How We Became a Screen Free Family – Screen Free Series

This post may contain affiliate links to products we love and use. We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.
A lot of questions I receive have something to do with us being a screen free family. So it’s time to dive into all the details and share our story. Now, there is a lot to say about this, so we are going to turn it into a series.
You can expect videos about why we became screen free, what our children do on a daily basis, what they do instead of gaming or watching TV and if we never watch TV? We will dive into all the details on my YouTube channel.
Here’s video one in this series, and it talks all about How we became screen free. And the reason might surprise you!
If you are more into reading, keep scrolling!
What does screen free mean to us?
Before we dive into the How, let’s discuss what it means to us to be a screen free family. Because let’s be honest, that can mean 100 different things to 100 different people.
So for us it basically means two things:
- No daily screens for our children. We had decided to limit the screen time of our children when our oldest was really young, but in recent years it has come down even more. We are now at the point where our kids do not use a screen in their every day life.
That means, we do not watch TV every day. They watch a fun show every Wednesday for about 1 hour. It depends on what they are watching, the weather, etc.
The children have also never played a game on our phone. Now they will tell you otherwise, because the games they do as part of their curriculum is their ‘gaming’ time, and it is so cute. It’s basically just reading games and letter recognition, but they love it!
Our kids are 7, 4 and 1 and they do not have a phone. I never thought I had to say this, but apparently every 4 year old has there own phone where we live. So I guess it’s important to note that they do not own one, and won’t for a very long time. - Being intentional about using our phone/laptop/ipad as parents. This is often the tricky part for people. But I do not want my children to watch screens all day, so it’s normal to also want that for myself. I use screens for my job (this blog and YouTube) so I need to be very intentional about when and how long I use my laptop.
In order to be intentional I had to create a good schedule for myself when I do and do not use my phone. My work hours are usually early morning, nap time or in the evening. But you can find more about my schedule here.
How we became screen free
On to the good stuff.. How did we actually become screen free. And as much as I’d like to say it was this huge intentional decision we made as a couple, it was not. It was basically the opposite.
A few days after the birth of our daughter, we moved to a new home. We had a TV, a sound system and all the things needed for a TV set up. When we moved into this home, we even arranged our furniture around the TV (Which is craziness to me now..)
We hung our TV on the wall and enjoyed it for two whole weeks. Yes just two weeks. Because then our TV broke down. And we could not fix it. We decided to sell it for a few bucks to someone who said he could (which, fun fact. He did. And it was the simplest thing to replace. Lol)
Anyway, we sold our TV, but had no money to purchase a new one. So we just used the TV stand for other things until we thought. You know what, having no TV is actually really nice!
At the time I was building my previous business, we listened to a bunch of teaching and loved reading. So why would we even NEED a new TV?! We had so much time, we spent more time together and with the kids, our home was quieter and the children were perfectly fine without a TV.
So we decided, let’s not buy a new TV at all for the near future. And that decision was made almost 5 years ago. And we are still extremely content with it. It was honestly the best ‘unintentional decision’ we ever made!
So now what?!
At this point in time, we do not plan to purchase a TV for a while. It has been such a blessing to our family. But I will share much more on that topic in later videos. So please subscribe to our YouTube channel so you do not miss any new videos I am posting!
If you have any questions about us being screen free, how we do this, what our children do or anything else; feel free to comment below and I will get back to you. I might also film a Q&A.
You might also like
Teach your children to play independently
A schedule of a stay at home mom of three
All the Screen Free posts in one spot
Pin it for later
