Start Your Screen Free Summer Now with a Mail Order Mystery

We don’t have to tell you how scary it is to read all the articles and reports about kids and screens - the increased rates in depression and anxiety, the online bullying, the negative impacts on growing kids’ brain development.

Bill Gates didn’t let his kids have phones until they turned 14. When Apple launched the iPad Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his kids use it. Those tech CEOs knew what we all know, but have so much difficulty doing anything about: technology is addictive.

When we first started Mail Order Mystery we asked some big questions about how, or if, we would allow screens into our mystery experiences. We could see the potential for tech: online content, research opportunities and video-game like challenges and levels. But did we want that? The short answer: No. We did not want that. We wanted Mail Order Mysteries to be screen-free experiences.  

Mail Order Mysteries are tech-free experiences in a tech obsessed world. And even though we sometimes feel like our voice against technology is a lone voice, it is a not a lonely voice. Mail Order Mysteries are real, connected, human experiences, with envelopes to tear open and letters to read and objects to hold and old maps to study and fantastic mementos for kids to cherish.

We make one small exception in our Spies, Lies and Serious Bad Guys mystery. When kids solve a clue they can go on-line to a basic web-page, enter a three digit code and get a clue. But we also know that some families prefer a zero-tech experience and so we give kids the option of calling a phone number for the clues instead.

So this summer, give your kids the gift of a six-week long screen-free adventure.

In Treasure Hunt the adventure begins with a mysterious letter and a note from a long-lost pirate ancestor with the same last name as you. And guess what! There’s missing treasure, and we believe it belongs to you, yaar!

In The Case of the Missing Bigfoot kids are invited by a detective agency to help solve a crime not far from where you live. It’s a classic whodunnit set in an old mansion, with a secret organization, missing photographs, and curious circumstances indeed.

In Spies, Lies and Serious Bad Guys the adventure starts with an acceptance letter to spy school. Before long our young spies-in-training are on a mad-cap mission to find a missing spy, stop the bad guy and save the world.   

In The Enchanted Slumber kids are gifted a noble mission to help an unlikely group of friends - a knight, a troll, a librarian and a Dragon - wake a princess who has been sleeping for 699 years. But what happens when the princess wakes up? Is waking up all there is to it? Or is happily-ever-after a bit more complicated than that?