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

by Andy Crouch

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.

Systems archetypes!

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.

I am horrified at the hours 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.

I see this at work, in myself and others.

So when we do sit down in front of a TV screen, it will be for a specific purpose and with a specific hope, not just of entertainment or distraction but of wonder and exploration. When we do scroll through social media, it will be to have a chance to give thanks for our friends, enjoy their creative gifts, and pray for their needs, rather than just something to take our mind off our tedium.

The good news is that the more often we resist the easy solution, the easier the solution will be to find—because our children (and we ourselves) will start to develop capacities to explore and discover that will make them less prone to be bored in the first place. The discipline here is committing to this simple rule: the screen stays off and blank unless we are using it together and for a specific creative purpose. Then we can put nudges in place.

And when we do put on a video or otherwise fire up a screen for a purpose, we’ll follow another principle: never entertain your children with anything you find unsatisfying, just like you shouldn’t feed your children anything you don’t enjoy eating yourself. Feed them with food that is both tasty and nutritious—and entertain them with movies, books, and stories that are both tasty and nutritious too.

by enjoying the best, on purpose, rarely and together, we’ll become the kind of people who can also find the best in anything, wherever we are, even alone. We’ll become the kind of people who can never be bored.

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.1 Up until that point, we are able to rely on our usual repertoire of topics—the weather, routine reports about our day, minimal and predictable chitchat. But around seven minutes, there is almost always a point where someone takes a risk—or could take a risk. The risk may be silence; it may be an unexpected question or observation; it may be an expression of a deeper or different emotion than we usually allow. 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.

The truth is that if we build our family’s technological life around trying to keep porn out, we will fail.

So the tech-wise family will make a simple commitment to one another: no technological secrets, and no place to hide them. If your family has a shared computer, arrange it so the screen faces the rest of the room and others who may wander in. Until children reach adulthood, parents should have total access to their children’s devices. I’m well aware this won’t stop teenagers from deleting text messages the moment they arrive, relying on self-destructing apps like Snapchat, and engaging in countless other subterfuges—if they choose. But when they do so, they will know they are violating a family practice of openness to and with one another; they will be making choices, even poor ones, within a moral framework rather than simply blundering their way through adolescence without any guidance or boundaries.

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.

I will never forget coming home from a dinner party at one of the residence halls of Harvard, where we lived and worked at the time, knowing that I had to tell Catherine the truth about my enmeshment in pornography. Telling the searing truth about my foolishness was a brutal contrast to the urbane conversation earlier in the evening. But as painful as it was, it was one of the most enduringly fruitful moments of my life. Her dismay and her forgiveness were the two essential ingredients in freeing me from my enslavement to porn’s unreality—probably because it is only the combination of dismay and forgiveness that keeps any of us sane.

At the root of the disappearance of shared singing in public life and our churches is one of the most profound changes in the history of human beings, who have made music, as far as we can tell, from the very beginning. Up until about one hundred years ago, there was only one meaning to the phrase “play music.” It meant that someone had to take up an instrument, having developed at least some skill, and make music, in person, in real time. They were not always expert musicians—the diaries and novels of the nineteenth century are full of rueful comments about how poorly some cousin played the piano in the family parlor. But there was only one way for music to be “played”—and that was for someone to play it.

But worship is actually more like a form of training—practicing, week after week, ideally in the presence of others who are further along in faith than we are, the exertion of our heart, mind, soul, and strength in the direction of giving glory to God. And Christians believe that God actually responds and moves in the midst of our worship: when we gather ourselves to offer him praise, he in turn dwells with us. At its best, worship transforms us, making us people capable of things we could never work up the capacity or courage for on our own: the ability to sacrifice, to love, to repent, to forgive, and to hope.

To sing well—not in the sense of singing in perfect tune or like a professional, but in this sense of bringing heart, mind, soul, and strength to our singing—is to touch the deepest truths about the world. It is to know wisdom. And it’s also to develop the courage and character to declare that God is this good, that we are this in need of him, that we are this thankful, that we are this committed to be part of his story.

Early in our marriage, Catherine and I made a commitment that has in turn dictated a hundred other decisions over the years. We decided that every time we were invited to a wedding or a funeral, unless circumstances made it truly impossible, at least one of us would go. We would cancel or reschedule anything else we had planned, and spend any money we had, to be present in person.

I believe it was the author Wendell Berry who made the devastating observation that in every family that gathers around the Thanksgiving dinner table, one member will one day be left entirely alone, having buried all the others. We bind ourselves to one another with all our love and loyalty, but one day all those bonds will be severed by loss.

The tech-wise family will choose a different way. We will recognize that our daily bodily vulnerabilities, our illnesses, and our final journey to death are our best chance to reject technology’s easy-everywhere promise. We will embrace something better: the wisdom of knowing our own limits, the courage to care for one another, and, just as difficult, the courage to accept one another’s care when we cannot care for ourselves. We will put love into practice in the most profound possible way, by being present with one another in person at the greatest and most difficult moments of life.

We are meant to build this kind of life together: the kind of life that, at the end, is completely dependent upon one another; the kind of life that ultimately transcends, and does not need, the easy solutions of technology because it is caught up in something more true and more lasting than any alchemy our technological world can invent. We are meant to be family—not just marriages bound by vows and the children that come from them, but a wider family that invites others into our lives and even to the threshold of our very last breath, to experience vulnerability and grace, sorrow and hope, singing our way homeward. 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.

If I were to suggest one book to take up after this one (if not before it), it would be Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age