free summer has been so great that I was kind of dreading the end of it because I liked the new rhythm we'd established and my pleasant kid. But I gave my word to kidlet that it was just for the summer and I wasn't going to go back on that. However, I warned him during the summer that when it came back, there would be limits.

So this week, I told kidlet that he can have 100 minutes a week on devices (any device counts unless it's something for school work) and he can budget those minutes how he wants. He was fine with that and, in his analytical way, immediately started figuring out how he wanted to budget them. But he also told me last night: "Mom, can we do device-free summer next summer? I really liked it."

*cue me doing a victory dance in my head* lol

And really, I completely understand where he's coming from. I've dialed back a lot of my social media and smartphone time this summer, too. I also took a three-week internet break when I was finishing my book. Coming back, I had a small sense of dread because the break had been freeing in a lot of ways. So I think that might be how kidlet is feeling now. So, I I told him we could do it again next summer and that just because devices were back didn't mean he HAD to use them. He could be device-free anytime he wanted.

Yesterday was his first day back with access. He spent 10 minutes playing a video game with a friend who came over and then last night used another few minutes to create Spotify playlists of the songs he wants to learn on guitar. Then he put it all away to watch some TV with me. He didn't rush back to them like he'd been deprived of anything.

So I'm declaring this summer a roaring success. I'm so very glad we decided to give this a try. It's been life-changing in a hundred little ways for all of us. : )

Anyone else do any experiments over the summer?

Previous posts on the Screen-Free Summer:

Other Related Posts:

If you've been following me this summer, you know that we embarked on a device-free or screen-free summer for kidlet. (Device-free is more accurate because we allowed watching TV and movies as a family but screen-free summer had alliteration, lol.) Here are the previous posts:

The experiment has gone so much better than I expected. I anticipated much more push back and problems. I expected it to be HARD. In truth, week one was hard. The rest has been...surprisingly easy. We've developed new routines and habits. Kidlet knows he's going to get his devices back in very limited quantities (20 min max a day) once summer is over, but he hasn't complained or asked for devices. The pull they had on him before (what inspired this screen-free summer idea in the first place) has disappeared. So I'm thrilled that we decided to take the leap and go cold turkey all summer (as scary as it seemed at the time.)

In addition to helping him, this whole experiment has opened my eyes a lot and helped me as well. I've wrangled a lot of my device time and social media time and have developed an aversion to things that are stealing my focus. Part of that is because I'm the type of person who wants to know ALL the things about a topic when I'm interested in it, so I have read A LOT of books about smartphones, social media, internet addiction, the changes technology has caused in how we interact, how our brains function, and how we live our lives.

I'm not sure I'm capable of summarizing the wealth of information I've read this summer, but I thought, for those interested, I could post the books I've read and share some of the quotes I highlighted while reading. So, that's what I plan to do this week. Each day, I'll post one of the books I read and the quotes I found most interesting or helpful.

Now, a disclaimer, I'm posting all of this without judgment. If you're into your devices and social media and don't feel the need to disconnect sometimes or back off of it, that's totally cool. I'm sharing this because I didn't like how things were trending with my lack of focus and my free time and family time being eaten up by my phone. So if it's not interfering with you or your family, then feel free to skip these posts. But otherwise, I think there's good food for thought in these books even if you aren't looking to make changes right now.

First up is The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris.

This one mainly focused on our ability to be in the quiet, to be bored, to be alone. I thought he had a lot of interesting and thoughtful things to say about how the internet, smartphones, and social media have changed us.

Here are the quotes that stood out to me:

"Evolution (nature) endowed us with minds capable of fast and furious transformation, minds able to adapt to strange new environments (nurture) within a single lifetime—even within a few weeks. Therefore, we’re always products of both inherited hardware and recently downloaded software... The flip side of all this, though, is that young brains, immersed in a dozen hours of screen time a day, may be more equipped to deal with digital reality than with the decidedly less flashy reality reality that makes up our dirty, sometimes boring, often quiet, material world."

"we now need to proactively engineer moments of absence for them. We cannot afford to count on accidental absence any more than we can count on accidental veggies at dinner. Without such engineered absences (a weekend without texting, a night without screens), our children suffer as surely as do kids with endless access to fast food. The result is a digital native population that’s less well rounded than we know they could be."

This is part of what spurred me to do the device-free summer. I have an amazing kiddo. I knew he was capable of more than running to his Xbox or Ipad every free moment of the day.

"It’s becoming more and more obvious. I live on the edge of a Matrix-style sleep, as do we all. On one side: a bright future where we are always connected to our friends and lovers, never without an aid for reminiscence or a reminder of our social connections. On the other side: the twilight of our pre-Internet youths. And wasn’t there something . . . ? Some quality . . . ?"

This one above really made me think because I think sometimes what we chalk up to "nostalgia" may be more than that. There was a quality to my childhood and those pre-internet years that's missing. I've learned this summer that it's not something that can't be reclaimed. Doing things like playing old school board games with kidlet or teaching him how to cook or watching him make up his own games has recaptured some of what I didn't even realize was missing.

"Children do need moments of solitude as well as moments of healthy interaction. (How else would they learn that the mind makes its own happiness?) But too often these moments of solitude are only stumbled upon by children, whereas socialization is constantly arranged."

I loved that line about how would they learn their minds make their own happiness.

"Despite the universality of this change, which we’re all buffeted by, there is a single, seemingly small change that I’ll be most sorry about. It will sound meaningless, but: One doesn’t see teenagers staring into space anymore. Gone is the idle mind of the adolescent."

Things I'd never thought about, but so true. Everyone has their heads down looking at their phones now.

"Solitude may cause discomfort, but that discomfort is often a healthy and inspiring sort. It’s only in moments of absence that a daydreaming person...can receive truly unexpected notions."

Sound familiar, writers?

"What will become of all those surreptitious gifts when our blank spaces are filled in with duties to 'social networks' and the relentless demands of our tech addictions?"

"I fear we are the last of the daydreamers. I fear our children will lose lack, lose absence, and never comprehend its quiet, immeasurable value."

God, I hope this is not the case. As a writer who makes her living in the world of imagination and daydreaming, I hope a new crop of writers, artists, creators is behind me.

"Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose."

This quote will stick with me. It's going to make me stop and think--when I look at this device, social network, whatever, what am I looking away from? I'm not a Luddite who is going to totally disconnect from the online world, but I'm becoming a lot more deliberate and choosy about how and where I'm spending my time and energy.

Needless to say, I found this book an engrossing read. I have more to share from other books the rest of this week, but I think this one did an excellent job of making the case for creating time in your life and your children's lives for solitude, quiet, absence, boredom, and blank spaces for your brain to daydream in.

Dream on, y'all. ;)

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