We live in a world that has many different types of screens. When I was growing up, we only had one TV in our whole house. It was in the living room. Whatever my mom or dad was watching is what we all watched (this was not a good thing because they are not Christians and watched some scary shows). The kids were allowed to watch cartoons on Saturday mornings. That was it.
Fast forward to present day and most people have a TV in every room as well as smartphones, tablets, computers, and video games. It’s a constant stream of screens in our faces. We only have two TVs. We have one in our family room and one in our living room. Neither one has cable. We do have Netflix and Amazon Prime. I have parental controls on both and in order to watch anything I have to put in a code.
I do allow screen time in the mornings. My children wake up SUPER early and I allow them to watch Little House on the Prairie until 7:30 when I get up. After that, the TV goes off until the afternoon if it’s hot and they can’t go outside. My children also have their own tablets. They are cheap tablets with no Internet access and parental controls. They have a few games on them but that’s it.
Lately I’ve been thinking of doing a fast from screens. I rarely watch TV and feel like my kids have asked a lot to be on some kind of screen. It actually started to get very bad when we took off for two weeks from school. They thought it was a free-for-all on the electronics. Boy were they wrong. I had to take away their tablets for one week of that time.
Fasting from screens will give my children some time to read, play with each other, explore outside, and many other non-screen things. They do all of these things anyway but the attitudes toward screens has gotten very bad. Screens are so addictive. I read an article recently about how much time the average child spends each week watching TV and playing video games and it was astronomical. I was shocked. It said the average child spends seven hours a day on screens. Yikes!
My plan is to reduce the amount of screen time over the next few weeks and then do a one week fast from all of it. It will be hard. It will be shocking for my children. But we will get through it. There are so many other things to do besides watching TV. There is so much bad on TV that we don’t have cable because of it (plus the cost).
We may stick out like a sore thumb when we don’t know the latest show on TV or the latest game on the tablet, but we will get to know each other better. That’s my ultimate goal. Being together as a family and spending more time with God. I will be spending a lot of time praying about this fast from screens in order to make the most of it.
Whether you do a full fast from all screens or just limit any time spent on them, make sure it’s what God would have you do. Make sure you are praying about it and seeking His counsel and wisdom. No matter what other people do or say, God will lead you and guide you. So, have you ever done a fast from screens? If so, how did it go?
