How to enjoy a Screen-Free Spring Break: Advice for Roadtrips

Can spring break be fun, peaceful, and screen-free all at once? The answer is “yes,” despite the eye roll of every weary parent reading this. I get it—raising kids in the digital landscape is challenging. You’ve worked hard to establish household habits that curb the mishandling of screen time. But breaks from school cause a disruption to your usual rhythms, sending those habits to the back seat. 

If you’re worried spring break will disengage your family’s healthy screen limitations, read on for some fun and unusual ideas to make this the most engaged spring break your family has ever had. 

Are we there yet?

If you’re traveling over spring break, you’ll likely be tempted to silence the chaos of being holed up in the car together for hours on end with good ‘ol screen time. Each mile marker brings a new challenge: traffic, sibling tiffs, and boredom, to name a few. Your own stress heightens from all the logistics you had to navigate just to be able to close the garage door and finally hit the road. 

Needless to say, reaching your spring break destination within hours of the original ETA is an elusive dream.

With all these relational and emotional dynamics at play, road trips put our family’s underdeveloped gratitude muscle under the microscope. In her book The Gift of Enough: Raising Grateful Kids in a Culture of Excess, Marianne Miller says, “If we want our kids to enjoy life more, then we may actually need to give them less.” With this in mind, let’s rethink our temptation to appease road trip nuisances with increased device use and instead go for less. 

Being trapped in a car together is the apparent downside. Might it also be the upside? After all, how often is your family together in one space for several uninterrupted hours? Oh, the beautiful possibilities. Here are just a few:

Pray Together

The best way to start a spring break road trip is with prayer. Before we hit the highway, we always cover our travels in prayer, inviting the kids to participate. We get so busy tying up loose ends at work, school, and with extracurriculars that our devotion time can suffer. Why not choose a child ahead of time to lead the family in a short devotion?  You can assign a different child to lead one on the way home. (This way, you can relax after helping the whole family pack; meanwhile, your child gets to practice leading others spiritually). 

Play Together

The alphabet and license plate games only hold interest for so long. Here are some silly ways to pass the time on a road trip:

• After a rest stop, have a contest to see who can write the funniest restroom review—heard of the Pooped There app? The group of high school students who developed it won a congressional award. No need to download the app, though; just bring scrap paper and something to write with, and let the bathroom humor begin.

• Hold an ugly selfie contest. Pass your phone around. Each child has one minute to snap the ugliest face of themselves. After everyone has a turn, review the finalists and vote on “Ugliest Selfie.” Make sure everyone knows it’s all in good fun. My family played this years ago on a spring break trip, and I can still remember the soreness of my stomach muscles from laughing so hard.

• Start unusually vibrant conversations among the passengers in your vehicle by playing “Most Likely To…” Stop if you sense someone may be getting their feelings hurt—this introduces a great opportunity to talk it out and build a sense of worth in each child. 

Listen Together (or Separately)

Research a few kid-friendly podcasts and let your children choose one to deep dive. Try The Big Fib or Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd—my friend tells me the episodes on Alcatraz were specifically intriguing to her elementary-aged boys. If you have older children, try a historical deep dive with Ken Burns or Sharon McMahon—this U.S. government expert even covers Disney’s fascinating role in U.S. history. Finally, podcasts are available to help your children grow spiritually: try UncommmonTEEN: The Podcast for Christian Teen Girls, for example.

Audiobooks on Audible, Libby, or Apple Books are great tools for passing the time. Consider reading a book that later became a movie. After you and your kids finish the book on the trip, plan to watch the film on the ride home. For more ideas on encouraging your whole family to love reading, check out my blog and scroll down to “Ideas for Engaging Your Kids in Reading.”

When you finally turn to screen time, watch a show together. Have siblings each take an earbud or hop in the back seat with them. Watch your bond grow as you sit shoulder-to-shoulder, watching your favorite show together. 

Smell the Roses Together

A few years ago, my family took a month-long cross-country trip in our trusty minivan with 100,000 miles on it. It was going to take us three full days of driving just to get to our first major destination. It took only 24 hours to be at each other’s throats.

So, on day two, I began looking up attractions we could visit on the road ahead. We were in Wyoming—not a lot was coming up. But there was this one exit that advertised a small pyramid-shaped monument. I convinced my husband to take the exit and adventure into middle-of-nowhere Wyoming.

As soon as our crabby selves opened the van door, spilling out in all our ugly glory, a windstorm picked up. This was no ordinary wind. With flat lands stretching for miles, this wind was the kind you could do a trust fall with. It twisted our hair up into mini tornadoes (talk about fun selfies). Our shirts were flying over our heads; we could barely walk.

Needless to say, our bad attitudes transformed into fits of laughter. As we pulled back onto the highway, I watched the world pass me by with a new sense of wonder and gratitude for God’s creation. You never know what a little roadside adventure will do for the mood. And hey—what’s a couple more minutes tacked on to the ETA?

Off the Radar (OTR) Time

With all this “together” time, finding creative ways to be alone is important, too. Parent Cue points out that children have a lot of emotions—27 to be exact. I’m no expert here, but I bet if there’s one place all 27 of them will come out, it’s in the car on a long drive. Road trips bring out that crazy combination of excitement, anticipation, gratitude, impatience, and annoyance all at once. 

In a parenting bootcamp called Parenting the Highly Sensitive Child Like a Ninja, Megghan Thompson, LCPC-RPT-S, teaches parents how to train their children to regulate their emotions. One of her tools is called “quiet time.” Because we also have a spiritual practice in our home called that, we have renamed ours “Off the Radar Time.” This is a time when each of our children takes at least 15-20 minutes each day to be by themselves with no devices. They get to choose how to spend their time, and we encourage them to find things that bring them joy.

Other than it being screen-free, there aren’t a lot of requirements. My oldest usually takes an extra shower to relax and let the hot water wash away his stress. My youngest loves to craft, dance, and belt out her favorite songs during her OTR time. 

This is one area where our habits don’t change during spring break. We consider OTR time of utmost importance. Because we’ve gotten so used to including it in our day, spring break is no exception.

Long car rides are critical to taking those few minutes away, even though we must get a little more creative with making it happen. Perhaps build that time into one of your planned rest stops with more grassy space to roam around. A child can read under a tree or go for a short walk within your sight. If you’re on a time crunch, it can be accomplished with coloring books, reading material, an activity bag full of Legos, and headphones for calming music. 

Be Reasonable

Finally, regarding the notion of “screen-free,” don’t freak out if screen time is part of the equation. Given that the content is appropriate for your child or teen, a little screen time never hurt anyone. Set a goal for how much screen time you’d like to allow, and then pay attention to ensure you’re reaching your target. For a shorter ride, perhaps you aim for less than 50% of the time spent on devices. For longer rides, you go for only 20% of the time spent on screens.

To all you spring breakers out there, happy traveling!