My Family Traveled Without Devices And Here Is What Happened

Our family is constantly outdoors hiking or at the ocean, but a cascade of small things occurred, starting with my getting quite sick. Before we knew it, the kids (ages 13, 12, 10, 9) were knocking out their daily minimum reading, their daily minimum personal and family chores, then plopping down to play on their tablets.

They were uninterested in other suggestions. Not completely uninterested, but any suggestion lacked enough charm to overpower the allure of their devices. 

I want the kids to be fully present in life, especially if there are people in-person to connect with. I often tell my kids stories of sitting next to strangers on a bus or an airplane or waiting for an elevator. No, you do not have to engage with everyone you encounter (and some people prefer not to interact with you), but there is something about being present and aware. There are, of course, powerful stories, like the alert seventh-grader Dillon Reeves, who was hailed a hero for preventing a school bus from crashing because he was the only one not on his phone. I am not asking my kids to be heroes, though, and they know that. This is about being present and alert to the world around us. 

Our family talks often about the value of giving our brains a break, decompressing in intentional ways, and that it is ok to pause. Growing up, my already instinctive ambition was fueled by the pressures around me to always be “on.” As a young entrepreneur, I slept little, worked hard, strategized harder, until burnout taught me its epic lesson. It took decades to overcome culture-induced survival conditioning to accept that rest was valuable and that I did not need to rest in secret. That just because someone was working hard or frustrated, did not mean I needed to match that energy and work hard and be frustrated too. As I raise my budding entrepreneurs, I try to emphasize the fuel that intentional rest gives us to propel forward. When I saw the devices had become more of a default end-of-day or fill-in-the-gaps activity, I tried not to let my heart sink that the kids had lost sight of intentionality. After enough chats and guiding points and another week going by with zero changes, I pulled what we call a “device reset.” In our house, a Device Reset means that all devices are collected and hidden until a designated time, usually a minimum of one month, but always a clear end date. This is not a “grounding,” but a reestablishing of what normal days should look like. The goal is to establish quality daily habits that enrich our minds, bodies, and each other. 

The first week was the hardest. Everyone was bored. It felt like every waking moment that my partner and I had was spent answering the urgent pleas of boredom. They were reminded quickly that if they come to us asking for ideas, then our ideas will be chores, so they were relegated to fighting amongst themselves until eventually the boredom jar was brought back. They each wrote ideas on torn paper and stuffed them in the jar. Some were hilarious or silly, and some were very clever. 

Our snowboarding trip to Canada was in the middle of this Reset. I was convinced that it may be hard if there is a delay or an extended layover, but that the kids are fully capable of traveling sans-electronics. What happened over the next two weeks surprised even me, the ever-optimist.

The kids were hanging out with each other again, sometimes pairing off, sometimes one would rally the others into a game. We caught them on the couch quizzing one another’s math speed, or setting timers to see how far they could get through a chapter book in a given amount of time. Reading over each other’s shoulders. Drawing and painting together, sometimes with challenges — one sibling would say a topic that they would all draw, then they passed their paper to the right for the next theme to be added to the original drawing, until the paper was filled, and they each held a hysterical rendition of art. They were roping us into playing board games with them. We had to call them back in the house for dinner, a beckoning we missed when devices were overtaking our evenings.

During this time, no one asked about devices coming back early, but they did occasionally mention that they missed a friend or wanted to call a friend to see how their holiday was getting on. We compromised by designating some time on one day to let them call friends from our phones. That satiated the palate. They looked forward to returning to school so they could see their friends again — real, in-person, live connection.

I’ll cut to the magic and tell you, after three weeks, our house was rich with conversation and jokes again — maybe even better than before — the kids were admiring the sunset and able to notice the one lone mountain goat on the mountain as we drove past. When we drove anywhere, they each packed a tote with pens and colored pencils, a sketchbook, and at least one book. The little ones had mounds of small stuffed animals around them and built forts so enormous and complicated that it took us days to tidy up. Raucous thumb wars broke out when we found ourselves waiting at restaurants. It was delicious. Family moments I dreamed of for our family. Yes, sometimes in their boredom, someone would inevitably get on someone else’s nerves, that’s human, but it was a small drop in the bucket of gold we received from the Device Reset rainbow.

We are now home, bags splayed open to be unpacked, while the warmth of the device-free vacation still blankets over me. I am left to wonder, with two weeks remaining in our Device Reset period, what should life look like on the other side? I’m glad for at least the fond memories now associated with the term Device Reset. May we never forget and forever be changed.