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

by Andy Crouch

Our home internet is filtered by the OpenDNS service, which constantly updates and blocks sources of sexually explicit content as well as other objectionable material.)

my friend Matt, who has four middle- and high-school-age sons, has told each one, “I’m your dad. Until you are grown, it’s my job to know more about what’s going on in your life—and therefore on your phone—than anyone else.” 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.

Until children reach adulthood, parents should have total access to their children’s devices.

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.

it will be the sort of singing you only can do at home, where you are fully known and fully able to be yourself. And it will be a rehearsal for the end of the whole story, when all speech will be song and the whole cosmos will be filled with worship.

We are meant not just for thin, virtual connections but for visceral, real connections to one another in this fleeting, temporary, and infinitely beautiful and worthwhile life. We are meant to die in one another’s arms, surrounded by prayer and song, knowing beyond knowing that we are loved.