Celebrate Screen-Free Week for your family's health -- and for a fun prize!
Do your kids spend more time in front of screens -- TV, computers, iPads, etc. -- than you’d like them to? Here’s your chance to change that! April 30th through May 6th is Screen-Free Week!
Can you get YOUR kids to turn off the screens for one full week? Try it and you could win!
Starting April 30th, keep the screens off, and come back here every day to tell us what your kids are doing instead. There are lots of great activities to substitute for screen time, from puzzles, to library visits, to writing letters, to participating in a community clean-up, and much more.
5 moms who participate in the challenge all week will each win a CafeMom frisbee! The more times you update us on your kids’ screen-free activities, the better your chances of winning! Check in often to tell us how your family is handling the challenge!
Not sure if this challenge is for you? Check out some interesting statistics from CommericalFreeChildhood.org:
- Children ages 8 -18 spend average of 4 ½ hours per day watching television, 1 ½ hours using computers, and more than an hour playing video games.
- Children with 2 or more hours of daily screen time are more likely to have increased psychological difficulties, including hyperactivity, emotional and conduct problems, as well as difficulties with peers.
- Direct exposure to TV and overall household viewing are associated with increased early childhood aggression.
And good news:
- Television viewing at a young age is associated with later behavioral problems, but not if heavy viewing is discontinued before age 6.
- Limiting exposure to television during the first 4 years of life may decrease children’s interest in it in later years.
Have fun and enjoy the quality time with your kiddos!
Official Rules
The "Screen-Free Week" Sweepstakes starts on April 27, 2012 at 12:37 pm (ET) and ends on May 6, 2012 at 11:59pm (ET) (the "Sweepstakes Period").
Enter by replying to this post with the screen-free things your kids are doing during the Sweepstakes Period. Multiple
entries are permitted and encouraged, as it increases your chances of
winning.
Five (5) winners will be selected in a random drawing of all eligible
entries to receive a CafeMom frisbee. The
random drawing shall occur on or about May 8, 2012.
*No Purchase Necessary. Open to US residents 16 years and older. Void where prohibited. Click here for the rest of the Official Rules.
My Aspie couldn't go 15 minutes after school without some nice "down time" on his net book! They are cooped up from 8 am till 4 pm in middle school! He needs time to decompress - and I wouldn't take that away from him.... He'd implode, then explode... then... combust!
He rarely watches tv, he mostly plays strategy games on his computer. His parental controls are set so he is restricted from playing violent games.. and can only access approved sites.
My daughter is 17 months and doesn't really care for tv that much but I do let her watch a show on occasion. Instead of watching tv we entertain ourselves by playing outside, reading books, etc.
We just went through not having any screens on for a week while we were moving. My husband took everything to the new house while we were still in the old house, i must say now that we live in the new house, we don't look at television, internet, video games etc... nearly as much as we were before we moved, now that we have a nice back yard, we are outside about 90% of the time. It really isn't as hard as one would think to do this for a week, take it from a mom who just went through it. Good luck.
Misty
Screen free is a great idea. As many hurricanes as we have had over the past 10 yrs, we have spent plenty of weeks without electrictiy much less screens. We read aloud, we play board games, we cheat at poker. We also do 1812 reenacting so my child has spent as many as 4 -5 days learning crafts from painted loinclothed Indians. I recently bought my DD and I a computer (my husband uses his for work so we don't touch it) because we will be moving to an isolated area. Before this, we walked to the library to use theirs. I prefered this because it required us to walk through town, exchange greetings with all we knew and once there others would greet us and generally many people would know who we were and that we were still alive.
In our new house in the mountains, we will not have broadcast tv. In the past, when we have spent the summer there - guess what happens? When kids don't have tv - THEY DEVELOPE HOBBIES!!!!!! It's true. without broadcast tv, kids get smarter and more conversational right before your eyes. You can actually watch it happening.
I guess I'm tuning in too late for the challenge, but we're on day 3 unintentionally. I had 2 days off work and we were outside A LOT, then tonight we ate dinner outside, watered the gardens and went for a walk that ended up three times as long because it turned into a "let's visit all the outdoor neighborhood cats" tour. haha
Just THROW it AWAY!!!
- Cafe Kristin
on Apr. 27, 2012 at 12:37 PM