The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

by Andy Crouch

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us bond with the real people we have been given to love. It’s out of its proper place when we end up bonding with people at a distance, like celebrities, whom we will never meet.

Technology is in its proper place when it starts great conversations.

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us take care of the fragile bodies we inhabit.

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us acquire skill and mastery

When we let technology replace the development of skill with passive consumption, something has gone wrong.

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us cultivate awe for the created world we are part of and responsible for stewarding

Technology is in its proper place only when we use it with intention and care.

Parents feel out of control, hopelessly overmatched by the deluge of devices. And we can’t even count on one another to back us up. Parents who set limits on their children’s use of technology often experience intense peer pressure—from other parents!

Our homes aren’t meant to be just refueling stations, places where we and our devices rest briefly, top up our charge, and then go back to frantic activity. They are meant to be places where the very best of life happens.

We benefit from all kinds of devices, but we don’t build our lives around them. We haven’t eliminated devices from our lives by any means, but we go to great lengths to prevent them from taking over our lives.

nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to make or want others to make.

our supply of willpower—the ability to make hard decisions that go against our instincts or preferences—is limited. Nudges help us make some of those right decisions without having to use up that precious limited supply of willpower, leaving it available for the moments when we really need it.

Every notification that comes in on your smartphone is a nudge—not a command or demand, but something that makes it easier to stop whatever you’re currently doing and divert your attention to your screen.

We are continually being nudged by our devices toward a set of choices. The question is whether those choices are leading us to the life we actually want. I want a life of conversation and friendship, not distraction and entertainment; but every day, many times a day, I’m nudged in the wrong direction. One key part of the art of living faithfully with technology is setting up better nudges for ourselves.

But nudges will never, on their own, build the wisdom and courage we need—partly because we often can’t control our environment, no matter how much we’d like to. We need to change something inside of us as well: to develop the strength to make good choices even when everything around us is nudging, or pushing, us in the wrong direction. And for that we need disciplines.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. . . . Let him who is not in community beware of being alone”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer.)

The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially true with technology.

Technology comes with a powerful set of nudges—the default settings of our “easy-everywhere” culture. Because technology is devoted primarily to making our lives easier, it discourages us from disciplines, especially ones that involve disentangling ourselves from technology itself.

The first and deepest is to choose character—to make the mission of our family, for children and adults alike, the cultivation of wisdom and courage.

The second is to shape space—to make choices about the place where we live that put the development of character and creativity at the heart of our home.

And the third is to structure time—to build rhythms into our lives, on a daily, weekly, and annual basis, that make it possible for us to get to know one another, God, and our world in deeper and deeper ways.

Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of God. But while in one sense a person is simply what we are as human beings, we are also able to become—to grow in capacities that are only potentially present within us at first.

Family helps form us into persons who have acquired wisdom and courage.

Wisdom is understanding. It’s the kind of understanding, specifically, that guides action.

(“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion” [Prov. 18:2]—which also sounds a lot like social media.)

living in a family is one long education in just how foolish we can be, children and adults alike.

All the really important things we do as families involve developing wisdom.

And even though it’s incredibly hard simply to know what we should do, it’s even harder to actually act on what we know we should do. Because almost all the time, the most faithful, the most loving, and the wisest thing to do is scary, hard, and painful—even, in some ways, dangerous.

But will we be able to bear whatever comes with the same grace and peace we’ve seen in others? How can we become the kind of people who have wisdom and courage? The only way to do it is with other people.

it is very unlikely you will have a deep enough understanding of yourself and your complex calling to actually become either wise or courageous. We just are too good at deceiving ourselves and think too highly of ourselves. The people who know us best see the truth about who we are, even as they also see more clearly who we could become.

Family, for almost all of us, is the setting where we are known and cared for in the fullest and longest-lasting sense. Family was there at your birth. If you are blessed, family will be there at your death. At the most vulnerable moments of your life, you hope that family will be there.

But if the church is to be our first family, it cannot just be a friendly, weekly gathering.

The church too was a household—a gathering of related and unrelated persons all bound together by grace and the pursuit of holiness.

Part of that “very-goodness” is the human capacity to discover and develop all the potential in God’s amazing cosmos.

But technology is only very good if it can help us become the persons we were meant to be.

But are we more patient, kind, forgiving, fearless, committed, creative than they were? And if we are, how much credit should technology receive?

Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were meant to.

Technology is a brilliant expression of human capacity. But anything that offers easy everywhere does nothing (well, almost nothing) to actually form human capacities.

In the most intimate setting of the household, where the deepest human work of our lives is meant to take place, technology distracts and displaces us far too often, undermining the real work of becoming persons of wisdom and courage.

we are going to have to decide, together, that nothing is more important than becoming people of wisdom and courage. We are going to have to commit to make every major decision, and many small decisions, on the basis of these questions: Will this help me become less foolish and more wise? Will this help me become less fearful and more courageous?

We will have to teach our children, from early on, that we are not here as parents to make their lives easier but to make them better. We will tell them—and show them—that nothing matters more to our family than creating a home where all of us can be known, loved, and called to grow.

When my family has made progress in matters of character, it has often come through the acute stress of conflict—the moments when our comfortable patterns break down and we find ourselves dealing with one another’s overflowing emotions.

Find the room where your family spends the most time and ruthlessly eliminate the things that ask little of you and develop little in you.

This is the central nudge of the tech-wise life: to make the place where we spend the most time the place where easy everywhere is hardest to find. This simple nudge, all by itself, is a powerful antidote to consumer culture, the way of life that finds satisfaction mostly in enjoying what other people have made.

Toil is not new—it has been with humanity since the fall—and technology can be a tremendous resource for real, valuable work.

If toil is fruitless labor, you could think of leisure as fruitless escape from labor. It’s a kind of rest that doesn’t really restore our souls, doesn’t restore our relationships with others or God. And crucially, it is the kind of rest that doesn’t give others the chance to rest. Leisure is purchased from other people who have to work to provide us our experiences of entertainment and rejuvenation.

children never see their parents acting with wisdom and courage in the world of work.3 Even if the adults’ jobs still require skill and insight, even if those jobs are quite meaningful and rewarding, that work now takes place far from home.

In a technological age, even those of us who have good work to do have to make an extra effort to show our children how our work requires real skill and produces something worthwhile.

Build into every single day an hour, for everyone in the household, free from the promises and demands of our devices. For many of us, this will most naturally be the dinner hour.

For families with small children, the better hour may be the hour just before bedtime, where baths and stories and cuddling can happen without digital distraction.