Captivated DVD the review that changed our families life and how it can change yours too! Adventures in Mindful Living.

Captivated DVD- The review that changed our home.

Captivated the Moive review and what happened when we turned off the tv and video games

Have you ever had those moments when you feel God pulling at your soul about something? It is just a gut feeling that is really hard to explain. When I saw this review opportunity my first reaction was to immediately come up with 5 reasons why I didn’t want to do it. None of the reasons had any kind if real substance (no moral or biblical reasons at all). Do you know why I didn’t want to review the Captivated DVD?

Very simply- I knew watching it would put the spotlight on some areas in my life that I liked to keep in the dark.

Talk about a heart check!

Let me first explain a little about the film CaptivatedMedia Talk 101  produced this film in effort not to make a anti- media film but to raise awareness of some of the pitfalls and dangers of unchecked media and technology in todays society. It really takes an in depth look at the effect on  adults and children. The DVD goes over the physical, moral, mental, and emotional impacts of today’s unchecked social media and technology.

Now before you start making up all the reason why you should not watch this movie like I did,please keep an open mind and take a minute and read my very honest review. This was really hard for me to do becasue I knew I would have to step out of the picture I like to paint of myself ( you know the perfect picture we all love  – the one where I have it all together and I do this parenting thing right all the time) and show you the real truth of where I had let my family slip.  I really am not a fan of doing that, I know its good and all of that jazzy stuff we claim to really feel. But really if you honestly said how you feel , no one likes to admit they have not done the best job with their parenting. But becasue I really do care about my readers I am going to be honest with all of you.

I received my copy in the mail and I let it sit on my desk for a week before I watched it. I wanted to pick a time that my husband and I could watch it together and throughout the week that just didn’t seem to happen. This movie is intended for adults, but has been approved for all ages.  I didnt want to watch it with my kids the first time, just my husband. I really wanted to give this film my full attention and thats hard to do with the  little kids running around and talking. I let my kids watch one of their favorite shows in the other room while I watched it with Jeremy. Yes I realize how funny it is that I let my kids watch unchecked media while I watched a movie about the dangers of unchecked media. Trust me that was not lost on me at all, but it was really the only way I was going to get to watch the movie anytime soon.

Before we watched the movie I had Jeremy pray. This is not something we usually do before movies, but if God wanted to use this to speak to me then I really wanted to hear it clearly. I also needed for Jeremy and I to be on the same page with this. When it comes to big family changes I find it really is better for both parents to be on board, so I asked God for help with that too. I just had this feeling deep down this was going to cause a change of some sort in our family. Boy was that feeling dead on!

Captivated hit on every level of why ingesting large amounts of social media is really not good for you and why it is REALLY not good for children. One way this DVD does this by stating scientific research and studies. Everything is backed not only by all of these studies but also by the biblical scripture.Now saying all of that, I want to say this. No matter what religion or faith that you practice or don’t practice – this film is still for you. Yes there are scriptures they use , but there is also just a lot of common sense, good parenting that they talk about in this film too.

I could go on and on about this film and all of what they talked about in it, but what I would really like to share is how Captivated help change our family. Let me tell you where we were and then I will tell you where we are now and where we hope to be heading in the future. This is that part I told you I didn’t want to talk about.

This was the state of our family a couple of weeks ago. I was busy, my husband was busy and our kids were addicted to computer games and tv. There I said it. I am not going to candy coat it.  Our family has gone through some real hard personal things over the last couple of years and they had taken their toll. The problem with stuff like this is that it never happens fast. Its not like one day I woke up and the kids needed to play on some kind of device to be happy and be kept amused. My sons sweet personality didn’t change overnight. My daughter didn’t go around demanding the iPad instead of a book in a  matter of minutes. Nope. That would have been easy to see and would have been like red flashing lights to me. I am a good mom. I love my family very much . If I would have seen that then I would have jumped on it and squashed it!

No it happened slowly.Consider this quote.

“The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” – C. S. Lewis

Slowly my kids got more and more engrossed in television shows and in their computer games. They started getting cranky when I would turn the tv off becasue their favorite show was on, and it was so much easier for me to get my work done when they were amused. It was a bad combination. I let the tv and all the other media they were consuming start to babysit them. I got lazy as a parent and I took the easy route.Yep.

The problem was not just with them though. It was with me too.

My gosh I do not like this honesty thing right now.

I was getting busier and busier too. My stress level was going up becasue I was getting busy. My website was finally getting going really well. We were getting ready to put our house on the market so we could move. I was getting ready to kick off my 2 new business ventures that would go hand in hand with my site. And on top of all of it I decided now is the time to get organized!! Now throw in some more personal family issues going on and you have a recipe for disaster.

At the end of the day and on weekends I just wanted to decompress.I wanted to watch something stupid on tv that would let me escape in a sense from the stress I was feeling. I just wanted to not think for a little bit.  I wanted to get on Facebook and see what everyone was doing , get on pinterest and pin a million things,  or read through twitter. I even started watching the Kardashians show. If you don’t know who that is, don’t worry you are not missing out on anything!

Before you start getting defensive and saying – there is nothing wrong with any of those things. I will agree ( well the Kardashians- yep there is a lot wrong with that one). What was wrong with it was that instead of doing it in little doses, it slowly started to be how all of my free time was spent. Remember it slowly crept in. Kind of sounds like a lion slowly creeping up on its prey, huh?

Slowly instead of engaging my children I started disengaging from them and the rest of my family. My relationships everywhere went from being deep to shallow. The kids just got more and more into their devices and shows. We slowly starting disconnecting from each other.

Here is one of the  problems when you disengage from your family. You stop being there to “guard your castle” as the saying goes. What happens when you don’t guard your castle?

The enemy sneaks in through the cracks and crevices that you have left open.Call it whatever you like,but the devil loves stuff like this.

And he did.

Character traits starting coming up in my children and myself that were not good at all. Things like anger,disrespectfulness,laziness, jealousy,greediness just to name a few.

I would talk to others about it and all I would get was that it was typical of the ages. In my heart I knew it wasn’t. I knew all of those things were reflections of your heart.

What my heart and my kids heart was reflecting was not love, peace, and joy. It was the opposite.

I was kind of floundering around trying to figure out how to undo all of this mess that we seemed to have become, but I didn’t know how too. My energy was sapped as it was. Of course then guilt starts flowing down on you. Yep- add that to the pile of stuff I already had going on.

Sounds like we were doing really great doesn’t it?

It might not seem like a big deal to others but to me it was. This was not my family at its best. I was not equipping my children to be successful and I was robbing myself of any kind of real success that would mean anything.

This is where God’s love and grace comes in for me personally. Call it whatever you wish , for me it is God.

He brought all of these things to light to me and then sent me a video to watch that showed me where a lot of our issues were coming from.

My husband and I watched the video and were convicted of some things that we could do differently. I told you the film is not anti-media or anti-tv. It simply encourages you to take some steps to make real changes in your families life in regards to media.

It encourages you to take the bad out but more importantly replace it with good.

We started by doing something pretty extreme in this house.

We turned off the tv completly, we took away video games, and all of the devices (iPad,Kindle, Wii) when it came to the kids. For me it was a little harder. My business runs off of social media. I have to be on the computer to do my job ( including this review). For me it was learning how to work smarter than working harder. I had to set limits on how long I could be on my social medias to promote my website and my business. I would give myself short periods after my work was completed to go and connect with my friends that don’t live close by.Luckily I am married to a marketer who taught me how to really optimize my social media time, and how to schedule posts, and set better limits. That is what he does as part of his business for his clients and friends, so I just tapped into the resources that I already had!

We decided to do this for a couple of weeks and then have a meeting and discuss where to go from there. So are you curious what happened during those weeks?

Keep reading-

Captivated DVD the review that changed our families life and how it can change yours too! Adventures in Mindful Living.

First let me say when my husband and I decided this we held a family meeting. We announced it to the children and held our breath. The film tells you to expect a backlash from the kids. I thought well they are not too addicted so they may be a little annoyed but it wont be tears or anything.

Wrong again.

The three year old didn’t care. She was really too young to care. She just kept on playing with her little stuffed dog. All we had to tell her was the tv was broke and the devices had to charge up. Not really a big deal to her. After all she is three.

The 8 year old, that was a different story. The world seemed like it collapsed around him.I actually felt really bad for him. We had created a void in his life that these games ( his Minecraft game in particular)  had filled. To take it away was literally like taking his family away from him. It was really heart wrenching on so many levels for all of us.

The impact of my choices and the consequences that came from them was tremendously hard to bear. but I refused to let the guilt get me anymore.

We apologized to him for letting him down as his parents and told him, there is nothing we can do about the past. What we can do is fix the present and the future.

It was a huge wake up call to us as parents.

The film encourages you to fill those voids with family things so that is what I did. I sat down and planned out my “plan of attack” for these next couple of weeks.

This is what I decided to do-

Outside time was a must.

Amp up the nutrition in our meals- this really does help with behavior and helped me plan better so it cut my stress levels down.

Add in great books.

Add in fun family times.

I really focused on my schedule and getting my work done a week ahead so I wasn’t spending to much time on the computer. I woke up earlier and worked while everyone was still asleep, and implemented some great strategies to free myself up from stress and chaos.

And this is what happened after a couple of days of implementing all of our changes.

We cooked more together.
We went on more walks, where I got to know my kids and their hearts again.
We all worked on more art projects and watched our creativity grow.
We had more days like this doing our school outside, having picnics and really just enjoying each other.
Captivated DVD the review that changed our families life and how it can change yours too! Adventures in Mindful Living.
We played more outside and our imaginations really took off. This is my youngest making “soup”. We were pretending to be early settlers and she decided she would cook us some soup to eat in the settlement while we went and discovered local wildlife and natives. (of course we were nice settlers).
We became more creative with our games we came up with outside. This was our fun version of playing miniature golf .
We learned how to play marbles together. Super fun by the way. I found these marbles at our local dollar store and then just googled how to play marbles. When is the last time you played marbles?
We did more fun stuff like this together.

And this was what I saw every night and all throughout the day!

 Things like all of the above happened everyday, several times a day. The kids slept better, they didn’t fight as much,and I didn’t fuss as much. We really started pulling together as a family and changing in so many really better ways. All of the bad character traits I was seeing in them and myself started really improving. I felt like we were really becoming the family we were meant to be.

After our “semi media fast” was up we decided what we had experienced was worth more than all of the devices, computer games, and tv. We knew as parents that we didn’t want to go back to what we were like before so we made some decisions.

– We turned off our cable. With the amount we saved we decided to get the next step up packages offered by Netflix (the one where we could get two movies out instead of just the instant streaming.) We did this becasue I like to use movies in our schooling . This also allowed us to pick a movie for our family movie night. This is something really enjoy together and I had control over what we were watching. So that meant picking films that reflected our values a lot better . Remember I said this movie was not about anti- media. It encourages you to replace bad with good.

(Even with going up on the Netflix we still saved money which we put in a “fun fund” for things like zoo trips or camping trips. More money for fun memory building- Come on , who wouldn’t want that? )

-We decided that some media with limits would be ok. The key is limits and supervision. We set a time limit on Saturday morning.From 10-12 the kids were allowed to get on their computer games ( at the table where we could see them) or on the couches where we could see them.We set very clear rules on what was ok to do and what was not, much to the dismay of the older children. My husband and I used this time to get a lot of work done so we could free up our day. When time was up , it was up. The first time this happened it was hard, but we worked our way through it.

I mindfully set out to spend more time with my kids outside, read aloud to them, and really taking time to hear them talk. I worked harder to come up with more fun ways we can learn together and in turn schooling got easier. Our days are better now.

So what about my business and my website? Not only did it not suffer, but it actually took off and really started growing. I have been able to do things with it and reach some new levels that I thought would take me so much more time to do. Why? Well first I think it is becasue I obeyed God in His calling on me to change some things in our life. But also I really was more productive and really focused on what worked with my website and business and the things that didn’t work I chose to not waste time on them. I am really able to see better what works and what doesn’t.

Are things picture perfect? No! Of course not!! We are family that is growing and changing together. We have bad days and good days. There are days we eat beautiful meals and days we eat PB&Js!  Sometimes the house gets clean, some days it doesn’t.

The point is when we turned off all the distractions and escapes from our life , we really started enjoying our life with each other. 

Captivated helped us start our mindful journey towards becoming the family we were always meant to be. I highly recommend you go and buy this DVD. You can purchase it from Media Talk 101 ~ (www.CaptivatedTheMovie.com)  for $16.95. There are several other purchasing options that may be better suited for you,your home school, church , or small group.

I have told you how Captivated the Movie has helped our family change for the better, but you don’t just have to take my word for it! Click on the link below and go see what my friends on the review crew thought about it and how it impacted their families!

Click to read Crew Reviews

Captivated DVD- The review that changed our home.

3 COMMENTS

  1. This is an impressive article. The growth of media in my lifetime is just incredible. We had 3 over the air channels to watch when I was growing up and the lucky families in town had this amazing thing called cable with HBO. The PC was still new when I was in college and my youngest was born just about the time Windows 3.1 replaced DOS Shell as a user interface. It’s been a marvelous time but, as your post points out, there are costs and they are often negative. Good on you and your husband for taking your family back and establishing boundaries that will help keep your family strong.

  2. I really appreciate your honesty. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while as well. Maybe it’s time to talk to the hubby… Thanks for sharing!
    p.s. my daughter LOVES marbles!

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