"I CAN'T BE A LIAR ANYMORE..." // How Our Family of 7 Did a Screen Free Week.

“Daddy! I have to tell you the truth.  I can’t be a liar anymore,”  she says bravely, bottom lip quivering.

“It’s 4:30 in the morning; this is too early for real parenting,”  I think to my self. “Don’t yell. Don’t yell. Don’t yell…” I repeat my mantra silently in my head. 

Ms. Wilde walks over to her bed. She’s basically the cutest human to ever live, all bundled up in her furry house coat and fuzzy slippers, cat ears still perched on top of her head. She bends down and reaches under her bed, pulling out her iPad, the one that was charging on the kitchen counter when I went to sleep last night.  

I look at her, disappointed. She bursts into tears.

“I just can’t help myself.  There are too many good things to watch in there! I need you to take it away and hide it from me Daddy!”

I bend down and give her the biggest, sweetest hug I have ever given her because, well, haven’t we all been here?  I know I have.  Knowing what’s good for us but just literally not being able to make ourselves do the thing. ::Ahem:: Like going to bed on time, or eating three healthy meals a day, hypothetically speaking.

Needing a force outside of ourselves to make us do what’s best for us. It’s why high performers, in sports, in music, in business, in life, have a coach.  Someone to hold us accountable, someone to make us do the shit we don’t want to do.  Like sleep instead of sneaking your iPad in the middle of the night to watch hours of SuperWHY? (Which is very educational by the way, good choice kid). Ms Wilde doesn’t have a life coach yet to help her make good choices, instead she’s got parents, one of whom actually is a badass life coach, so I guess she has both, but shit, in that moment I was ON!

I bent down and took her iPad. Then I held her sweet face in my hands, wiped away her sad little tears and told her how proud I was for being so brave.  I told her that the voice she could hear inside her, the one that was telling her to tell me the truth even though she knew she would be in trouble, the pounding in her chest, the way she is feeling right now— REMEMBER THIS FEELING.  And always listen to it. Because it’s telling her the right thing to do. The brave thing to do. And I was so so so proud of her for listening to it and doing the brave thing.

She hugged me tightly.  I scooped her up and tucked her furry little self into bed.

If I can give her anything in this world it would be to trust that voice inside of her to guide her through this world. 

That voice is her inner knowing, her intuition, her compass, her spidey sense.  We’ve all got it, but mostly we’re taught, by very well meaning and loving adults, to ignore it, push it down, push past it.  By the time we’re adults ourselves, we’ve mostly silenced our inner knowing and now pay many dollars to sit in warm, candle lit rooms with other adults who’ve forgotten their inner knowing, where some teacher attempts to guide us back into our bodies through yoga, meditation or those new badass spin classes.

What if we didn’t have to work so hard to access that inner knowing?

What if we didn’t lose it to begin with?  What if we worked with it, and amplified it and let it guide us?  I know that I would have lived as my true self a lot earlier.  I wonder who else I might be.  I wonder who we all might be. 

These are the things I ponder early in the morning. These are the conversations I want to be having with my kids.  Even if they are at 4:30am.

This pre-dawn conversation is how and why we started our screen-free detox last week. 

The truth is that it’s something we should have done a long time ago.  I’ve known it. Katherine and I have talked about it.  But it falls squarely into that category of things I was talking about earlier…

Things you know you should do but JUST CAN’T force yourself to do yet.  Until your 5 your old begs you to hide her iPad in the middle of the night. 

So that’s what I did.

The results have blown me away. 

Last Tuesday our littles went screen free outside of family movie and T.V. watching.

I put their iPads on the top shelf of my Cloffice and haven’t looked back since.  

But how the hell did you survive your kids, you ask?  

Didn’t they revolt?

The short answer is yes.  They sure as hell did.  I just didn’t give in.  When I thought about backing down, I remembered that sweet little girl’s face at 4am and then I let them have their very big, very wild feelings about it. I said things like “Wow! You’re really upset about this huh? It’s hard to miss things that make us feel good.”  Along with a lot of “You can feel as sad or as angry as you want about this but you have to have those feelings in a way that is fair and safe to the rest of the family.  Why don’t you go have those big feelings in your room?”  and a little bit of me loosing my ever loving mind, and yelling back at her sprinkled in there just to keep it real.

And then eventually on day 3 they just stopped asking.  

Instead they made hats for their stuffed animals, they created imaginary worlds, and they coloured some epic pictures, and they played a lot of Guess Who with each other, which is maybe the most hilarious thing you’ve ever seen.

Yes, it was hard. Yes, it was 100% worth it, but no, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with screens.  The world requires technology from our kiddos, it serves us in so many ways, in fact I’ll probably reintroduce ours any time now.  But I’ll do it more deliberately, because now that I know what sort of magic exists in a screenless world I want to make sure we have access to it day in and day out. 

Just please not at 4:30am.