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

by Andy Crouch

This book is about how to find the proper place for technology in our family lives—and how to keep it there.

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

In our families we see the consequences of all that misunderstanding. Our busyness, our laziness, our sullenness, our short tempers, our avoidance of conflict, our boiling-over conflicts—living in a family is one long education in just how foolish we can be, children and adults alike. And yet a second amazing thing happens in families at their best. Our foolishness is seen and forgiven, and it is also seen and loved.

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

Technology is good at serving human beings. It even—as in medical or communication technology—saves human lives. It does almost nothing to actually form human beings in the things that make them worth serving and saving.

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.

Even simply fighting off our own bodies’ urge to fully rest for a few nights incurs what psychologists call “sleep debt.” Sleep debt cannot be written off or powered through—it eventually must be repaid, and while it remains outstanding, it has dramatic effects on our cognitive and physical capacities.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.