From TV-Free Week to 2025: how do we make sense of it all?

And what does it mean for Gen Alpha?

Every year, my elementary school announced TV-Free Week.

It was the nineties, and excessive television time was one of the worst sins for a child to commit. Video and computer games were starting to pose their own threats, but it was the evils of the good ‘ol boob tube that we heard about the most. In an effort to combat said evils, we were challenged annually to tuck our handy remotes away and find other ways to entertain ourselves during non-school hours. If you managed to pull it off, your parents signed a form to be turned into your teacher. From there, there were pizza parties and raffles and homework coupons and school store vouchers and stickers—basically, all manner of incentives for your average eight-year-old of the time.

Like most things, I took this very seriously as a kid.

I was not only going to not watch TV. I wasn’t even going to look at a TV. In fact, I might avoid the room with the TV altogether. If my classmates were willing to cheat the system and convince their parents to sign off even if they hadn’t actually gone screen-free, that was between them and their god. I was going to do it for real. And I did. Every year.

I think a lot about the TV-Free Weeks of my childhood. You might even call it one of my so-called “Roman Empires.”

And given my own personal relationship with screens—and the way we as a society relate to them—in 2025, I think it’s something worth examining.

How did we go from basically throwing children a parade for saying no to TV for a whopping seven days to hardly factoring in television when we itemize our bad tech habits?

Maybe I’m just exhausted from parenting a one-year-old with big feelings, but I find it very difficult to wrap my head around.

---

---

Currently Reading: A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings

I’ll read almost anything that exposes real stories from inside Christian fundamentalism, which has meant A Well-Trained Wife has been on my radar for a long time. So far, the language of this memoir is denser than I expected it to be, but that’s just making it pack an even bigger emotional punch. It’s hard to read about Tia’s difficult experiences, but I admire her for coming out and sharing the truth of what happens in communities like the IBLP.

---

---

I did a little reading about the history of TV-Free Week, and here’s what I found:

• Over the years, it’s also been known as TV Turnoff Week (this rings a bell for me) and Digital Detox Week. More recently—because this is apparently something we’re still doing—it’s called Screen-Free Week.

• The TV-Free America organization launched the event in 1994 with promotional help from Adbusters magazine and others. Nineties kids, this means we were right there at the forefront! It’s no wonder grown-ups were making such a big deal about it.

• TV-Free America ultimately became the Center for Screen-Time Awareness, which shifted its focus away from television and to screens more broadly. Much of their messaging has been about encouraging folks to use their screens responsibly and to create more free time for other activities and community engagement.

• More than 70 organizations (including the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, the YCMA, and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America) support the Screen-Free movement.

Maybe it’s because I don’t have a school-aged child yet, but it’s been years since I’ve seen anything out in the word about a dedicated Screen Free Week. And I like to think that I’m pretty plugged in! My gut instinct is that we are now collectively so concerned about screen use all the time that the idea of a single week to combat it feels quaint and unhelpful.

Could I really quit social media?

The millennials who were once celebrated for stepping away from cable for a couple of days are now so steeped in screen-centric life and entertainment that watching TV is the least of our concerns.

I’m not proud to say this, but watching so-called “regular TV” is now such a non-issue that it’s more like a soundtrack than a leisure activity.