Welcome to Motley Mama — honest takes on motherhood, marriage & family.

What Our Family Learned From a Weekend Without Any Screens

The decision came on a Wednesday afternoon, halfway through packing school lunches while half-watching something on my phone I cannot remember now. My husband walked in from his home office and I said, out loud, "What if we just turned everything off this weekend?" By the time the bell rang at 3:15, I had a half-baked plan and a small stack of board games pulled from the back of the linen cupboard.

We live in a quiet pocket of suburban Melbourne, the kind of street where the magpies wake you earlier than your alarm and the kids can ride their scooters to the local primary. Our weekends usually include a Bunnings snag run, a quick stop at Woolworths, and at least one episode of whatever AFL game is on. Our phones are usually part of all of it: the recipe in the cart, the highlights on the couch, the music while we mop. I wanted to see what would happen if the glue quietly holding it all together went missing.

Part of it was practical. I had been reading the eSafety Commission's guidance on family screen habits and noticed how often my own scrolling mirrored my children's. Part of it was spiritual. I have been hungry for a slower kind of attention, the kind that does not flicker. My grandmother would have called it "being present in your own kitchen," and I wanted to taste that again, even for forty-eight hours.

So we made a few rules. Phones in a drawer, not on the table. Tablets charged and shut in the study. The telly off unless we were watching something together. I left the rules on the fridge in my own handwriting, hoping the sight of it would shame me as much as it was meant to encourage the kids.

Why We Finally Pushed the Button

Looking back, the tipping point was not one fight but the slow drift of an ordinary week. Dinners were eaten to the soundtrack of a cartoon I had never seen. Our son's homework stretched longer because YouTube was always on in the background. Our daughter took her iPad to bed and woke up grumpy. I had started photographing dinners more than I was tasting them, a small vanity I am not proud of.

I read the Australian Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour Guidelines one night while the kids were in the bath, and the numbers sat heavy on my chest. Two hours of recreational screen time for school-aged kids, recommended. Some weekends we were blowing past that before Sunday lunch. I did not want to be the parent who rolled her eyes at the guidance while quietly ignoring it. Something in me had to give.

I talked to my husband first. He was hesitant in the way honest partners are when they suspect you are right. We agreed to a trial run, just one weekend, and to do it together rather than make it a rule the children had to bear alone. That felt important. We picked a weekend that did not clash with birthdays, a mate's barbecue, or a Saturday football match we cared about. I told the kids on Thursday and watched the small mournful faces with a mixture of guilt and resolve.

The First Hours Felt Strangely Quiet

Friday afternoon felt almost rebellious. I put my phone in a drawer in the laundry, the one with the spare batteries and the dog leads. The kids put their tablets in the study. The TV stayed off. By 4pm the house had a hush to it that made me keep checking whether I had forgotten something.

Dinner that night was almost comically long. The kids kept asking questions I would normally be too tired to answer. What was in spring rolls, actually? Why did we not have a dog that could do tricks? Did I ever get bored as a kid, and what did I do? I made something simple, fried rice from whatever was wilting in the crisper, and we sat at the table until the candles burned low. I realised how often we eat standing up, half-watching, half-listening.

Evenings became strangely spacious. Without Netflix hovering in the corner, the couch had room for all of us. We played one round of Uno and our son cheated openly and cheerfully. I tucked the kids in without the glow of a screen in their hands for the first time in months. They drifted off faster than I expected. So did I, curled up with a novel I had been pretending to read for six months.

The Kids Got Bored, Then Got Creative

Saturday morning arrived with the usual Saturday complaints, only this time no tablet to absorb them. By about 9am the bickering had reached a pitch I would usually surrender to with a quick episode of Bluey. I held my ground. I did the dishes slowly. I folded washing. I waited.

What unfolded surprised me. Our daughter dug out a shoebox of beads and started making friendship bracelets for the neighbour's kids across the road. Our son pulled out a half-finished Lego set we had bought him at a market in Geelong last year and set up a card table in the loungeroom. They stayed at it, properly, for over an hour. The quiet industry of their hands was something I had not heard in our home for a long while.

By lunch they were outside. We live near a small park and they rode bikes in a loop that wore a groove into the footpath. A neighbour came over with her dog and ended up staying for tea. I made scones because I felt like baking, something I almost never do anymore, and we ate them warm with jam from a jar I had bought at the farmers' market in Carlton. None of this would have happened if the tablets were doing their usual babysitting.

Things they rediscovered when no one was watching a screen:

Looking back, the boredom was the gift. It cracked something open in the kids and it cracked something open in me.

Dinner Became Dinner Again

I have written before about a spotless house, and a screen-free weekend taught me a similar lesson about the kitchen bench. For years I had set it up like a small stage with a fruit bowl and open cookbook. What I realised on Saturday night is that the bench had also become a charging station for two tablets, a phone, and the small pile of school iPads that never quite made it back to their lockers.

When we cleared the bench of all the cords and devices, dinner changed. The chopping board had room to breathe. The kids sat on the bench stools and chopped cucumber and snapped beans for a salad, something I usually do alone. We talked about their teacher's strange haircut, the cricket match that went to a draw, a friend who had moved away and whom our daughter missed quietly. The conversation felt unhurried, like the kind of table I remember from my own childhood holidays down the coast.

We were not perfect. Our son asked twice if he could just check one thing on the iPad. I said no, gently, and the request faded. I also caught myself reaching for my phone three times to photograph the salad, which made me laugh out loud. We are all a little addicted, even the parents.

Our Evenings Took a New Shape

Saturday evening we played a board game the kids had got for Christmas and never opened. It took two hours because nobody read the rules and we kept arguing about them, and it was wonderful in a clumsy, loud sort of way. Sunday evening we played dominoes and listened to the rain come in across the back fence. There is something about playing a game together that requires presence in a way watching a screen does not.

I also read out loud for the first time in what must be years. We have a battered copy of an old Wind in the Willows that my mum gave us, and the kids climbed onto the beanbag and listened while I did the voices badly. The lamp on the side table was the only light in the room. I remembered being read to as a child in our old weatherboard in Brisbane, and I felt something of my own mother in the room.

Without the late news on in the background, we went to bed earlier. I think we all slept better, though that could have been the long day and the fresh air. I woke on Sunday with a kind of clarity that surprised me, the kind that comes when your brain has not been fed other people's thoughts all evening.

Faith and Presence in the Margins

The most unexpected thing about the weekend was the spiritual weight of it. I expected the kids to grumble and my husband to be patient, and that is mostly what I got. I did not expect the quiet hush to feel like something I had been missing in my own devotional life. There is a kind of attention that requires stillness, and I have been chasing it through podcasts and sermons without understanding that the stillness itself was the practice.

Sunday morning we walked to the small Anglican church two streets over, a thing we have been doing on and off since we moved here. I sang louder than usual and meant the words more. After the service we had friends over for lunch and the conversation wandered through the afternoon into early evening, the way it does when no one is checking the time on their phone. A friend has written about hospitality from grandmother that I carry with me, and I felt the truth of her words sitting around that table, bread being torn, kids running in and out.

The gentleness I want in this season does not come from doing more. It comes from cutting back to the bones of what matters, and what matters, it turns out, is mostly each other and the slow work of being family to one another.

What We Are Choosing to Keep

A full weekend off is not going to be a weekly rhythm, and I do not want it to be. We have jobs and kids who play Saturday sport and a marriage that needs a little entertainment now and then. But we are keeping the small lessons, because they felt like gifts.

Rhythms we are carrying into the weeks ahead:

It is not a manifesto. It is not a programme. It is just a slightly slower way of moving through the days, a way that lets the kitchen bench hold a chopping board instead of a charger, and lets the couch hold all four of us instead of four separate laps. After this weekend, our family is trying, gently and imperfectly, to live as if the screens are guests in our home rather than the hosts of it.