For a Family Home Evening we decided that we would present the idea of fasting from electronics. We opened a discussion by reading from an article titled A Question of Time, by Elder F. Burton Howard. In the article he asks a series of questions about television watching. Some of the questions I liked were: Does the television have its own room? Do you like it better than your brother? Does it come with you to dinner? etc. We asked the questions to the kids and listened to what they collectively said. When I asked the questions: Do your parents spend more time with it than they do with you? Do they spend more money on it than they do on you? I was amazed to hear them answer "Yes!" I realized that it is not just the kids who are too preoccupied with electronics that Derek and I need to cut them out too.
One of the questions Elder Burton asked was: Could you live without TV for a week? How about a month? All the kids answered yes to this as well. That gave me hope, that maybe they would embrace this idea. That hope was quickly squelched however.
We talked about how we each want more time, how mom and dad want more family time, and how easy it is for us to get distracted by electronics. We then explained that we would begin that evening and would continue until the last day of school. We immediately got lots of complaints. When I was ready to just say "this is what we are doing, deal with it!" Derek began to talk about the prophet Lehi. How he had received revelation for his family to go into the wilderness and leave everything. That not everyone wanted to do it. That as parents we had prayed about this and truly felt the Lord was leading us down this path. That the kids could choose to be Laman and Lemuel's about it or Nephi and Sam's. I felt this was truly inspired.
Not all the negative feelings went away but we were able to close FHE knowing that we had done what Heavenly Father had asked.
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