I have a confession. I had originally aimed for a week of no screen time at all but that is HARD! So after about a day or so with absolutely no screen time I decided to settle for letting my daughter have one hour of screen time a day just so I could use that hour to sleep in a little longer, clean the kitchen or work on the blog.
To give you a little background on why I decided to start limiting screen time is that my daughter was starting to act out a lot. Before I could just say that it was just because she is a threenager, I had to really look at the way I was raising her and in what ways I could change my parenting to better our relationship. That is when I noticed that a lot of our days were being spent sitting in front of the television watching shows and so I started looking online to research a little on how screen time can affect your child’s mood. A whole bunch of articles popped up right away and the general consensus of them all was that the more screen time a child has the more moody they can be. I had found my answer and I was ready to make the change to better our family.
It wasn’t an easy transition and I haven’t been very good with sticking to it but that one week where I did really good with limiting our screen time I could see a difference in my relationship with my daughter and her mood right away. Of course the hardest part of this all was being able to find things to fill up our time that had originally been screen time and I was able to find a lot of fun things to do that even I enjoyed doing with my daughter and my one year old son. I wanted to share some of those with you to help give you some ideas on how you can limit screen time in your homes.
2. Play with sock puppets.
3. Make cookies together.
4. Play with an indoor hopscotch.
5. Have a dance party.
6. Play hide and seek.
7. Sensory play with water beads.
8. Color with crayons.
9. Build block towers.
10. Blow up a whole package of balloons.
11. Make moon dough.
12. Do the dishes together.
13. Pretend to be a monster and chase your kids around the house.
15. Play outside.
16. Go to the park.
17. Make a mommy and me craft.
18. Color with markers.
19. Read books.
21. Play with chalk on the driveway.
22. Make dinner together.
23. Paint
25. Go to the library.
26. Play ring around the rosie.
28. Build a fort.
29. Play with Ice.
30. Start a pots and pans band.
31. Make peanut butter playdoh.
32. Look at yourselves in the mirror.
33. Play dress up.
35. Play with pom poms and sort them by color.
36. Play with their toys.
37. Ride bikes.
38. Go on a hike.
39. Do science experiments.
40. Play with bubble wrap.
41. Clean up their toys.
42. Go swimming.
43. Play pretend airplane, firetruck or hospital.
44. Start a preschool curriculum.
45. Take a nap!
Believe it or not, during my week of limited screen time we did a majority of the ideas listed above, it is amazing how much you can fit into a day when you aren’t sitting in front of a screen for a good part of it. Limiting screen time is not easy but it is always worth the benefits you get from spending more quality time with your kids.
what are your favorite screen free activities you like to do with your kids? Let me know in the comments how limiting screen time in your home has helped your family!
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