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

by Andy Crouch

I think the best part of tech-wise parenting, for me, has been its focus on “something older and better than the newest thing.” The key word is better. Tech-wise parenting isn’t simply intended to eliminate technology but to put better things in its place.

Tech-wise parenting has added wonder to my life, though, and that’s enough.

OK, my parents’ approach to parenting has caused a certain amount of havoc and even difficulty. But since that’s not the best way to persuade you to buy the book, call it flourishing instead. Tech-wise parenting welcomes the mud, the crayon drawings on the wall, and the arguments, because it takes some messiness to flourish. After all, the creativity that makes a kid think the wall is her canvas also encourages her to sing cow songs—and to learn the violin.

Technology is literally everywhere in our homes—not only the devices in our pockets but the invisible electromagnetic waves that flood our homes. This change has come about overnight, in the blink of an eye in terms of human history and culture.

the pace of technological change has surpassed anyone’s capacity to develop enough wisdom to handle it.

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.

We feel helpless to prevent them from overexposure, far too early, to the most violent and intimate facts of life. (Medieval Jewish rabbis, it’s said, used to discourage anyone under thirty from even reading the Bible’s poetically erotic Song of Songs. If only that was our problem.)

This better way involves radically recommitting ourselves to what family is about—what real life is about. Our homes aren’t meant to be just refueling stations, places where we and our devices rest briefly, top up our charge, and then go back to frantic activity. They are meant to be places where the very best of life happens.

Nudges don’t generally make us do anything, but they make certain choices easier and more likely. They don’t focus so much on changing anything about our own preferences and ability to choose well; they simply put the best choice right in front of us and make the wrong choice harder.

The mere presence of your smartphone in your pocket is a nudge, a gentle reminder that just a tap away are countless rewards of information, entertainment, and distraction.

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.

Very few of us, for example, are meant to spend our lives largely alone, but the person who has not experienced or cannot bear solitude is missing an essential part of maturity. (“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. . . . Let him who is not in community beware of being alone”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer.)

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.

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.

(“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion” [Prov. 18:2]—which also sounds a lot like social media.)

As a Christian, I actually don’t believe the biological family is the main place we are meant to be known and loved in a way that leads to wisdom and courage. Jesus, after all, said some pretty harsh things about ordinary, biological family. He said that his way of wisdom and courage would divide children from parents and brothers from sisters—as it did in his day and sometimes still does in ours.

The first Christians met in homes, and those homes were not single-family dwellings but Greco-Roman “households” that often included several generations as well as uncles and aunts, clients, and indentured servants of the “paterfamilias.” The church too was a household—a gathering of related and unrelated persons all bound together by grace and the pursuit of holiness.

Please understand: I’m not saying technology is bad. In fact, I would say it is very good. Christians inherit the Jewish story in which the world is meant to be tended and developed by human beings, with their unique capacity for memory, reason, and skill. Once these image bearers were placed in creation, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). Part of that “very-goodness” is the human capacity to discover and develop all the potential in God’s amazing cosmos. It took thousands of years for us to understand how electricity and magnetism work together, to learn how to efficiently harness the earth’s amazing reserves of energy, and to discover the properties of materials at tiny scales—but all that was there from the very beginning, waiting for us. Technology is the latest, and in many ways most astonishingly good, example of the fruit our image bearing was meant to produce.

Without a doubt, compared to human beings just one century ago, we are more globally connected, better informed about many aspects of the world, in certain respects more productive, and—thanks to GPS and Google Maps—certainly less lost. But are we more patient, kind, forgiving, fearless, committed, creative than they were? And if we are, how much credit should technology receive?

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.

So here’s where we have to start if we are going to live as flourishing families in an age of easy everywhere: we are going to have to decide, together, that nothing is more important than becoming people of wisdom and courage.

Will this help me become less foolish and more wise? Will this help me become less fearful and more courageous?

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.

So here is a simple test of whether your home is a techwise space: 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. Are the most visible things more like a hearth or more like a furnace?

What makes the things on our first floor valuable is not their price. Instead, it’s the way each thing asks us, our children, and our guests to bring creativity and imagination to life together.

So if you do only one thing in response to this book, I urge you to make it this: 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.

Children, in particular, are driven to create—if we just nudge them in that direction. They thrive in a world stocked with raw materials.

But most nights, we clear everything away in time for dinner. Once again most everything in sight is organic, colorful, textured, with the fractal variety of nature—the wood of the chairs and table, the deep blue of the tablecloth, the motley patchwork of book covers on the shelves. The sleek blank slabs of aluminum and glass are banished for a little while.

Work is the fruitful transformation of the world through human effort and skill, in ways that serve our shared human needs and give glory to God. Work requires wisdom—understanding something about the world, its limitations, and its possibilities. And work requires courage, because even work at its best involves risk and effort, and in a fallen world, work is not often at its best. Work also requires wisdom and courage because we always work together with others, and other human beings are never easy to understand or work with.

Instead of work and rest, we have ended up with toil and leisure—and neither one is an improvement.

Think of toil as excessive, endless, fruitless labor—the kind that leaves us exhausted, with nothing valuable to show for our effort.

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.

What happens to families when the home becomes a leisure zone? One of the most damaging results, as the philosopher Albert Borgmann has pointed out, is that children never see their parents acting with wisdom and courage in the world of work.

No wonder children at the “peak leisure-home” stage of the 1960s and 1970s stopped admiring their parents. They never saw their parents doing anything worth admiring.

But there is a silver lining in the way technology has clouded our lives with nonstop toil and leisure—it gives us an amazingly simple way to bring everything to a beautiful halt. We can turn our devices off.

So I suggest a simple, minimal pattern of Sabbath: we choose to turn our devices off not just one day every week but also one hour (or more) every day and one week (or more) every year.

plug them all in (where they can have their own little feast on electrons),

(Part of true rest is not having work accumulate relentlessly while you are resting!)

But for at least a short time, we had a taste of the life we were meant for: conversation, conviviality, communion. It’s just enough.

Perhaps all this is in the background of the ancient Jewish and Near Eastern practice of considering sunset the start of the day, instead of sunrise. The Jewish people’s psalms included this heartening admonition: “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives sleep to his beloved” (Ps. 127:2). 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 expression “burning the midnight oil” comes from a pretechnological time when keeping a lamp lit was a costly and unusual practice.

So, we need a simple discipline: our devices should “go to bed” before we do. And to add a nudge to that discipline, it’s by far the best if their “bedroom” is as far from ours as possible.

Sleep specialists widely recommend that, once night comes, the bedroom should be reserved for just one thing: sleep (and, for the parents, romance).

Human beings are bodies. This is much truer than saying we “have” bodies—as if we could do without them or leave them behind. We are also souls—unique and irreplaceable selves that exist in and beyond our physical nature. We don’t “have” souls any more than we “have” bodies. We are both, soul and body together, and the Christian faith, rooted in ancient Hebrew belief, teaches that they were always meant to go together and, thanks to the resurrection of the body, always will.

The truth is that our children, just like us, will spend far too much of their lives tethered to glowing rectangles. We owe them, at the very minimum, early years of real, embodied, difficult, rewarding learning, the kind that screens cannot provide. And that is why a family that cares about developing wisdom and courage will exert every effort to avoid the thin simplicity of screens in the first years of life. Our family adopted a simple if radical standard: no screens before double digits. Until our children were ten years old, screens just weren’t a regular part of their lives.

a ten- or eleven-year-old can figure out an iPad (or whatever has replaced it by the time she turns that age) in an instant. By that age, as well, she will begin to be cognitively ready to actually become “computer literate”—to be taught and to practice the fascinating algorithmic and mathematical thinking that is at the heart of much technology. And she will have had a real childhood, with dirt under her fingernails, countless books nearly memorized through delighted rereading, and complex, embodied skills encoded into her still-growing brain. She will enjoy the rich life of a soul in a body, rather than being reduced to a brain on a stick.