What do you think your kids could do if they used the time they spend on Facebook to study? Melynda Rushing of Rock Hill, South Carolina, wanted to find out. She offered her daughter, Alyssa Rushing, 20, $300 to stay off of the social networking site for a month and spend the time studying instead. Alyssa, who told the Charlotte Observer that she spent between two and three hours a day on Facebook before she started her fast, already had fine grades. But her mother, inspired by her own experiences giving up television when she was Alyssa’s age, wanted her to see how much she could get done in a world without her biggest distraction.
With a little help from her friends, Alyssa made it through the challenge. She had her roommate change her password and not tell her the new one until the challenge was over. It wasn’t easy, however, to stay clean.
“It’s very hard,” she told the Observer via telephone from the University of South Carolina Upstate campus in Spartanburg. “It was actually a lot harder the first couple of days. I didn’t know I was truly addicted.”
Alyssa, who did find herself turning papers in early when she didn’t have Facebook to distract her, feels that, now that she’s lived without Facebook, she won’t go on as much as she did.
“It’s definitely made me see I could spend my time more wisely,” she said. “Now that I see I can stay off it … I might not even go on every day.”
