My kids will tell you I ruined their lives. They’ll tell you it was useless torture. There were no silver linings. The whole thing — all of it — was a complete waste of time and energy.They’re wrong. Our monthlong digital detox was one of the best things we’ve ever done as a family.From my perspective, it was enriching, challenging, character-building, cup-filling, soul-nourishing, and lots of other adjectives adults use. It was truly one of the best ideas I’ve had in a long time, and I am so grateful that we did it as a family. (But if my kids call me an unc one more time, I’ll put them on dishwasher-loading duty for a month.)My family of four had phone habits that seemed problematically out of balance. Especially me — by being constantly connected, I was disconnected from actual, physical, tactile things. I would go to bed scrolling, sometimes for hours, then wake up in the morning and immediately pick up my phone again.I knew we needed a reset, and I knew we needed to do it together.I am not anti-tech. The internet, while sometimes oppressive and suffocatingly inescapable, makes our lives, my life, richer in innumerable ways. Much of my reporting and writing is rooted in internet culture. I’m fascinated by it. And it can be useful.I wasn’t interested in cutting us off from digital devices entirely. We’re not living in a pioneer-era dreamworld like it’s Yesteryear in the New Jersey suburbs.For my children to be independent, they need access to communication. They need to be out in the world, experiencing it, and if that means they are tethered to a smartphone, I’m all for it. Let’s say I commandeered their phones, and they needed to reach me to change the details on where and when to pick them up from sports practice. Good luck finding a pay phone.They also explore and nourish their interests and hobbies via creators online. My younger daughter, Cece, can explain astronomy facts and fossil discoveries thanks to YouTube videos.So instead of casting aside the internet completely, we took on this project to learn a far more useful skill: how to be intentional in our consumption of it. This topic seems to be everywhere lately, in the courts and in culture.We strove to set modest limits and find balance. None of us can singlehandedly radically change or altogether avoid modern technology. But we can change how we interact with it by learning how to use tech tools as exactly that, tools.We agreed that for a month we would:Ban devices behind closed doorsProhibit kids' screentime before noonLimit ourselves to 3 hours of total daily screentimeNot multitaskUse our family laptop for necessary internet researchThe goal: to own our devices and no longer have them own us.