It started as a weekend experiment. I was frustrated, a little desperate, and honestly just curious. What would my kids do if the internet simply wasn’t there?

My kids are 7 and 12. Like a lot of families, screens had slowly crept into every corner of our home. We tried setting limits on apps. We tried parental controls on the TV. But my kids are smart. My son figured out pretty quickly that the search feature on our smart TV could open up a whole new world of streaming channels we hadn’t thought to block. No matter what we did, there was always a workaround.

So I Googled “how to temporarily turn off the internet” and discovered something I didn’t know I had. Through the Xfinity app, you can actually see every single device connected to your internet and pause them individually or all at once. It is incredibly easy. One tap to pause, one tap to unpause. I don’t know why I hadn’t found this sooner.

I paused everything.

When my kids asked what was going on, I kept it simple. I told them we didn’t have internet right now. I didn’t get into the details. I wasn’t lying exactly; I was just vague about when it would be back, which was actually the truth. I genuinely wasn’t sure when I was going to turn it back on.

What I Did Not Expect Was the Fighting

I won’t sugarcoat it. The first thing that happened was a lot of bickering. Without screens to retreat to, my kids were suddenly in each other’s space constantly, and they did not handle it gracefully at first. There were arguments, boredom complaints, and more than a few dramatic declarations that they had “nothing to do.”

I held firm.

Then Something Shifted

By the second day, something quietly changed. My daughter started pulling out toys she hadn’t touched in months. My son found a Lego set that had been sitting in his closet, still in the box, and actually built it. They started playing together. Not perfectly, not without the occasional argument, but together.

The house felt calmer. They felt calmer. And honestly, so did I.

The Thing That Really Got Me

Here’s the part that stuck with me the most. Before I turned off the internet, my son would spend hours watching other kids play video games on YouTube. Hours watching other families joke around, go on adventures, and just be together. Meanwhile, he wasn’t doing any of that himself. He didn’t want to leave the house. He didn’t want to call his friends. He was watching a version of childhood instead of living his own.

That hit me hard.

Where We Are Now

What started as a weekend experiment is still going. I decided to just leave it off.

I am not completely anti-screen. They can still watch PBS on live TV, and I turn on the Nintendo Switch periodically. It has actually become something my son looks forward to and works toward, which feels a lot healthier than it being available every second of the day. What’s gone are the YouTube rabbit holes, the gambling commercials that somehow kept showing up in kids’ content, and the passive hours of consuming other people’s lives.

Are my kids thrilled about it? Not always. But they are playing more, fighting less, and seem genuinely happier in a way that is hard to explain until you see it.

I don’t think screens are the enemy. But unlimited, unstructured access to the internet was quietly robbing my kids of something they didn’t even know they were missing: boredom, creativity, and each other.

It turns out that when you take away the easy option, kids are a lot more resourceful than we give them credit for.

It has only been a few weeks, but here is the part that surprised me most: my kids don’t even ask about the internet anymore. They just got used to it not being there. I plan on keeping it off. For the first time in a while, I feel genuinely in control of what they are watching and how they are spending their time. That alone has been worth it.