The Tech-Wise Family Quotes

“Simply, singing may be the one human activity that most perfectly combines heart, mind, soul, and strength. Almost everything else we do requires at least one of these fundamental human faculties: the heart, the seat of the emotion and the will; the mind, with which we explore and explain the world; the soul, the heart of human dignity and personhood; and strength, our bodies’ ability to bring about change in the world. But singing (and maybe only singing) combines them all. When we sing in worship, our minds are engaged with the text and what it says about us and God, our hearts are moved and express a range of emotions, our bodily strength is required, and—if we sing with “soul”—we reach down into the depths of our beings to do justice to the joy and heartbreak of human life. To sing well—not in the sense of singing in perfect tune or like a professional, but in this sense of bringing heart, mind, soul, and strength to our singing—is to touch the deepest truths about the world. It is to know wisdom. And it’s also to develop the courage and character to declare that God is this good, that we are this in need of him, that we are this thankful, that we are this committed to be part of his story.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“So the best defense against porn, for every member of our family, is a full life--the kind of life that technology cannot provide on its own. This is why the most important things we will do to prevent porn from taking over our own lives and our children's lives have nothing to do with sex. A home where wisdom and courage come first; where our central spaces are full of satisfying, demanding opportunities for creativity; where we have regular breaks from technology and opportunities for deep rest and refreshment (where devices "sleep" somewhere other than our bedrooms and where both adults and children experience the satisfactions of learning in thick, embodied ways rather than thin, technological ways); where we've learned to manage boredom and where even our car trips are occasions for deep and meaningful conversation--this is the kind of home that can equip all of us with an immune system strong enough to resist pornography's foolishness.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“Because technology is devoted primarily to making our lives easier, it discourages us from disciplines, especially ones that involve disentangling ourselves from technology itself.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“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.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“The home is the place where worship of the true God starts: the place where we remember and recite God’s Word, and where we learn to respond to God with our heart, soul, strength, and—as Jesus added when he called this the greatest commandment—with our mind as well.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“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.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“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”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“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?”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“We only get one life to live. Wouldn’t it be better spent enjoying and serving the world God made rather than a glowing screen?”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“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 discourages us from disciplines, especially ones that involve disentangling ourselves from technology itself. 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 of intense effort or demanding withdrawal that help us make the right choice when it’s not easy at all.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“But I do know this: if we don’t learn to put technology, in all its forms, in its proper place, we will miss out on many of the best parts of life in a family.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“If technology has failed to deliver us from toil, it has done a great deal to replace rest with leisure—at least for those who can afford it. 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.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“This level of access (accountability) is not a matter of managing, let alone preventing failure and sin. It has a simpler and deeper purpose, to keep us deeply connected to one another, in ways that make failure and sin both less attractive and less damaging to our souls and our relationships. All sin begins with separation. Hiding from our fellow human beings and our Creator. Even if we at first we simply hide in the privacy of our own thoughts, fears, and fantasies. Anything that shortcuts our separation, that reinforces our connection to one another and our need for one another, also cuts off the energy supply for cherishing and cultivating patterns of sin.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“Never entertain your children with anything you find unsatisfying. Just like you shouldn't feed your children with anything you don't enjoy eating yourself. Feed them with food that is both tasty and nutritious and entertain them with movies, books, and stories that are both tasty and nutritious too. This doesn't mean avoiding all children's movies or books or food! It just means avoiding the ones that are too simple or simplistic to satisfy adults.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“Further into the technological the age, the home has become the sight 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 around the world globalized around the clock workplaces. But this is little like the era when children would watch fascinated as a mother or father demonstrated some skill, whether caring for farm animals, repairing a plow on an engine, preparing a pie or a roast or turning a piece of fabric perfectly clean and crisp. Instead, the work that parents do at home on our laptops and our phones is hardly different than the schoolwork our children do and sometimes much less obviously rewarding.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“The technological magic that gives us washing machines, dryers and non-ironed shirts can easily seem like a harmless improvement. But when the art of cooking is replaced by meals warmed up in the microwave - something a five-year-old can do as well as a fifty-five-year-old, then children no longer see their fathers and mothers doing something challenging, fruitful, admirable, and ultimately enjoyable. Instead, the family's life together is reduced to mere consumption, the result of others work or toil. No wonder the children at the peak leisure stage of the 1960's and the 1970's topped admiring their parents, they no longer saw their parents doing anything worth admiring.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“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, device that ask very little of them...A single pencil can produce more colors of gray and black than the most high-tech screen can reproduce. For a child's creative development, the inexpensive, deep, organic thing is far better than the expensive, broad, electronic thing.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. 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 shapes us in countless ways.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“We love the way screens can, almost magically, absorb our children’s attention and give us a few moments of quiet in the car or before dinner.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“We are meant not just for thin, virtual connections but for visceral, real connections to one another in this fleeting, temporary, and infinitely beautiful and worthwhile life.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“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.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“Because make no mistake: the videos we put on for our kids—or the video games we pull up on our phones in our own moments of boredom—are designed, unconsciously or consciously, to produce a bewitching effect. And that effect is achieved by filling a screen with a level of vividness and velocity that does not exist in the real world—or only very rarely. Because it is rare, we instinctively respond to it, and indeed take delight in it.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“And when we do put on a video or otherwise fire up a screen for a purpose, we’ll follow another principle: never entertain your children with anything you find unsatisfying, just like you shouldn’t feed your children anything you don’t enjoy eating yourself. Feed them with food that is both tasty and nutritious—and entertain them with movies, books, and stories that are both tasty and nutritious too.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“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”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“It is surely not coincidental that all the earliest citations of the word bore in the Oxford English Dictionary—from the mid-eighteenth century—come from the correspondence of aristocrats and nobility.2 They did not have technology, but thanks to wealth and position they had a kind of easy everywhere of their own. The first people to be bored were the people who did not do manual work, who did not cook their own food, whose lives were served by others.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“We are meant to be family; not just marriages bound by vows and the children that come from them, but a wider family that invites others into our lives and even to the threshold of our very last breath, to experience vulnerability and grace, sorrow and hope, singing our way homeward.
we are meant, not just for thin, virtual connections but for visceral real connections to one another in this fleeting, temporary and infinitely beautiful and worthwhile life. We are meant to die in one another's arms surrounded by prayer and song knowing that we are loved.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“If you want to be wise, then, the most important thing you can learn to do is worship.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“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.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

“Instead, we are our own jailers. We are prisoners of our own insecurity (Will I still have a job if I take two solid weeks of vacation?), pride (How can people get along without me?), fantasies (What if I miss an email telling me I’ve won the lottery?), and cultural capitulation (This is just how the world works now, isn’t it?). For us, the door to a better life is only locked from the inside.”
― Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place