More Than A Year of Screenless Sundays in a Family of Five

At the start of January 2025, it was eerily quiet in my home. It was very strange because in a family with three kids, things should not be this quiet when everyone is home. I stepped away from my work computer, headphones still on, and walked around my place to check on my offspring. Three faces lit by the blue light, never even lifting their eyes from the screens to acknowledge my presence. That’s not right, I thought. Something must be done.

How it started

I said to my husband that over covid, our lives have turned from “living life with occasional mindless screen time” to “screentime interrupted by necessary life functions” and that we needed to do something. He took off his own headphones and said: “What?” (mildly kidding).

After some discussion, we decided to start Screenless Sundays — one day a week, mindless use of screens is prohibited (Youtube, videogames).

“But for adults too,” my eight-year-old said. “Otherwise, it would be outrageous,” she added to illustrate the gravity of her demand. It took all we had to keep straight faces as parents at that one.

Naturally, some ground rules were established:

• It doesn’t mean that you are prohibited to use screens at all like in that bet in Modern Family.

• You can listen to Spotify, use Pinterest for drawing prompts or crochet patterns, you can check WhatsApp to see whether someone messaged you, you can video-chat with a friend, you can use navigation in the car, check bus schedules or opening hours, etc.

• No mindless endless scrolling or staring or gaming, and no social media for adults (meaning Reddit for my husband - I have sworn off social media years ago).

How it’s going

Let me tell you: I was afraid that my preschooler and two pre-teens would protest against it, but they viewed it as a fun experiment.

The first Screenless Sunday, we played board games, talked to each other lots more, did some straightening up, danced to fun songs… We are a family of Lego-addicted bookworms, so self-entertainment is very easy if you get tired of group activities.

I was shocked when my youngest suggested after a couple of months we add Screenless Wednesdays to Screenless Sundays. We tried to implement it, but this amendment did not last. We have kept the Sundays, though.

Impact

Screenless Sundays prompt my husband and I to do a lot more around our home, in terms of chores, planning, maintenance, and making up ideas to make the place cozier or more practical for all five of us living there.

We talk more, sit together more, read more, play manual FreeCell (very satisfying with the real-world tangible deck of cards), sip coffee in silence… I usually roll my eyes when someone starts preaching mindfulness, but I’m pretty sure we ended up having more of it on Sundays.

My kids talk and play together more, dance to music more, sing karaoke, they engage in lots of arts and crafts, and even when the house is silent, it is alive with tiny sounds of scissors cutting color papers, Lego pieces crackling as we’re searching for that one key tiny piece, quiet conversations and little laughs as the kids joke together…

Conclusion

I love our Screenless Sundays. Life feels slower that way, it feels like I can take a breath without feeling the constant bombardment of ads and notifications. I feel like I don’t have to care about the online world for one day. And it is a glorious feeling.

I recommend Screenless Sundays to anyone who listens, and most reactions are “Oh that sounds lovely, but I could not possibly suggest this in my house, my kids would eat me alive.”

Well, that’s what I had thought, and I have a 1.5 years of happy Screenless Sundays behind me to back up the opposite.

So go ahead, take that Sunday offline just this once, and see where it takes you.

THANK YOU FOR READING THIS FAR. TAKE CARE!

Credits:
- This post was originally published in the Medium publication “Change Your Mind, Change Your Life”.
- Photo by Marjan Blan on Unsplash