Turn Off Week (formerly TV Turn Off Week) always seems to fall during April Vacation! On the one hand, that’s brilliant timing. With most families of kids in front of screens on the go, you can’t hand pick a better time to ask people to avoid screens for an entire week. On the other hand, with screens so ubiquitous, even avoiding them on vacation is easier said than done, as we discovered last year in New York City. From screens on the limo bus to the city to screens in the hotel lobby, restaurants and Times Square, they were impossible to avoid. While I love the concept of Turn Off Week and believe we have to find a way to plug in less and live unplugged more, is it possible to truly unplug and be 100% screen-less for a week?
Well, we can’t, entirely. Some screens we can’t avoid because they are controlled by others. Those are the screens in restaurants, hotels, airplanes, and other similar public places. But, we can control the screens in our immediate lives and homes and those are the screens we should be focusing on during Turn Off Week and all year long. The screens we can avoid are our home computers, laptops, TVs, MP3 players, portable gaming systems. Those are the screens thatTurn Off Week is designed to raise awareness about. Those we can control!
You know the stats by now: kids who have too much screen time at all ages are at risk for obesity, inattention and behavioral issues. A study out last year showed that teens without TVs in their bedrooms were healthier than their teen peers who had TVs in their rooms because they moved more, ate healthier foods and spent more time with their families.
Being unplugged and away from screens more doesn’t just benefit kids but adults as well. In the adult world, groups are becoming very creative in their campaigns to get adults off line and back into the unplugged world. Some groups are going for the “go green” approach, using the rationale that unplugging more is healthier for the environment, while others are sticking with the simple platform that being unplugged is good for our hearts and souls. One blog even suggests taking a “technology Sabbath” to purge form our systems the need to be plugged in all the time. It is easier said than done, as New York Times writer Mark Bittman learned. Describing his experiencing becoming unplugged, he wrote: “I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop . . . I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.”
That should tell us everything we need to know about finding more unplugged time in our family’s lives, as individuals and as a family! As the old poem now goes:
Spring has sprung;
the grass has riz;
I wonder where the family time is??
Its right there…off line waiting for you.
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Turn Off Week is April 18-24, 2010. Here are some resources to take steps to become more unplugged that week, and all year long:
(Originally posted April 2009; Updated April 2010)
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