How a Fast From Technology can Trigger Discussions on Influences and Addiction

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A few months ago, a friend of mine decide for Lent that he was going to give up watching all forms of entertainment and limit his technology usage for work only. He said it was actually incredibly refreshing not feeling that he had to jump online and check Facebook or watch the latest Netflix’s special. Intrigued, I tried it for myself and my family for a week and decided to share our experiences.

Our Tech Fast Lowered The Amount Of Outside Influences In Our Home

My children were understandably less excited about this experiment than I was. Luckily only my teenage son had a smartphone to be convinced to give up for the week. My wife and I also gave up our phones. Everyone’s device sat on the kitchen table unless we received a phone call.

It only took a day for my teenage son to become frustrated. We had to sit down and have a conversation about just what was so hard about giving up his phone.

Our son brought up that he was frustrated because he couldn’t “hang out with his friends”. But when I suggested he actually go and physically hang out with friends, he got irritated and defensive, and it turned out the “friends” he was referring to were on on social media like Snapchat and he didn’t actually know where they lived.

We then had a long discussion about smartphone safety while being clear that even though places like Snapchat were marketed to disappear and have no consequences, the truth is that social media doesn’t go away.

We Realized That Addiction Patterns Start Early

During the technology fast, I never thought My Little Pony would be the starting point of an addiction conversation for my family.

To be fair, it does sound silly, because it is silly – for now anyway. But after I endured a huge temper tantrum from my daughter during our technology fast, I really started to wonder when we start forming patterns of addiction. My daughter had replaced most of her old playtime activities for opportunities to watch shows like My Little Pony and Adventure Time. While that may be a light form of addiction, it did leave me an opening to talk about addiction with her and my other two children.

I realized as we talked that my children believed a lot of addiction myths, such as addictions only apply to hard drugs and it’s easy to recognize an addict. This is dangerous, because the more they believed in the false representation of addiction, the less on guard they would be when it came to actual addiction.

This conversation likely would have never come up if we hadn’t had our technology fast, and it has provided a way to continually talk about who and what our children are interacting with on their devices.

Personal Changes For Myself

My week-long technology fast was informative on my end as well. As I work from home with some traveling, I normally have a lot of opportunities to get distracted from my work. From my fast, I gained:

A realization of how much time I waste during the day – When I couldn’t just watch a quick video and justify it as “research” or play a few rounds of Hearthstone as a break, I got so much more work done. By finishing quicker, I was able to spend more time with my family.
New appreciation for old hobbies – I used to enjoy hand-carving when I was younger, but had let the hobby drop off as my children were born. I was amazed at how satisfying it was to pick up my old tools and create something with my hands with no distractions.
More ideas of how to have family time – While my wife and I work hard to have quality family time with our children, we realized that the TV had become a large player in facilitating that time. We now have scaled family movie nights back to twice a month, and have moved toward more engaging family time with board games, museum visits, and other activities that have us playing as a family, not with just the TV.

At times it felt like much longer than a week-long technology fast, but I am glad my family joined me on it. Having all of us work together and recognize the addictive patterns we all engaged in has helped as we have had to discuss other types of addictions.
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