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

by Andy Crouch

What it all adds up to is a set of nudges, disciplines, and choices that can keep technology in its proper place—leaving room for the hard and beautiful work of becoming wise and courageous people together. Indeed, becoming wise and courageous

Even the ten commitments in this book are meant to be starting points for discussion—and as you will read, they are ones my own family has kept fitfully at best. But almost anything is better than letting technology overwhelm us with its default settings, taking over our lives and stunting our growth in the ways that really matter.

But let me be direct and honest: this better way is radical. It requires making choices that most of our neighbors aren’t making. It requires making choices that most of our neighbors in church aren’t making.

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.

As with so much in our mediated world, the solution to this mess is astonishingly simple, and radical only because it is so rarely done. The problem isn’t with our devices themselves—it’s with the way we use them. We simply have to turn off the easy fixes and make media something we use on purpose and rarely rather than aimlessly and frequently. So when we do sit down in front of a TV screen, it will be for a specific purpose and with a specific hope, not just of entertainment or distraction but of wonder and exploration. When we do scroll through social media, it will be to have a chance to give thanks for our friends, enjoy their creative gifts, and pray for their needs, rather than just something to take our mind off our tedium. And this means that most of the time, the screens stay blank. 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.

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. And these opportunities are not just for our children but for us too, figuring out how to cultivate our own patience and spark our own creativity as we deal with their sometimes unreasonable or impossible desires.

Evidence is piling up that the earlier and the more you use porn, the less you are capable of real intimacy with real partners.6 There is no lasting sexual performance, let alone satisfaction, without the development of wisdom and courage—how could there be for something so core to human existence? There is no technological way to replace becoming the kind of people who know ourselves and know another well enough to truly, deeply give ourselves to them. But as with all addictions, by the time you discover the disappointing reality of pornified sex, you are very often unable to break free on your own. Technology’s promise of shortcuts around the long path of wisdom and courage turns out to be a lie.

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. This is why the most important things we will do to prevent porn from taking over our own lives and our children’s lives have nothing to do with sex. A 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.

His sons know that he can, and will, look over their shoulder at any moment, and that he can, and will, and does, pick up their phone without needing to ask and browse through their messages and apps and history. To many parents, and to nearly every American teenager, this will seem like an impossible invasion of “privacy.” But Matt’s sons have plenty of privacy. He doesn’t barge into their bedrooms, and he can’t, and wouldn’t want to, police their secret thoughts or their conversations with friends at school. He makes a great deal of room for his sons to come to their own conclusions about their convictions and to develop, or not, their inner spiritual and emotional lives. 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.

Worship calls us out of the small pleasures of an easy-everywhere world to the real joy and burden of bearing the image of God in a world where nothing is easy, everything is broken, and yet redemption is possible.

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 will put love into practice in the most profound possible way, by being present with one another in person at the greatest and most difficult moments of life.