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

by Andy Crouch

As the author’s daughter, I’ve been living with tech-wise parenting for sixteen years. Some might say my older brother, who’s had it for nineteen years, would be even better qualified to write this foreword. I, however, would argue that as test subject number two, I’ve enjoyed an even more refined approach.

Tech-wise parenting isn’t simply intended to eliminate technology but to put better things in its place.

that’s the real legacy of tech-wise parenting for me. It has shown me where to look for what I need most. Wonder comes from opening your eyes wider, not bringing the screen closer.

figuring out the proper place for technology in our particular family and stage of life requires discernment rather than a simple formula.

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. It’s out of its proper place when it prevents us from talking with and listening to one another.

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us take care of the fragile bodies we inhabit. It’s out of its proper place when it promises to help us escape the limits ...

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us acquire skill and mastery of domains that are the glory of human culture (sports, music, the arts, cooking, writing, accounting; the list could go on and on). When we let technology replace the devel...

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us cultivate awe for the created world we are part of and responsible for stewarding (our family spent some joyful and awefilled hours when our children were in middle school watching the beautifully produced BBC series Planet Earth). It’s out of its proper place when ...

Technology is in its proper place only when we use it with intention and care. If there’s one thing I’ve discovered about technology, it’s that it doesn’t stay in its proper place on its own; much like my children’s toys and stuffed creatures and minor treasures, it finds its way underfoot all over the house and all over our liv...

To be a child, teenager, or young adult these days is to have to navigate a minefield of potentially life-altering choices, often with strangely little guidance from older adults, who are, after all, glued to their own screens.

the main thing we all want you to know is that it is possible to love and use all kinds of technology but still make radical choices to prevent technology from taking over our lives.

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.

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 ten commitments begin with three choices that are especially fundamental. 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.

Ten Tech-Wise Commitments 1 We develop wisdom and courage together as a family. 2 We want to create more than we consume. So we fill the center of our home with things that reward skill and active engagement. 3 We are designed for a rhythm of work and rest. So one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year, we turn off our devices and worship, feast, play, and rest together. 4 We wake up before our devices do, and they “go to bed” before we do. 5 We aim for “no screens before double digits” at school and at home. 6 We use screens for a purpose, and we use them together, rather than using them aimlessly and alone. 7 Car time is conversation time. 8 Spouses have one another’s passwords, and parents have total access to children’s devices. 9 We learn to sing together, rather than letting recorded and amplified music take over our lives and worship. 10 We show up in person for the big events of life. We learn how to be human by being fully present at our moments of greatest vulnerability. We hope to die in one another’s arms.

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.

Technology is the latest, and in many ways most astonishingly good, example of the fruit our image bearing was meant to produce. But technology is only very good if it can help us become the persons we were meant to be.

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.

nothing matters more to our family than creating a home where all of us can be known, loved, and called to grow.

find the place that is its emotional center—the place where your family spends the most time and the most energy—and take an inventory of what you see there.

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. Move the TV to a less central location—and ideally a less comfortable one. And begin filling the space that is left over with opportunities for creativity and skill, beauty and risk.

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.

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.

an amazingly simple way to bring everything to a beautiful halt. We can turn our devices off.

One of our treasured family traditions is Sunday afternoon tea, a custom loosely borrowed from our British ancestors that is easier to prepare than a full Sunday dinner.

(I wrote more about this “Sabbath ladder” in my book Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power.)

So one hour a day, one day a week, one week a year—set it all aside.

a taste of the life we were meant for: conversation, conviviality, communion.

God’s unsleeping care is good news: we sleepy creatures can trust that our needs will be provided for while we can do nothing on our own behalf.

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.

A Jewish day begins in the quietness of dusk, sharing the evening meal as the world settles in to rest, 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.

The devices we carry to bed to make us feel connected and safe actually prevent us from trusting in the One who knows our needs and who alone can protect us through the dangers and sorrows of any night.

The biggest problem with most screen-based activities is that because they are designed to keep us engaged, we can learn them far too quickly. They ask too little of us and make the world too simple.

Until our children were ten years old, screens just weren’t a regular part of their lives.

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.

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.

Keeping us entertained is getting harder and harder. We are bored far more easily than we once were.

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 are not bored, exactly, just as someone eating potato chips is not hungry, exactly. But overconsumption of distraction is just as unsatisfying, and ultimately sickening, as overconsumption of junk food.

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.

The author Sherry Turkle, who has done so much to help us realize the dangers to real relationship that come along with technology’s promised benefits, suggests in her book Reclaiming Conversation that most conversations take at least seven minutes to really begin.

around seven minutes, there is almost always a point where someone takes a risk—or could take a risk.

All true conversations, really, are risks, exercises in improvisation where we have to listen and respond without knowing, fully, what is coming next, even out of our own mouths.

creating that kind of healthy immune system for everyone in our homes—becoming the kind of people who see technology’s shallow pleasures for what they are and set their sights on pursuing something better and deeper, together.