The gift of a screen-free summer

Recently I was talking with a friend with elementary-aged kids. She was enjoying the early morning while they slept late, with nowhere they had to be. It brought back memories of long unstructured days when our kids were little and had time for playing make believe, running around outside, dressing up, building forts, and inventing games. Summer is a season of creativity for families. Or at least it can be—if you don’t answer boredom with a screen.

I asked my friend if her boys had ever made a “Rube Goldberg.” She’d heard the name but wasn’t sure what I was talking about. Goldberg, an American cartoonist in the early 1900s, drew fantastical machines to perform comically complex chain reactions to accomplish simple tasks. Think Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions or how Max the dog makes coffee in the most recent Grinch movie. Our three boys used to spend half a day setting them up. Once, their contraption ran from the second floor to the basement. They used dominoes, Keva blocks, library books, Matchbox tracks and cars, marbles, bouncy balls, bells, and more—to turn off the basement light. All they needed was “nothing to do” to spark hours of imaginative play.

They were as prone as any kid to whine, “I’m bored!”—the cry of every child at some point in the summertime. But they stopped once they realized those words were my cue to hand them the broom or dust cloth and extra chores. In our family, boredom wasn’t a problem for mom or dad to solve, it was an opportunity for our kids to dream up something interesting to do offline.

Despite the glut of evidence that screens cause real harms to children and teens, many parents have responded to boredom—and muted the creativity it can spark—with screens. Understandably, they worry about what their kids will miss if they don’t have a smartphone. But what about all they’ll miss if they do? Summer is prime time to be active in the real, tangible, physical world, with embodied siblings and friends—something screens seriously undermine.

For parents who “feel stuck,” Clare Morell’s new book The Tech Exit offers timely help and hope. She says summer is a great time to detox and shows how to do it as a family. It requires much of parents—time, attention, and the willingness to be off of our phones more. But it’s a sacrifice loaded with potential and the benefits of redeeming the time (Ephesians 5:16). Her interviews and research are ballast against the feeling that everyone has a smartphone and social media (they don’t), that they’re safe enough with parental controls (they’re not), and that there’s no way you can take back tech once you’ve given in (you can).

Morell’s book is helping me re-evaluate phones in our season of parenting. When our youngest got his license this year, we gave him a phone with an internet filter, GPS, email, and text (he’s got to be able to FaceTime me from the grocery store, right?) But my conscience troubled me, are those conveniences worth the risks of always being distracted? Phones are nearly irresistible once they start buzzing in your pocket. Watching him habitually check his phone the day he got it—even without social media—gave me pause. It also challenged me about how much I check my phone. Spurred on by Morell, and Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, we changed his phone settings so it works even more like a tool, not a private entertainment box. We’re back to sharing a laptop for going online, in a family setting. It’s not worth any convenience to lose his heart, or the family culture we worked so hard to build early on.

If you’ve gone along with the cultural flow, a low-tech summer might feel impossible for your kids—and you. But there’s help, a lot of it. In the year since Jonathan Haidt sounded the alarm about screens in The Anxious Generation, many parents are countering the fear of missing out by finding like-minded friends to join them in opting out. They’re forming communities of support to return their children to a phone-free, real world childhood, and organizations are rallying people to restore childhood to one that is play-based. States are enacting restrictions on smartphones in schools, and full-on bans are spreading.

Eight years ago, our third born posted a handwritten list on the fridge with 25 checkboxes. Beside each were things like “make a bird feeder, buy & fly a kite, read twenty books, eat ice cream, enjoy the sun.” Also listed was “visit Great Gramma, learn a song as a family, make fizzy lemonade.” I’m not sure how many we did, but my heart aches to think how that list would never have been written, nor those things longed for, if he’d had a phone. He was just 10—a year away from the average age when kids get their first smartphone.

Do you remember what you looked forward to at the start of summer when you were young, before tech was dissipating everyone’s attention? Instead of giving your kids screens, help them to dream about what’s possible. Encourage them to make their own list and do some of what’s on it with them. The days will fly by. Don’t let screens rob you of your children, or your children of the wonder of summer.