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

by Andy Crouch

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

Thanks to tech-wise parenting, I’ve discovered a world out there that is better than anything technology can offer—as close as our front lawn.

Not only have I always known that wonder is out there; I’ve been taught how to search for it. No multitude of glowing rectangles will ever be able to replace a single bumblebee. And 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.

keep technology in its proper place.

But if there’s one thing our children need to hear from us, over and over again, it’s this: “Our family is different.”

The proper place for technology won’t be exactly the same for every family, and it is not the same at every season of our lives.

So 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...

So consider this short book a bit like those ten-minute cleanup sessions I put my children through: a ruthless guide to sorting out where technology actually belongs...

If there is one word that sums up how many of us feel about technology and family life, it’s Help!

this better way is radical. It requires making choices that most of our neighbors aren’t making. It requires making choices that most of our neighbors in church aren’t making.

you don’t have to become Amish, but you probably have to become closer to Amish than you think.

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.

Build your life around not having a TV, and when you finally do have a TV, almost nothing will change.

make it a practice to find a seat where I simply can’t see a screen. I know I’m not capable of resisting the urge to watch, so I remove the temptation whenever I can, especially when there’s a person with me who deserves my full attention.

It’s a simple, low-friction decision that has made countless hours at friends’ homes and at restaurants much more meaningful

nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to make or want others to make.2 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.

our supply of willpower—the ability to make hard decisions that go against our instincts or preferences—is limited. Nudges help us make some of those right decisions without having to use up that precious limited supply of willpower, leaving it available for the moments when we really need it.

The world around us is nudging us ...

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.

If you sit down on your couch and the TV remote is sitting in front of you, inviting you to press the power button and see what’s on—that’s a nudge. The TV itself is a nudge—if it weren’t there at all, you’d have to go somewhere else (maybe out to dinner!) to watch a game or a sitcom or, for that matter, car-dealer ads. But with it sitting right there, it’s easy to make the choice to stay put and turn it on.

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 th...

Nudges play to our weakness—our tendency to take the easy road most taken. They change the environment outside us in order to make good choices easier. But nudges will never, on their own, build the wisdom and courage we need—partly because we often can’t control our environment, no matter how much we’d like to. We need to change something inside of us as well: to develop the strength to make good choices even when everything around us is nudging, or pushing, us in the wrong direction. And for that we need disciplines.

progressive overload.

spend an hour a day, a few days a week, in that kind of focused, strenuous exertion, and you will see gains in strength that come no other way, strength that will then be available for everything else you do. The point of working out is not just to be able to complete more reps with higher weight a few times a week—it’s to develop and train our bodies to be healthier all the time.

The central disciplines of the spiritual life, as taught by generations of Christian saints, have stayed the same for twenty centuries now: solitude, silence, and fasting. Each of them pushes us beyond our natural limits, and all of them give us spiritual resources for everyday life that we can’t gain any other way.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. . . . Let him who is not in community beware of being alone”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer.)

the person who has not experienced or cannot bear silence does not understand what they hear and has little to offer when they speak.

The disciplines, by taking us to our very limits, gradually move those limits.

the discipline of Sabbath, for example, doesn’t just help us take one day a week to enjoy deep and restorative rest (with all the preparation, concentration, and commitment that requires); it helps us make choices the rest of the week to avoid anxiety and pride.

The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines...

For almost all of human history, tools were quite limited. They weren’t everywhere; they were in specific places. Tools were in the field (agricultural tools) or in the kitchen (cooking tools) or in the toolshed (work tools). And while tools helped us do our work, they didn’t work on their own.

Increasingly, our lives have been colonized by things that don’t just help us accomplish a task but do the task for us.

At the same time technology is less and less limited to a specific place.

Family is about the forming of persons.

in one sense a person is simply what we are as human beings, we are also able to become—to grow in

Wisdom is understanding. It’s the kind of understanding, specifically, that guides action. It’s knowing, in a tremendously complex world, what the right thing to do is—what will be most honoring of our Creator and our fellow creatures.

This is why, in the psalms and the proverbs of the Hebrew Bible, the fool is the one who doesn’t know God, doesn’t understand fellow human beings, and doesn’t even really know himself. (“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion” [Prov. 18:2]—which also sounds a lot like social media.) A fool can know a lot of things, but a fool doesn’t really know what it is to be a person. And the fool certainly doesn’t know how to act in a way that will serve the flourishing of persons—even, in the end, his own flourishing. The fool may be well educated, but the fool does not understand. When he acts, the results are, sooner or later, hilarious and disastrous in equal measure.

we discover what fools we are. No matter how big your house, it’s not big enough to hide your foolishness from people who live with you day after day.

We misunderstand each other, we misunderstand ourselves, and we certainly misunderstand God (when we remember him at all). In our families we see the consequences of all that misunderstanding. Our busyness, our laziness, our sullenness, our short tempers, our avoidance of conflict, our boiling-over conflicts—living in a family is one long education in just how foolish we can be, children and adults alike.

Knowledge, these days, is very easy to come by—almost too easy, given the flood of search results for almost any word or phrase you can imagine. But you can’t search for wisdom—at least, not online. And it’s as rare and precious as ever—maybe, given how complex our lives have become, rarer and more precious than before.

Because we need not just to understand our place in the world and the faithful way to proceed—we also need the conviction and character to act.

virtue, a word that has dwindled, in our common language, into something like “niceness” or, worse, a kind of goody-goody avoidance of bad behavior. But we can’t afford to give up the word’s older and deeper meaning, which is the habits of character that allow us to act courageously in the face of difficulty.

And even though it’s incredibly hard simply to know what we should do, it’s even harder to actually act on what we know we should do. Because almost all the time, the most faithful, the most loving, and the wisest thing to do is scary, hard, and painful—even, in some ways, dangerous.

stay committed, stay faithful, stay hopeful. To actually commit and keep faith and hope has sometimes asked more of us than we could imagine