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

by Andy Crouch

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?