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

by Andy Crouch

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...

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 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.

At all the moments of greatest conflict in our marriage, and in our deepest friendships with others, the way of wisdom has been clear: stay committed, stay faithful, stay hopeful. To actually commit and keep faith and hope has sometimes asked more of us than we could imagine giving.

As a Christian, I actually don’t believe the biological family is the main place we are meant to be known and loved in a way that leads to wisdom and courage. Jesus, after all, said some pretty harsh things about ordinary, biological family. He said that his way of wisdom and courage would divide children from parents and brothers from sisters—as it did in his

day and sometimes still does in ours.

Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt. 12:48–50).

the church is, and can be, family for everyone in a way that biological families cannot. No matter whether your parents are still living—or whether they were ever loving—no matter whether you have a spouse or children or siblings or cousins, you have a family in the church.

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.

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.

Will this help me become less foolish and more wise? Will this help me become less fearful and more courageous?

We will have to teach our children, from early on, that we are not here as parents to make their lives easier but to make them better.

We will tell them—and show them—that nothing matters more to our family than creating a home where all of us can be known, loved, and called to grow. And then we’ll have to make hard choices—sometimes radical choices—to use technology in a very different way from people around us.

This was once natural, indeed unavoidable. Almost every home once had a hearth, the fire that gave warmth, light, heat for cooking—and entertainment too, with its dancing flames and distinctive glow. The Latin word for hearth, focus, reminds us that fire was once the center of our homes. Fire is a marvelous tool—one of the first human tools. But it is not technology in the sense I’m using the word in this book, with its easy-everywhere simplicity. Fire is dangerous and difficult to work with. Tending a fire, outside or indoors, requires skill, work, and care. 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.

So if you do only one thing in response to this book, I urge you to make it this: Find the room where your family spends the most time and ruthlessly eliminate the things that ask little of you and develop little in you. Move the TV to a less central location—and ideally a less comfortable one. And begin filling the space that is left over with opportunities for creativity and skill, beauty and risk. 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.

the people of God, anyone who depended on them or lived among them, and even their livestock were to cease from work and enjoy rest, restoration, and worship. They were called, you might say, to ceasing and feasting: setting aside daily labor and bringing out the best fruits of that work, stored up in the course of the week and the year, for everyone to enjoy.

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.

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. (Is it totally an accident, by the way, that the 1970s gave us the “leisure suit”?)

a simple, minimal pattern of Sabbath: we choose to turn our devices off not just one day every week but also one hour (or more) every day and one week (or more) every year. Build into every single day an hour, for everyone in the household, free from the promises and demands of our devices. For many of us, this will most naturally be the dinner hour. Few Americans, of course, sit at a weeknight dinner for a whole hour, but if we weren’t springing up from food hastily scarfed down to get back to the demands of homework and leftover office work, maybe our dinners would last a few minutes longer. However long we’re actually at the table, make it a daily practice to gather up the devices at the beginning of the hour, plug them all in (where they can have their own little feast on electrons), and leave them there, silenced and untouched, for sixty minutes. For families with small children, the better hour may be the hour just before bedtime, where baths and stories and cuddling can happen without digital distraction. Dinnertime How many times per week does your family intentionally eat a meal together, either in your home or at a restaurant?

“The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath,” Jesus told the Pharisees (Mark 2:27). The biblical prohibition on work was life giving, but the thicket of rules about what exactly counted as “work” ended up being so dense and forbidding that the Pharisees were scandalized when Jesus healed the sick on the Sabbath. Something has gone wrong with our disciplines when we become more obsessed with the mechanics and mechanisms of fulfilling them than with the gift they are meant to give. So we should be wary of legalism in the way we implement our hour, day, or week of (relative) technological freedom.

But for at least a short time, we had a taste of the life we were meant for: conversation, conviviality, communion. It’s just enough.

We are meant to be still, quiet, unconscious, and vulnerable for roughly a third of every day, and more when we are young. Devices do not need this kind of rest. While anything with moving parts requires periodic maintenance, and even fully electronic devices will eventually wear out and fail, most of our technology can function for days, months, or even years without anything like sleep. But we are not devices; we are persons. And while we are made in the image of God, in this respect we are not like God at all. God “never slumbers or sleeps” (Ps. 121:4 NLT) but is continually present and available to all creation. God’s unsleeping care is good news: we sleepy creatures can trust that our needs will be provided for while we can do nothing on our own behalf.

As with so much in our mediated world, the solution to this mess is astonishingly simple, and radical only because it is so rarely done. The problem isn’t with our devices themselves—it’s with the way we use them. We simply have to turn off the easy fixes and make media something we use on purpose and rarely rather than aimlessly and frequently. 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.

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).