Discover Life Beyond the Screen!

By Michael Anne Conley, LMFT

How much are you facing a screen? How often do you clock out of your technology? What would happen if you set aside the cell phone for a day, or didn’t watch the tube – or the YouTube – for a week?

These are not idle questions as we approach this year’s Screen-Free Week, scheduled from April 30 to May 6. It’s only a few weeks away, so here’s a head start in considering whether – and how – you might play with life beyond the screen.

I don’t know about you, but I can imagine a week without television because I lived it. Growing up in the high mountain desert of the southwest where I was a kid, television reception was hit-or-miss.

Then we got hooked up to cable when I was about 12, and you would think the floodgates would open, but no. Our Los Angeles cousins could watch a gazillion TV stations all around the clock, and on visits we could guzzle along with them. But at home, the cable limited us to three networks that clocked out every night.

And it only got worse! Parental rules decreed that television was off-limits on school nights. Just imagine, parents who make rules like that.

And yet, it’s well worth considering — and trying just for a week.

It’s possible you live in an average American home, which has more televisions than people. Although only 42% of us think TVs are a necessity, the Pew Research Center reported in 2010 that the televisions we do buy keep getting bigger.

I thought it was good news that 42% is down 22 points from the 2006 statistic, but we all know this trend isn’t happening because we’re facing each other over the dinner table instead of a screen, much less going for more walks, playing games or reading poetry.

We’ve just expanded the kind of screen we watch. In the 1940s, television began its ascent as the medium of the day. In 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh computer – and then used television itself to announce a sea change in our relationship to screens with its infamous ‘big brother’ Super Bowl ad.

Ten years later, the first TV-Turnoff campaign was initiated. In 2010 it was renamed Screen-Free Week to acknowledge reality: The merging into a multitude of screens – television, computer, video game, cell phone, mp3 player, electronic reader and tablet.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood sponsors Screen-Free week and says on average, pre-school children are exposed to more than 32 hours of screen time a week. Older children get even more. That’s equivalent to a full-time job! A number of concerns are tied to the number of hours that kids spend with their face in a screen, says the CCFC, including obesity, poor school performance and problems with attention span.

Children deserve to have broader experiences that will help them develop into vital, creative and engaged adults. Examples: Learning to entertain themselves and play with each other helps children develop self-regulation – which is essential for healthy adult relationships; playing outdoors gives children a personal experience of their own physical capacity and attune to the natural world, which helps them develop an inner compass that can sustain them throughout life.

Sure, the information provided by all of our screens, can be valuable. But knowledge alone is not wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience. Having a wider range of experiences, including time away from our screens, is a smart choice for parents to make for their kids and for adults to practice themselves.

Screen-Free Week is a great time to experiment. The great thing is, you don’t have to do it on your own. CCFC has an information kit to invite individuals, families, neighborhoods, schools and community groups to have fun with this.

To “rediscover the joys of life beyond the screen,” go to www.screenfree.org.

Michael Anne Conley is a health educator, licensed marriage and family therapist and the director of Stillpoint Integrative Health Center at 953 Mountain View Drive in Lafayette. She has been supporting people whose habits create problems for themselves and others for 27 years.

Originally published in Lafayette Today (April, 2012).