It’s the end of Media Diet Week in the Cornell household. The children are lithe and tan, their little muscles strong from endless days spent outside on climbing walls and monkey bars, their hair flecked blond from sun and chlorine.
“Here, let me help you,” the big one says to her little brother as she pours him a glass of water and drops two ice cubes into it before he even asks. “Why, thank you!” he says. He gives her a big hug and spills a few drops of water in the process, but he has grabbed a rag to wipe it up so quickly I almost don’t notice.
“Mama, can we give the TV away?” they ask in unison. “We could pack it up and send it to someone who really needs it.”
Okay, none of that happened.
I’ve got all kinds of excuses why my family didn’t participate in the Media Diet we prescribed in our feature article on page 22, ranging from the socially acceptable (“Summer is such a busy time! We wouldn’t get the full effect.”) to the more truthful (“Mama needs her Project Runway premiere, dangit!”). But I can’t help wondering whether a screen-free week would have resulted in the pleasant picture-book children of my imagination or the whole family sequestered in separate rooms so nobody could say anything vile and regrettable.
When we asked for volunteers to give up their TVs, computers, video games, and recreational phone use for a week — in a single note at the bottom of an issue of our e-newsletter — the response was so big you might have thought we were giving something away instead of asking families to give something up. But these families — the Fredericks and the Blakes who eventually participated, as well as everybody else who raised their hands — suspected that a week with their eyes trained somewhere other than on a screen would give them all something of inestimable value. So did we.
It wasn’t a cakewalk, as you’ll see. And some participants decided that the diet’s rules were best honored in the breach. But everybody agreed that more was gained than given up.
