A few days before Lent this year, still unsure what we would give up as spiritual discipline, I realized that as a family our relationship with screens had become severely disordered. At various points in previous years, we’ve had rules around not using screens after dinner, or not on school days, etc., but we’d let a lot of that slip especially for our younger daughter (age 7). So we decided to collectively give up screens for Lent. (Caveat, my husband gave up social media, but he only gave up screens basically when we were all awake; I attempted to give them up completely except for necessarily school-related things.)
Overall it was wonderful, though there were definitely some challenges!
The 12-year-old was totally fine the whole time; she loves reading and playing board games and doing handicrafts, so I don’t think she really even missed using screens that much.
Going into this I was really excited about how much more time I would have for reading and writing and commonplacing, and maybe I’d get back into cross-stitching….and I didn’t really have much more time for any of that, which makes me think that maybe my own screentime wasn’t as disordered as I thought. I did spend a lot more weekend/day off time reading in the morning, which was beneficial.
It was of course harder for the 7-year-old. She struggled a lot the first week or so trying to figure out what to do (lots of “but I don’t know what to dooooooo” whining), but within a week she wasn’t really whining at all - she got home from school and immediately started playing with her toys, Lego sets, pretend games with her sister, making her own bizarre crafts (she’s never been much for planned crafts), or going outside to the trampoline. It was wonderful to see that, and she definitely benefitted most from this time. It made a huge difference to her attitude overall, too.
That said, once she knew Lent was over, some of the whining has restarted as we kept school-week limits in place, especially if her sister isn’t available to play with her. She CAN play by herself, she’s proven it these last several weeks, but it’s definitely not her default mode, and if she’s not in the right mood for playing alone, she has a hard time letting go of wanting someone to play with. I do have hope that a lot of this hurdle will be breached when she can read fluently herself - the made a world of difference with current 12yo. That’s this summer’s major goal for me.
For me: It was good to introduce some analog friction into a lot of my everyday activities - using a pocket notebook instead of doing/looking things up immediately on my phone, printing out articles to read, spending more time reading rather than watching shows or playing video games. That said, I’m still struggling with how or how much to digitize what I did offline during Lent - my typical workflow is highlighting in Readwise Reader, which automatically syncs article highlights to Obsidian, my note-taking app, where I can then atomize notes or quotes. But I also don’t now how much I’m actually using the results of this workflow (articles get archived into Obsidian, but…I haven’t really been using them after that). So maybe I don’t need it?
For 12yo: Totally not worried about her relationship to screens. She enjoys video games but plays in moderation, doesn’t have a phone and doesn’t want one, she enjoys movies with us as a family but doesn’t really crave movies or TV or YouTube or anything else.
For 7yo: She would be better off completely without screens, but that is not really a fit for our family as a whole, so the goal moving forward is to keep her solo screen time to a minimum, refocus our screen usage on family time (movies together, games we’re playing together, etc) and encourage balance with all the other kinds of activities she (re)discovered during Lent.
The biggest thing I MISSED was being able to watch movies together on Saturday nights, our typical family movie night. We did occasionally did it on Sundays (which our church recognizes as feast days and Lenten restrictions don’t apply). I do think my 7yo has figured out that I’m much more likely to say yes to watching a movie (especially a classic!) than games or YouTube, and I’m okay with that. :) We watched both West Side Story and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers yesterday, and they don’t affect her attitude nearly as much as other things she watches, leaving opportunity cost the only real consideration there.
I did find that Sunday feast days actually often turned into binge days where we tried to catch up on all the screen stuff we didn’t do during the week, which was not restful. If we do this again in the future, I will think differently about how to rest/feast well on Sundays.
The biggest thing that caused me to fail was needing to look up recipes that I only had saved online. I could’ve had my husband print them for me, and I did do that in the beginning, but quickly fell into allowing myself an exception to look up recipes. Toward the end of Lent we had some good ideas about using a discbound-type notebook or something to keep a recipe book for frequently-used recipes, so I may implement that and remove this as an issue for the future.
Overall, I feel like I have a much better sense now of what screen-related activities are necessary and valuable and which ones are pure distractions or actually detrimental. For that reason alone, I highly recommend a digital/screen fast!
Reading recommendation - I made the plunge into doing this partly on the inspiration of School of the Unconformed, and I want to think Ruth Gaskovski over there for the encouragement to follow through on it! Check out what they’re doing over there, it’s pretty wonderful and helpful for resisting the centrality of technology to modern life.
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