What I Learned About Parenting When We Went iPad-Free For 2 Months

Several months ago, we realized we had been using iPads as a bit of a parenting crutch. It's not something I'm proud to admit, but it happens.

We've all been there, right? Sometimes it's easier to set up the kids with a movie, game, or learning activity knowing you just bought yourself some time, rather than trying to juggle 12 things at once, which can often be the case. Parenting is hard work.

For us, we were in the middle of relocating our family and our life from America to Australia. The months prior to the move consisted of a lot of preparations to sell the house and prep for the big move. Once we arrived in Australia, we had to take the time we needed to get settled in. There were a lot of changes during that time, so the iPads became a regular staple for us — our go-to when we needed a break or a little extra time to get everything done.

My partner and I both started to notice a change in our children's attitudes after they had spent a substantial amount of time on them. Our daughter would often put it down on her own, but our son would have been glued to it from sunup until sundown if we let him.

When the two of them started fighting more frequently, just as any parent who recognizes the power of bribery and threats would do, we knew it was time to lose the iPads.

One day turned into two, which turned into a week.

Our kids have now been iPad-free for nearly three months. And while the break from technology was the result of bad behavior, we have realized something else: it's nice. Really nice.

At first, we worried that it would be punishment for us more so than for the kids. But what we quickly realized was just how wrong we were.

Time that was once spent with heads buried deep into technology has been replaced with creativity. All the things we remember from our own childhood, things we look back on fondly, we are now seeing our own children do. More outdoor play and running around in the backyard chasing one another. More puzzles. More Legos. We've had our entire living room turned into a speedboat made of blankets and pillows, our office turned into air traffic control, and have made houses out of leftover moving boxes.

And I couldn't be happier about it. We are all happier.

Here are some other things we have noticed in our family since ditching the iPads.

The other day, I heard the kids talking and decided to go and check it out. I peeked around the corner ever so slightly to find them reading books to one another. This would never have happened during our iPad days. They would have rather continued playing games individually than engage with one another, and certainly not by reading to one another. And as someone who has spent over a decade of my professional life in the book industry, this one was particularly heartwarming.

Their vocabulary has expanded tremendously because we are engaging with them more and they are listening. There isn't the constant distraction to take their attention away from conversation. Now when they play, they act out scenes and have discussions among their toys and the characters they create. Their imaginations are thriving and visible in nearly everything they're doing.

They have taken an active interest in the world around them and ask questions, sometimes to a point of excess. They want to engage in dialogue and learn about everything. During a simple 30-minute car ride, our son will literally spend the entire time asking questions — about the cars we see, the type of trees, the animals, the weather patterns, world issues. We are all engaging more as a family.

Our home now echoes with the sound of laughter. We laugh almost daily at something one of our children said. We laugh with one another about life or something funny we read. We notice things, and with that comes the ability to laugh and find the humor in life again.

I would love to say the fighting has stopped, but they are siblings and especially now that they are playing together more and more, there seems to still be a healthy dose of it each day — which simply extends our time without iPads, so I am perfectly OK with it. But what we have noticed are fewer tantrums and less attitude. We are able to talk to our children instead of them quickly giving way to a tantrum or bad behavior.

Taking away the iPads has provided us an opportunity to all connect with one another again in a way that is simply impossible to do when your head is buried deep in a screen. And the same can be said for adults. We have had to challenge ourselves to also put down our screens so that we can be intentional about connecting as a family.

In doing so, we get to experience childhood all over again, this time through the lens of our own children. We see the world again — the innocence, the creativity, the imagination that life and adulthood can sometimes force us to lose sight of.