One Friday night, my family stayed in the family room to watch a movie together. We prepared popcorn and other snacks, but poor Iron Man on the screen was getting no attention.
My husband was playing a video game. My 14-year-old son was watching a YouTube video, laughing so loudly at what he had happened to find that he decided to text it to us — while we were all sitting in the room together. His message interrupted my own social media browsing(浏览)and finally I realized that we were a family of addicts. Screens had become our entertainment, our social lives and more scarily, our way of communicating.
Things had to change. So I did what any modem parent might do: I went upstairs to our modem(调制解调器)and I simply turned it off. As extreme as this may sound, I knew it would work. My father-in-law was actually the inspiration for my action. Whenever he thought his children were watching too much TV, he'd walk over to the switch and turn it off. He'd tell them there must have been a fault with their old TV set, and they'd believe him. Everyone would leave the room and find a book to read or head outside instead.
I went back downstairs and without screens to take their attention away, my husband and my son looked directly at me, which felt like the first time in weeks. I told them there was something wrong with the Internet and we'd have to play a board game instead. I pulled out our family favorite-Setders of Catan(卡坦岛桌面游戏)—and hoped for the best. There were some complaints. But, within a few minutes, we were trading cards, trading stories, and, most importantly, trading screens for conversation.