I banned all our phones for a week. Did my family survive?

I’m wading through waist-high nettles on what was perhaps once a path, my 11-year-old son, Felix, in shorts and stung from knees to ankles; my 13-year-old daughter, Rosie, turning to glower at me sporadically. She read the compass correctly to get us to the pub, she insists — it was her dad and I who ignored her advice and charged off in the wrong direction. By the time we finally extricate ourselves from the overgrowth — at loggerheads, 30 minutes late for our dinner booking and still a mile away — we have no option but to break into a run.
We are lost because we have no GPS to guide us. We have no GPS because we have no smartphones and we have no smartphones because I decided, in what felt like week 2,565 of the school holidays, it was time for a digital detox.
As every parent who spent August talking to the top of their child’s head knows, it has been near-on impossible to keep kids off screens during the endless summer “break”, not least when, like mine, they’re too old for holiday clubs and too young to steal your car keys and skulk off to see their friends.
My husband, Chris, points out that we were left to our own devices as kids and it did us no harm. But when we were their age we had no devices. The extent of our screen obsession was the Neighbours omnibus. There was no online bullying, warped TikTok trends or YouTube rabbit holes for our parents to worry about.
My children are by no means the worst offenders: Rosie is glued to Spotify, one earphone permanently inserted while conducting her social life on WhatsApp (which she insists is retro in itself — most of her friends are on Snapchat). Felix, meanwhile, who campaigned relentlessly and successfully, for a smartphone earlier this year, is still more attached to his Nintendo, so engrossed in his Fifa games I have to repeat everything three times.
Attempts to curtail their use ground to a halt when school broke up. Our usual evening phone ban in bedrooms seems churlish when they haven’t spoken to friends all day, and when their apps shut down because they’ve exceeded their four-hour daily limit, Felix simply logs on to YouTube on television instead, promising he’ll only watch “one more” video on Tottenham’s best goals until another two hours have passed, because “there’s nothing else to do!”
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Rosie insists she’s looking up crochet tutorials and song lyrics online, which aren’t exactly going to kill her, and I wonder if I’m worrying unnecessarily — until I’ve hollered up to her bedroom for five minutes with no response and decide she needs to join the real world.
Then again, they’re only following the lead of the biggest culprit of all: me. I’m too busy on my own phone WFH during the day to pay them attention, too addicted to using Instagram as a pacifier to self-soothe and checking my email in the evening to entertain, too ashamed of my sheer hypocrisy to force them to log off — even though research this month suggests they might secretly want to. The report from not-for-profit organisation ukactive found that although 24 per cent of children aged seven to fourteen were staring at screens for six hours a day out of school, 40 per cent wanted to be more physically active than they were.
I’m not sure getting them offline is a sensible strategy to reset before the end of summer or a surefire way to kill off any last vestiges of sanity. But I’m willing to give it a try.
We are staying at the first digital detox cabin created for families by Unplugged, a company launched in 2020 by Hector Hughes and Ben Elliott to encourage burnt-out adults to lock their phones away.
Hughes, who used to notch up 11 hours of screen time a day working for a tech start-up, says the pair “received an increasing number of requests to start catering for families.” Realising parents were worried they were neglecting their kids with their screen dependence, and how children were discovering devices “younger and younger” they expanded their business accordingly. The fact that Elliott is now a dad made it a “hot topic internally too,” Hughes adds.
When I float the detox idea as enthusiastically as I can, Felix’s reaction is confusion. Of all things, the prospect of an alien invasion we won’t hear about is his initial concern. Rosie fixes me with a withering glare and issues a warning: “If I miss Reputation (Taylor’s Version) dropping, I will never forgive you.”
Chris, whose poison is Reddit, Wikipedia and weather apps, is cross at the prospect of missing the Olympics and asks why we can’t just turn our phones off at home instead. If detoxing was that simple we’d have done it years ago, I say. Besides, I’ve already spent £16.85 on colourful notebooks and pens to keep us clean. And so we set off.
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On arrival at our cabin set down a track in a corn field in rolling Cheshire hills, an hour outside Manchester — a destination that, ironically, requires Google Maps to find — we lock our phones in a box provided, put the key in an envelope provided and stick it shut. Presumably, the shame of being the one to rip the envelope open is what stops people cheating.
For me, the surrender feels frightening, like jumping into a freezing swimming pool. The children handle it better (as they would the pool). “It will be like a school residential, but with old people,” says Rosie, who can at least hear what we’re saying now.
The cabin, part plush (fancy toiletries and designer bedding), part basic (eco non-flushing toilet and two gas hobs to cook on), comes with plenty of detox paraphernalia, including a cassette player, an Ordnance Survey map, games, a Nokia phone and Polaroid camera.
They don’t entirely detract from the sausages I’ve forgotten to bring for lunch. “I’m not worried about my Nintendo. The thing I’m going to find most difficult is living like a caveman,” Felix declares, dipping a crisp into his hot chocolate and putting a Tina Turner tape into the cassette player upside down.
I suggest a game of Jenga on the outdoor table. “Is that because it will give you the best angle for your Instagram picture? Oh, wait,” taunts Rosie, sounding as tetchy as I feel. By 4pm, however, she’s strumming her guitar, Felix is playing football, Chris has had an afternoon nap for the first time in our 15-year marriage, and we appear every inch the wholesome 1980s family.
We’re still in reasonable spirits as we embark on what was supposed to be a two-mile walk to the pub for dinner, occupying time that would have been spent listening to Taylor Swift (Rosie) or scanning the plants we pass on an app to find out their names (Chris) by furiously debating subjects such as Elton John’s age (“75!” “85!”).
With no Wikipedia to declare a winner, we’re so engrossed it’s more than 30 minutes before we realise the road we were heading for is four miles in the opposite direction. I could happily hurl the map over a hedge. Luckily I don’t because, after we finally stagger into the pub, puce and sweating, and a waiter takes pity and arranges a taxi to take us home after our meal, it’s the only record we have of our cabin’s address.
Normally if we’re out for dinner we allow the children to turn on their devices after the main course, so they don’t start fidgeting. Instead, Rosie pulls out a pack of cards we’ve brought from the cabin. “Let’s play Snap!” she suggests. Silence descends as we stare at the deck she’s dealing before she eventually asks “…how?” I wonder how she can code, but not know the rules of a card game.
Day two and the Percy Pigs I bought to soften the digital blow are almost gone. “You’re forcing us to sit in the middle of a field — the least you can do is let us have sweets,” says Rosie, annoyed because she’s run out of chords scribbled into her notebook from the internet to practise on her guitar. Chris is frustrated because he wants to look up a word and his “knowledge progression has slowed”. Far from enriching our family discussions, the dearth of devices seems to have reduced us all to simpletons. The excitement of the morning is Felix finding a spider in the sink.
Rosie: “What’s his name?”
Felix: “Alfonso.”
Rosie: “He’s not Spanish. He’s called Doug. Deal with it.”
Five minutes later, I’m trying to read and Felix is lying in bed on his stomach, pillow over his head, humming “Doug, D-Doug, Doug, Doug.” I reach the end of my tether. “Will you please pick up a book or you are going to fail this detox,” I warn him. Chris disagrees. “He’s detoxing better than any of us because he’s living in the now and just existing, annoying as that is.”
Over lunch, Chris seems unusually quiet. I posit that he’s struggling without Reddit. He says I’m projecting and starts explaining that everything is subjective — even waves and particles of light, meaning time itself is open to interpretation. It’s quite a journey from Snap to Doug to quantum physics. I dare to hope cognitive function has returned.
When Chris leaves early to get back for work that evening, however, Felix, suddenly anxious, asks how we’ll know he hasn’t crashed on the motorway on the way home. The truth is, I realise, we won’t. I’m transported back to my teenage years, when I’d worry incessantly if my dad was late home from work, and realise tracking, texts and calls have their uses.
With no Nintendo, his imagination seems to improve and, after modelling three ways to wear the cabin’s retractable colander on his head — fancy hat, sun hat and top hat — he finally settles down to read. For three hours, the cabin is largely silent save for the sound of pages turning and our labrador Herbie’s tail thudding on the cabin floor. In the quiet camaraderie I feel a greater connection with the children than we’ve shared in months.
We pick blackberries for brunch the next morning, after which there’s another walk, four hours long this time. Recent research in the British Medical Journal found removing screens increased the amount of exercise children do. I can see why and of all our detox activities, exercise seems the most helpful.
When there’s an argument after my shortcut leads us headlong into a bramble bush, saying sorry feels better than retreating into my phone and seeking refuge with a social media meme or joke as I might at home. Even after we’ve climbed a hill and Felix points out the beautiful view — something I’m not sure he’s done before — I don’t have the usual compulsion to take a picture. “I’m getting your attention and I really like it,” Rosie says.
Cliché or not, without smartphone distraction I am entirely present, calmer and more appreciative of life. My children too are more interesting and interested, getting on better with each other — “it’s not like we have any choice,” says Rosie — the meltdowns I feared conspicuous only in their absence.
But how long will it last? The second we get in the car for home, Felix turns on his Nintendo. I sigh, surreptitiously trying to ignore the texts flashing on my phone as I enter our postcode on Google Maps. Before we get to the motorway, however, he puts his game down and picks up his book. I glance quizzically at him in the rear-view mirror. “I was at a good bit,” he says.
unplugged.rest