The title of this has the potential to put people right off reading it. But, before you scroll past, please just pause to give us a minute of your time.
If you strike gold, you want to tell your nearest and dearest where to go and mine the depths, right? Well, this blog post is us doing that.
Until relatively recently we had never wanted to be a screen-free (or minimal screen) family. Screens are convenient, they can keep little ones safe when you’re cooking hot food, and they can be educational too. Sometimes we feel like we need them to survive the day.
But we were noticing some unhelpful patterns in our family, not just for the children but for us adults too – screens often make us less engaged with the kids, more irritable and sometimes lazy.
As for the children, they would argue about what to watch, and would not be able to self-regulate once we turned it off. We tried watching on two devices, we tried watching only a Christian streaming service (Minno), we tried taking it in turns. But we had never tried going without screens.
Over a series of situations (nightmares from cartoons; inappropriate morality on children’s TV, violent play acting), conversations with other mums battling similar situations and things that I had read, I (Cathy) felt like God was calling me to try and massively reduce the screen time in our family.
I knew that this would be sacrificial – our 2 year old sometimes gets up at 5.30am; I knew that I couldn’t do it in my own strength; and I knew that Scott and I couldn’t be hypocritical and spend time on our phones while calling our children to occupy themselves with other endeavours.
I was contemplating the verse “Do nothing out of selfish ambition[…] but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” Would I be willing to get through fewer books on my goodreads each year (what I often do at 5.30am in the morning), have a less tidy house, engage more fully with the children for their entire waking day?
I prayed, I strewed (more about this later), I went to bed early – and the next morning I was really pleasantly surprised. No. I was astonished.
The children didn’t even ask for TV.
So back to the strewing. Strewing is something that I came across on a homeschooling blog. You basically leave out games, toys and activities to entice your children to play with them. I’m not talking about elaborately themed tuff trays here (although if you like that sort of thing then go ahead!). I simply mean, get out a colouring book and some crayons and put them on the table. Put a couple of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together and leave the rest undone. Put together the trainset. Or place the doll and her accessories on the sofa. It can actually be really fun! It’s fun to get out toys that aren’t often played with, and even more fun to set them up like they’ve been partying through the night. We enjoying putting Woody and Buzz on the piano stool as if they were playing it together, and seeing our son’s enjoyment of it the next morning.
It requires 5 minutes of getting out toys before you go to bed. But honestly, it’s so worth it!
Now before we go any further, I think it’s important to say that we usually shy away from “how-to” blog posts like this. Because this is a gospel-centred parenting blog. The gospel is the main thing. We can most definitely use screens to the glory of God. We can also be screen-free in a self-righteous way.
But as we said before, if you strike gold, you want to share the location of the gold mine with those you love. While the amount of screen time a family consumes has no effect at all on their standing before God (we are justified freely by God’s grace, not our own efforts), it is true to say that as Christians we need to live intentionally and thoughtfully in every area of our lives – seeking to bring glory to God.
Reducing the amount of screen time that the children consume has massively benefitted our family. There are far fewer arguments among the children, better engagement between parents and children and far fewer instances of unhelpful behaviour like play fighting and bad language. Rather than filling their minds with unhelpful entertainment, we get an opportunity to develop good and beautiful appetites in our children.
whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
Philippians 4:8
So if you’re wondering what the silver bullet might be for your parenting, then we’d have to of course say that there isn’t one. Parenting isn’t a formula and it certainly isn’t that easy. But for us as a family, reducing the screen time has been the nearest thing to a silver bullet that we’ve ever encountered.