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

by Andy Crouch

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.