Screen-Free Week kicks off on Monday, May 4, 2015.  Join children, families, communities around the world, and us as we swap digital entertainment for the joys of life beyond the screen. Unplug from digital entertainment and spend your free time playing, reading, daydreaming, creating, exploring, and connecting with family and friends.

Regardless of whether children are consuming “good” or “bad” programming, it’s clear that digital entertainment dominates the lives of far too many kids, displacing all sorts of other activities that are integral to childhood. Excessive screen time is linked to poor school performance, childhood obesity, and attention problems. And it is primarily through screens that children are exposed to harmful marketing.

Screen-Free Week is a fun way to reduce our dependence on digital entertainment, including television, video games, smartphones, tablets, and computers. It’s a chance for children—and adults—to power down and reconnect with the world around them.

Make it even more fun for kids by downloading a pledge card for them to sign. This encourages them to go ‘screen-free’ for a week and it teaches them about personal responsibility and commitment to a cause. You can also download a Certificate of Achievement to award children for carrying through with their commitment to be ‘screen free’.

Kaiser Permanente has some excellent recommendations on how to spend time away from the screen.  There are also plenty of ideas for activities during screen-free week too.

Make a commitment to spend less time staring at the screen and more time interacting with your children, family, and friends. And remember to manage screen time all year long with a healthy balance of outdoor activity, study, fun, and other aspects of a healthy lifestyle.