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

by Andy Crouch

When the Pharisees complained about Jesus doing “work” by healing on the Sabbath, he pointed out that any of them would (rightly) do the “work” of rescuing an ox, let alone a child, that fell into a well on the Sabbath day. By all means, if technology will help us rescue someone who falls into a well, we should use it—even if it is during our precious week of vacation once a year. But we are already constantly telling ourselves how much we want to use technology for good. We are probably more at risk of being so distracted by our devices that we would fall into a well ourselves.

In person and with a good night’s sleep, almost all of us would be far more careful with our own bodies and would exercise better judgment over the flights of our own imaginations than we do late at night. 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.

And then, in the morning, rather than rolling over to check for whatever flotsam and jetsam arrived in the night, get up and do something—anything—before plugging in. Stretch. Shower. Open the front door for a moment and breathe the morning’s air, humid or frigid as it may be. Make coffee or tea and wait for the brew to finish. There is something for you to discover in these moments just after waking that you will never know if you rush past it—an almost-forgotten dream, a secret fear, a spark of something creative. You’ll have the rest of the day tethered to the impatient wider world; let that wait a moment. Give your devices one more minute in their “beds.” Practice the grateful breath of someone who slept and awakened, given the gift of one more day.

Human beings are bodies. This is much truer than saying we “have” bodies—as if we could do without them or leave them behind. We are also souls—unique and irreplaceable selves that exist in and beyond our physical nature. We don’t “have” souls any more than we “have” bodies. We are both, soul and body together, and the Christian faith, rooted in ancient Hebrew belief, teaches that they were always meant to go together and, thanks to the resurrection of the body, always will.

But now, very early on in our lives and learning, we are substituting a single kind of activity, a dangerously easy and simple one, for the difficult, multidimensional kinds of activity that the real world offers us. We hand our children screen-based devices that, at this writing at least, respond to only a few very simple kinds of touch. They are exquisitely engineered to be easy to use, and their screens glow in colors far brighter than we almost ever see in nature. No wonder they are so enticing to children. And it’s neither surprising nor impressive that our children figure them out so quickly.

There is no reason to think this will impair our children’s learning in the least. All of our modern wonders of science and technology, after all—not to mention the world’s treasures of literature and poetry, songs and dance, sports and cuisine—were created by men and women whose childhoods were free of screens.

This is one of the greatest, most radical gifts we can give our children: ten years free to be embodied human beings, before we begin helping them manage the complexities as well as the gifts of the screen-based world. Give them those ten years, and I believe many of the patterns that are overwhelming parents as well as teenagers and young adults—let alone the frustrations that teachers are experiencing with ever-declining attention spans and capacity to concentrate—will be far more manageable.

What applies to children can apply to us adults as well. Many of us spend most of our working hours tethered to screens—such is the power and value of these tools for representing the world and working with others. But we can attend to the needs and possibilities of our bodies too. I do most of my writing, almost all of which requires a screen, in twenty-four-minute intervals, punctuated by six- to thirtyminute rest periods that give me a chance to weed the garden, walk around the block, brew tea, wash dishes, practice a page of Bach, or otherwise engage my full body. Our screenbased work will be far more productive if we balance it with plunges back into the complex, three-dimensional physical world that reawakens both our brains and our minds, both our bodies and our souls.2

Choosing no screens before double digits at home, and advocating for the same at school, is hard. Screens are easy. Screens are engrossing, absorbing, and rewarding for children just as much as for adults. If our goal is to have engrossed, absorbed, and easily rewarded children, we will turn to screens every time.

But mostly our children (who are now, like all teenagers, more adept than we really want to know in the ways of technology) spent their single-digit years learning in a world full of things, complicated things in three dimensions, not a world full of devices, simplified if beautiful illusions in two dimensions. They now say they wouldn’t want it any other way.

Put on a brightly colored, fast-moving video, and your kids will stay slack-jawed and motionless for the half hour it takes to get dinner on the table. (Is there any half hour more stressful in more homes than the one right before dinner? Friends of mine with three young children used to call it “the witching hour,” which is probably unfair to actual witches.) What could possibly be wrong with something that solves such an urgent problem so neatly? 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.

As screens—movies, TV, video games—present a world far more colorful and energetic than the created world itself, they not only ratchet up our expectations for what is significant and entertaining; they also undermine our ability to enjoy what we could call the abundance of the ordinary. Even when there is no cardinal in my backyard, it is full of varied colors, shapes, and sounds: the rustle of the breeze in the bushes, the subtly different leaves and bark of oak and maple, the infinite varieties of green against the changing sky. Even when there is no meteor shower, the night sky’s stars and nebulae are of countless different brightnesses and even shades of color, and they shimmer in the air. They form constellations in our ancestors’ imaginations and our own. Seeing a cardinal or a meteor is a special event, but in fact the very ordinary analog world is itself charged with beauty and surprise.

If you pay attention, you cannot possibly get bored in a meadow. It is all too easy to be bored on a lawn.

They do little to develop our abilities to wait, pay attention, contemplate, and explore—all needed to discover the abundance of the ordinary.

But there is a new challenge in our postindustrial times, with vast amounts of computing power channeled into screens we carry everywhere. We now have the technology to be perpetually distracted from boredom, and thus we never realize how bored we really are.

You probably wouldn’t be reading this book if you hadn’t had at least a few times in your life when you were thoroughly unbored—by a good story, a long walk, or an absorbing piece of music. At the end you felt alive, refreshed, and alert. But you probably wouldn’t be reading this book if you hadn’t also spent an hour being distracted from boredom by the “junk feeds” on your phone—and at the end just felt disoriented and spent.

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

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. If the craft table is always set up and within earshot of the kitchen, 5:30 p.m. is an ideal time to get out the watercolors or the finger paints (our craft table was designed to be stainproof and waterproof, but an equally good solution is to have an old table devoted to total mayhem, with a rubberized picnic tablecloth underfoot).