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.

If you’re hoping that being tech wise will neatly eliminate technology’s harmful influences from your children’s lives, you’re set up for disappointment.

if we don’t learn to put technology, in all its forms, in its proper place, we will miss out on many of the best parts of life in a family.

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 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.

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 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.

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. The dream of a tool that would work by itself was strictly the stuff of magic or fantasy—the sorcerer’s apprentice’s dream of a broom that would clean up by itself.

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.

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.

Somehow, in the discovery that we are great fools, we also begin to develop wisdom. This happened to all of us as we grew up, from children who foolishly thought every toy belonged to us, to adults who are capable of empathy and self-sacrifice. It happens for parents, too, as we discover in the course of caring for our children just how self-centered and impatient we can be and begin to acquire a deeper capacity for love. All the really important things we do as families involve developing wisdom.

the friendships that do make it to that level of honesty and commitment end up feeling an awful lot like family.

technology is only very good if it can help us become the persons we were meant to be.

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.

opportunities for creativity and skill, beauty and risk.

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.

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.

Thanks to this annual Sabbath, we have memories of life together at every stage of our children’s lives, memories that we will remember longer than anything anyone might email me about during those two weeks. When I return after two weeks and deactivate the filter, my empty inbox quickly begins to fill again. But I have had two weeks of rest. Somehow the work ahead, and the year ahead, seems more like gift and less like toil than it did before my digital Sabbath.

Sabbathless toil is a violation of God’s intention for our lives and our whole economy. When we find ourselves in its grip, it means that we are slaves to a system of injustice.

The beautiful, indeed amazing, thing about all disciplines is that they serve as both diagnosis and cure for what is missing in our lives. They both help us recognize the exact nature of our disease and, at the very same time, begin to heal us from our disease.

Fatigue and isolation compound our immaturity and susceptibility to temptation—especially for teenagers but also for adults.

The lilies of the field close up their blooms at night and rest patiently for the next day, but we, cloaked in ghostly light, make tomorrow’s troubles today’s and tonight’s instead. The devices we carry to bed to make us feel connected and safe actually prevent us from trusting in the One who knows our needs and who alone can protect us through the dangers and sorrows of any night.

the physical act of reading a book, with its bound pages, helps strengthen the learning of the concepts inside.1 (If you are reading this book in physical form, you may well be able to remember, hours or days from now, where on the page and how far into the book this very sentence was found—a physical memory of your senses from eyes and hands that will reinforce the idea you absorbed at the same time. That experience will be missing if you read it on a digital screen, with no fixed location on a page, no weight of the two halves of the book in your hands, and the idea itself will also be harder to remember.)

Physical activity engages our brains in ways that mere thought or contemplation does not—indeed, there is reason to believe there is no such thing as “mere thought.” All human thought requires embodiment, and without bodies we could not think. We can have a faint idea or hunch in our mind, but it is only when we speak or write it that it becomes clear, not just to others but to ourselves as well.

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.

First, eliminate “passive” screen time at home—televisions or videos playing in the background with no one even really paying attention. Then reduce or eliminate “unaccompanied” screen time—the games and videos that substitute for individual play and reading. Then take the more challenging step of reducing “social” screen time, figuring out how to challenge children to play together in tactile, creative, self-initiated, and self-sustaining ways.

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.

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. And as with all the things we do to our children, the truth is that we are doing it to ourselves as well. 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. Those hours have been spent avoiding suffering—avoiding the suffering of our banal, boring modern world with its airport security lines and traffic jams and parking lots, but also avoiding the suffering of learning patience, wisdom, and virtue and putting them into practice. They have left me, as the ring left Bilbo, feeling “all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”4

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.

this is a good word

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.

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.

the most important things we will do to prevent porn from taking over our own lives and our children’s lives have nothing to do with sex. A home where wisdom and courage come first; where our central spaces are full of satisfying, demanding opportunities for creativity; where we have regular breaks from technology and opportunities for deep rest and refreshment (where devices “sleep” somewhere other than our bedrooms and where both adults and children experience the satisfactions of learning in thick, embodied ways rather than thin, technological ways); where we’ve learned to manage boredom and where even our car trips are occasions for deep and meaningful conversation—this is the kind of home that can equip all of us with an immune system strong enough to resist pornography’s foolishness.

The path to health is not encasing our children in some kind of germ-free sterile environment that they will inevitably try to flee; rather, it is having healthy immune systems that equip us to resist and reject things that do not lead to health.

All sin begins with separation—hiding from our fellow human beings and our Creator, even if, at first, we simply hide in the “privacy” of our own thoughts, fears, and fantasies.

Simply, singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength. Almost everything else we do requires at least one of these fundamental human faculties: the heart, the seat of the emotion and the will; the mind, with which we explore and explain the world; the soul, the heart of human dignity and personhood; and strength, our bodies’ ability to bring about change in the world. But singing (and maybe only singing) combines them all. When we sing in worship, our minds are engaged with the text and what it says about us and God, our hearts are moved and express a range of emotions, our bodily strength is required, and—if we sing with “soul”—we reach down into the depths of our beings to do justice to the joy and heartbreak of human life. 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.

so good