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

by Andy Crouch

(Part of true rest is not having work accumulate relentlessly while you are resting!)

Sabbathless toil is a violation of God’s intention for our lives and our whole economy. When we find ourselves in its grip, it means that we are slaves to a system of injustice. Sometimes that slavery is external to us and all too real—we are genuinely bound to systems of toil that prevent us from a healthy life, with no good option for escape.

We are prisoners of our own insecurity (Will I still have a job if I take two solid weeks of vacation?), pride (How can people get along without me?), fantasies (What if I miss an email telling me I’ve won the lottery?), and cultural capitulation (This is just how the world works now, isn’t it?).

The beautiful, indeed amazing, thing about all disciplines is that they serve as both diagnosis and cure for what is missing in our lives. They both help us recognize the exact nature of our disease and, at the very same time, begin to heal us from our disease.

lying down to practice the “quietness and confidence” that Isaiah said was the source of true strength (Isa. 30:15 NLT). And then in the morning (neither anxiously early nor slothfully late) we rise to our work. Rather than resting to recover from a hard day’s work, this way of seeing time suggests that we work out of the abundance of a good night’s rest.

We are made to live and learn in a physical world. And no human beings are more exuberantly and fundamentally rooted in the body than children. As children, our bodies are full of energy and primed for physical learning. We are designed to explore our world and learn through all our senses.

From the earliest games of peekaboo to the challenge of mastering a sport or a musical instrument, we are designed to thrive on complex, embodied tasks that require the engagement of many senses at once, and not just our senses but our muscles,

First, eliminate “passive” screen time at home—televisions or videos playing in the background with no one even really paying attention. Then reduce or eliminate “unaccompanied” screen time—the games and videos that substitute for individual play and reading. Then take the more challenging step of reducing “social” screen time, figuring out how to challenge children to play together in tactile, creative, self-initiated, and self-sustaining ways.

But there is no doubt that making this commitment requires creativity, energy, and patience from parents as well as children.

The less we rely on screens to occupy and entertain our children, the more they become capable of occupying and entertaining themselves.

Our screenbased work will be far more productive if we balance it with plunges back into the complex, three-dimensional physical world that reawakens both our brains and our minds, both our bodies and our souls.

Boredom—for children and for adults—is a perfectly modern condition. The technology that promises to release us from boredom is actually making it worse—making us more prone to seek empty distractions than we have ever been.

It is purposefully edited to never require too much concentration or contemplation; instead, it grabs our attention and constantly stimulates our desire and delight in novelty. But in doing so, it gradually desensitizes us as well.

they not only ratchet up our expectations for what is significant and entertaining; they also undermine our ability to enjoy what we could call the abundance of the ordinary.

Children were the ones who simply went out to play in the ordinary world, even with no toys at all, because they had something far better than toys: grass and dirt, worms and beetles, trees and fields.

Boredom is actually a crucial warning sign—as important in its own way as physical pain. It’s a sign that our capacity for wonder and delight, contemplation and attention, real play and fruitful work, has been dangerously depleted.

We simply have to turn off the easy fixes and make media something we use on purpose and rarely rather than aimlessly and frequently.

We will never, ever figure out how to help our children—and ourselves—survive that maddening half hour before dinner if we always settle for the screen. Instead, we will simply decide that whatever else happens in those confounding moments of children’s boredom and parents’ frustration, we will find some solution other than mediated entertainment.

The good news is that the more often we resist the easy solution, the easier the solution will be to find—because

never entertain your children with anything you find unsatisfying,

but by enjoying the best, on purpose, rarely and together, we’ll become the kind of people who can also find the best in anything, wherever we are, even alone.

Who wants to turn every trip home from the store into an opportunity to build character? Except, of course, that’s exactly what character is made of—daily, slow, sometimes-painstaking steps toward handling everyday challenges with courage and grace.

The great, deep conversations that are possible in the car after the seven-minute mark grow out of practicing simply staying engaged with each other and the world around us.

For most American youth and young adults, thanks to the relentless messaging of popular and mass culture, sex is indeed everywhere. This is true not only in the imaginative world of media but also in their actual experience, in relationships unsupervised by adults or extended family. Especially among young adults, but even among many middle schoolers and high schoolers, the easy-everywhereness of sex is dramatically increased by easy-everywhere access to alcohol, cannabis, or other drugs.

And as family becomes less solid and stable, the parental oversight that used to guide and restrain youthful sexuality diminishes. Growing up without one’s biological father, specifically, is related to everything from early onset of puberty, to early initiation of sexual activity, to vulnerability to sexual advances from nonbiologically related household members like stepfathers and half siblings.

Adrift in this chaotic and complex environment, young people have to sort out for themselves a vision of what sex is and should be.

All addictions feed on, and are strengthened by, emptiness. When our lives are empty of relationships, porn’s relationship-free vision of sex rushes in to fill the void. When our lives are empty of meaning, porn dangles before us a sense of purpose and possibility. When our lives have few deep satisfactions, porn at least promises pleasure and release.

So the best defense against porn, for every member of our family, is a full life—the kind of life that technology cannot provide on its own.

home where wisdom and courage come first; where our central spaces are full of satisfying, demanding opportunities for creativity; where we have regular breaks from technology and opportunities for deep rest and refreshment (where devices “sleep” somewhere other than our bedrooms and where both adults and children experience the satisfactions of learning in thick, embodied ways rather than thin, technological ways); where we’ve learned to manage boredom and where even our car trips are occasions for deep and meaningful conversation—this is the kind of home that can equip all of us with an immune system strong enough to resist pornography’s foolishness.

We need something more powerful: accountability, transparency, and visibility, all in the context of relationship.

What Matt understands, though, is that if mature adults struggle to handle the pipeline of temptation, titillation, and distraction that comes with 24/7 access to the internet, there is no way still-developing teenagers can handle it. His oversight is strictest where the technology is most powerful and potentially out of control.

So the tech-wise family will make a simple commitment to one another: no technological secrets, and no place to hide them.

keeping our filters up, sharing our passwords, and monitoring our children’s devices?

we can’t stop the birds from flying over our head, but we can stop them from building a nest in our hair.

We rob the easy-everywhere world of its power to seduce us not so much by the rules we put in place as by the dependence on one another we cultivate—depending on one another to help us be our best selves, growing in wisdom and courage and serving one another, in a world that wants to make us into shallow slaves of the self.

Every family that cares about wisdom and courage needs to be part of a community larger than itself—a community that takes us deeper in our understanding of the world’s beauty and brokenness, and that calls us to greater character than we would ever muster on our own.

And the most distinctive thing the church does—the thing that most directly develops wisdom and courage in us, from childhood through old age—is call us to worship the God who made us in his image.

Worship is the path to true wisdom. “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1 NIV).

And since human beings cannot actually live without some sort of god—some sort of ultimate reality—the fool makes something else god, often himself. But this leads to a shallow and dangerous view of the world. Worship brings us to the real truth about the world, its or...

Just because you know something is true doesn’t mean you have the courage to act on it. But worship is actually more like a form of training—practicing, week after week, ideally in the presence of others who are further along in faith than we are, the exertion of our heart, mind, soul, and strength in the direction of giving glory to God.

At the really crucial moments of greatest beauty and tragedy, only music that flows from the heart of the gospel is really enough.

The home is the place where worship of the true God starts: the place where we remember and recite God’s Word, and where we learn to respond to God with our heart, soul, strength, and—as Jesus added when he called this the greatest commandment—with our mind as well.

In too many of our churches, however, we have settled for a technological substitute for worship: amplification, which allows a few experts to do the worshiping on our behalf while we offer far too little of our own heart, soul, mind, and strength.

But too often, instead, amplified voices and instruments let the rest of us off the hook; overwhelm our voices, which could be so powerful but instead sound by comparison so feeble; and subtly teach us that those of us without microphones are just consumers of worship rather than active offerers of

Only by showing up in person can we feel and grasp the full weight, joy, and vulnerability of the most important experiences in human life.

The tech-wise family will choose a different way. We will recognize that our daily bodily vulnerabilities, our illnesses, and our final journey to death are our best chance to reject technology’s easy-everywhere promise. We will embrace something better: the wisdom of knowing our own limits, the courage to care for one another, and, just as difficult, the courage to accept one another’s care when we cannot care for ourselves.

We are meant to build this kind of life together: the kind of life that, at the end, is completely dependent upon one another; the kind of life that ultimately transcends, and does not need, the easy solutions of technology because it is caught up in something more true and more lasting than any alchemy our technological world can invent.

We are meant for so much more than technology can ever give us—above all, for the wisdom and courage that it will never give us. We are meant to spur one another along on the way to a better life, the life that really is life. Why not begin living that life, together, now?