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

by Andy Crouch

No multitude of glowing rectangles will ever be able to replace a single bumblebee.

Wonder comes from opening your eyes wider, not bringing the screen closer.

Of course, I never made good on my threats to put anything of real value in the trash—though the difference between what I and my children considered “of real value” will no doubt be further material for those future therapy sessions.

This book is about how to find the proper place for technology in our family lives—and how to keep it there. If only it were as simple as cleaning up a bunch of stuffed animals. 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.

When previous generations confronted the perplexing challenges of parenting and family life, they could fall back on wisdom, or at least old wives’ tales, that had been handed down for generations. But the pace of technological change has surpassed anyone’s capacity to develop enough wisdom to handle it. We are stuffing our lives with technology’s new promise...

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 and vulnerabilities of those bodies altogether. 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 development of skill with passive consumption, something has gone wrong. 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 it keeps us from engaging the wild and wonderful natural world with all our senses. 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...

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.

I find TV’s moving images nearly irresistible. This is a problem in America, because in an awful lot of public places and homes, there’s an awful lot of TV. If there is a screen in view, I’ll find myself following a college basketball game, or, for that matter, local-car-dealer advertisements, with far keener attention than I’m giving to the person right across from me.

The makers of technological devices have become absolute masters at the nudge. Every notification that comes in on your smartphone is a nudge—not a command or demand, but something that makes it easier to stop whatever you’re currently doing and divert your attention to your screen. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms help apps manage the number of nudges so you never get tired of responding to them. 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.

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.

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.

Disciplines are very much like what weight lifters call progressive overload. The best way to gain strength is by pushing your muscles to the very edge of their current capacity, for a relatively brief time. No one can spend twelve hours a day bench-pressing hundreds of pounds, and no one should want to. But 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.

We are not meant for perpetual silence—we are meant to listen and speak. But the person who has not experienced or cannot bear silence does not understand what they hear and has little to offer when they speak. And of course we are meant to eat, and even to feast, but only when we fast do we make real progress toward being free of our dependence on food to soothe our depression and anesthetize our anxieties.

The disciplines, by taking us to our very limits, gradually move those limits. They move us toward being the kinds of people we were meant to be and want to be. So 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 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 disco...

If we want a better life, for ourselves and for our families, we will have to choose it—and the best way to choose it is to nudge and discipline ourselves toward the kind of life we most deeply want. We’ll arrange the places we live and the patterns of our daily lives to make the best choice easier. And because the best choice often requires strength and courage, we’ll build in periods o...

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.

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.

Increasingly, our lives have been colonized by things that don’t just help us accomplish a task but do the task for us. And this technology, at its most beguiling, requires almost no effort or learning at all. (This will end up having a lot to do with what the role we think technology should or shouldn’t play in education.) The highest compliment you can pay a piece of technology today is, “It just works!”

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 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.

A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.3

Life is difficult. In fact, if you do life properly—with wisdom—life gets more difficult as you go. (Eventually, it gets difficult for everyone, especially for the ones who try to avoid 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.

The only way to do it is with other people. We need people who know us and the complexities and difficulties of our lives really well—so well that we can’t hide the complexity and difficulty from them. And we need people who love us—who are unreservedly and unconditionally committed to us, our flourishing, and our growth no matter what we do, and who are so committed to us that they won’t let us stay the way we are. If you don’t have people in your life who know you and love you in that radical way, it is very, very unlikely you will develop either wisdom or courage.

Technology is a brilliant expression of human capacity. But anything that offers easy everywhere does nothing (well, almost nothing) to actually form human capacities.

In the most intimate setting of the household, where the deepest human work of our lives is meant to take place, technology distracts and displaces us far too often, undermining the real work of becoming persons of wisdom and courage.

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. We are going to have to commit to make every major decision, and many small decisions, on the basis of these questions: Will this help me become less foolish and more wise? Will this help me become less fearful and more courageous?

At the same time, fire is mesmerizing and beautiful. It is one of the only things in nature that glows on its own. Almost everything else merely reflects the light that comes from the fusion reactor conveniently located 93 million miles from our planet—still so bright that we can’t look at it directly. But terrestrial fire generates its own light, and our eyes are drawn to it, watching it play and dance.

But homes still need a center, and the best things to put in the center of our homes are engaging things—things that require attention, reward skill, and draw us together the way the hearth once did.

Though our central living space is by no means technology-free (as if any space can be that in an age of Wi-Fi and cell phones), it is still true that almost all the devices on our first floor can be—and regularly are—replaced by thoroughly nontechnological items.

The bookshelf speakers provide music, but we can also sit down at the piano or pull out the violin and make our own. • We can microwave our meals (which is great for making the best use of leftovers), but we can—and mostly do—cook them from scratch. For that matter, while I love our built-in dishwasher fiercely, every night we also plunge our hands into warm water and wash the pots and pans by hand. (OK, actually it’s usually the next morning. Or two mornings later.) • Even the lights and the heat can be replaced by candles and fireplace. Some of our happiest times as a family have been spent on this first floor, lit entirely by candlelight and the glow of a wood fire. Why wait for a power outage? • The Wi-Fi and cell signals are there, all right, but we can choose to ignore them, turning instead to conversation, music, books, or silence. Indeed, on Sundays (see the next chapter) that is what we intentionally do, all day long. Only one significant technological part of life on our first floor can’t be replaced by a nontechnological equivalent: cold—year-round refrigeration for our food and air-conditioning for sweltering summer days and nights. Everything else is turned off regularly.

This is the central nudge of the tech-wise life: to make the place where we spend the most time the place where easy everywhere is hardest to find. This simple nudge, all by itself, is a powerful antidote to consumer culture, the way of life that finds satisfaction mostly in enjoying what other people have made. It’s an invitation instead to creating culture—finding joy in shaping something useful or beautiful out of the raw material of the world.

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 too often, and with the best of intentions, we fill their world with technology instead—devices that actually ask very little of them. A cheap electronic keyboard makes a few monotonous sounds, while an expensive one promises to make all kinds of sounds, from trumpets to marimbas to organs. But actually, neither the cheap keyboard nor the expensive one has anything like the depth and range of possibility of an acoustic piano—or a trumpet or a marimba (if you are considering filling your living room with an organ, you probably do not need to read this book). A single pencil can produce more “colors” of gray and black than the most high-tech screen can reproduce.

Think of toil as excessive, endless, fruitless labor—the kind that leaves us exhausted, with nothing valuable to show for our effort. This is, alas, the kind of work that many people in our world must do their whole lives. But toil actually can afflict even the people who seem to have “dream jobs.”

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.

But in the technological age, toil and leisure are, oddly, less divided along these lines of social class. Many of us, even the most apparently privileged, have the uneasy sense that our work, though it seems physically undemanding (in its complete lack of physical activity, it may even be actively dangerous to our health), is toilsome. Most of us can now afford to purchase extravagant amounts of leisure—Netflix will sell you more entertainment than you could ever consume for $9 per month. But no amount of leisure can compensate for the sense that your life, whether poorly paid or well paid, is ultimately in vain.

(In an era when industrial jobs were mainly reserved for men, this also meant that women’s work became disconnected from men’s and began to be treated as less valuable.)

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.3 Even if the adults’ jobs still require skill and insight, even if those jobs are quite meaningful and rewarding, that work now takes place far from home.

But when the art of cooking is replaced by meals warmed up in a microwave—something a five-year-old can do as well as a fifty-five-year-old—then children no longer see their mothers or fathers doing something challenging, fruitful, admirable, and ultimately enjoyable. Instead, the family’s life together is reduced to mere consumption, purchasing the results of others’ work or toil. 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.

Further into the technological age, the home has become the site of work—or toil—again. Many of us bring our work home on our screens. Parents and children alike can work late into the night, as kids download their homework assignments from the school website and as parents field messages from globalized, round-the-clock workplaces. But this is little like the era when children would watch, fascinated, as their mother or father demonstrated some skill, whether caring for farm animals, repairing a plow or an engine, preparing a pie or a roast, or turning a wrinkled piece of fabric perfectly clean and crisp. Instead, the work that parents do at home, on our laptops and our phones, is hardly different from the schoolwork our children do—and sometimes much less obviously rewarding. As a young boy, my son told me he had figured out what my job was: “You type on your computer and talk on the phone.” He didn’t seem very impressed—and in one sense he was all too right. And I’m one of the fortunate ones who can bring fulfilling and rewarding work home. In a technological age, even those of us who have good work to do have to make an extra effort to show our children how our work requires real skill and produces something worthwhile.

And just as work (or toil) follows us into our day of rest, so does leisure. Netflix is always waiting to stream more entertainment into our home. Facebook keeps serving up more morsels of news, animated GIFs, and cute cat videos from our friends. It’s easy to let Sunday become one more day of toil and leisure (maybe, if we’re a churchgoing family, with the added stress of getting the whole family out the door at the same time in the morning, slightly better dressed and more polite than usual).

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. Close the laptop. Slide the little onscreen button on your phone to the right and watch its screen go not just blank but black. For bonus points, unplug the power strip that keeps all your entertainment devices constantly listening, like hovering ghosts, for the silent voice of the remote control. Suddenly, with the flick of a few switches, you have left the world of technology—at least its most commanding and demanding forms—entirely behind.

And then, just as the Sabbath commandment expands to include not just parents and children but servants and immigrant neighbors, find ways to invite others along for the joy of refreshment and rest. One of our treasured family traditions is Sunday afternoon tea, a custom loosely borrowed from our British ancestors that is easier to prepare than a full Sunday dinner. Our daughter makes place cards and hand letters a menu. We slice up fruit, bake cookies and bread, make little sandwiches, brew a pot of tea (and maybe pour some still or sparkling wine along the way, too)—and many Sundays we invite friends or neighbors to join us. The adults love the lack of pressure to deliver (or clean up after) a hot meal, the children love a meal composed entirely of snacks, and we all love the conviviality of passing simple, tasty treats around the table, and around again.

Our family has had the great privilege of being able to take two solid weeks of vacation each summer while our children were growing up. On the Friday before that vacation, I clean out my email inbox, set up a filter that will send every single message straight to an archive, and activate a “vacation message” with the stark subject line, “Unfortunately I will never read your email.”

The days that follow are full—full of rest rather than work. We fill them with biking and hiking and grilling and reading and napping. 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.

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.

So we should be wary of legalism in the way we implement our hour, day, or week of (relative) technological freedom. But for most of us, the risk of legalism is far, far less of an issue than our nearly insatiable appetite for the easy everywhere that technology offers. When it comes to technology, most of us are more like alcoholics than we are like sourpussed teetotalers—and most of us desperately need an infusion of intentionality about technology into our lives more than we need release from overly limited, legalistic restrictions.