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

by Andy Crouch

They’ve watched as their most media-savvy peers, the ones with a thousand followers from their high school or a million followers from all over the world, first expose themselves, then overexpose themselves, and go from reveling in the attention to breaking under the weight of others’ expectations and derision.

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.

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

(I use third-party programs like f.lux and Apple’s own settings to make sure my devices glow yellow rather than blue at night.)

the quest to cure boredom with entertainment actually makes the problem worse. But it works the other way around as well. The less we rely on screens to occupy and entertain our children, the more they become capable of occupying and entertaining themselves.

The problem, as with so many short-term solutions, is that solving the immediate problem requires leaving a bigger problem unsolved—and actually makes the bigger problem worse.

This is why our short-term solution to the witching hour—to bewitch our children with technological distraction—in the long run just makes things worse.

I have spent, often in the face of demanding creative work, scrolling aimlessly through social media and news updates, clicking briefly on countless vaguely titillating updates about people I barely know and situations I have no control over, feeling dim, thin versions of interest, attraction, dissatisfaction, and dislike.

in her book Reclaiming Conversation that most conversations take at least seven minutes to really begin.

(An alarming number of them will be visibly preoccupied with their cell phones, an activity that impairs driving more than moderate alcohol consumption, but try not to be too freaked out by that.)

An astonishing 62 percent of teenagers say they have received a nude image on their phone, and 40 percent say they have sent one.

(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.)

To use an older and hilariously apt metaphor attributed to Martin Luther, we can’t stop the birds from flying over our head, but we can stop them from building a nest in our hair.