Notes on *Tech-Wise Family*
The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place, Andy Crouch (Baker, 2017)
Main Idea/Takeaway
The parental calling to cultivate wisdom & courage in their children is the grid through which we assess the use of technology.
Table of Contents
Preface: The Proper Place
Introduction: Help!
Ten Tech-Wise Commitments
Part 1: The Three Key Decisions of a Tech-Wise Family
I. Choosing Character
II. Shaping Space
III. Structuring Time
Part 2: Daily Life
IV. Waking and Sleeping
V. Learning and Working
VI. The Good News About Boredom
VII. The Deep End of the (Car) Pool
VIII. Naked and Unashamed
Part 3: What Matters Most
IX. Why Singing Matters
X. In Sickness and in Health
Favorite Quotes by Chapter
Preface: The Proper Place
"The pace of technological change has surpassed anyone's capacity to develop enough wisdom to handle it. We are stuffing our lives with technology's new promises, with no clear sense of whether technology will help us keep the promises we've already made." (17)
"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." (17)
"The proper place for technology won't be exactly the same for every family, and it is not the same at every season of our lives." (19)
Introduction: Help!
"An awful lot of children born in 2007, turning ten years old as this book is published, have been competing with their parents' screens for attention their whole lives." (26)
"There is a better way...and this better way is radical." (28)
"It requires making choices that most of our neighbors in church aren't making. Let me put it this way: you don't have to become Amish, but you probably have to become closer to Amish than you think." (29)
"This better way involves radically recommitting ourselves to what family is about- what real life is about. Our homes aren't meant to be just refueling stations, places where we and our devices rest briefly, top up our charge, and then go back to frantic activity. They are meant to be places where the very best of life happens." (29)
"We benefit from all kinds of devices, but we don't build our lives around them. We haven't eliminated devices from our lives by any means, but we go to great lengths to prevent them from taking over our lives."
"For now, I can almost always settle for simply sitting where no screens are in sight. It's a simple, low-friction decision that has made countless hours at friends' homes and at restaurants much more meaningful and memorable than they would have been otherwise. You might call it a nudge." (33)
"Nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to make or want others to make." (33)
"They don't focus so much on changing anything about out own preferences and ability to choose well; they simply put the best choice right in front of us and make the wrong choice harder." (33)
"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." (35)
"The central disciplines of the spiritual life, as taught by generations of Christian saints, have stayed the same for twenty centuries now: solitude, silence, and fasting. Each of them pushes us beyond our natural limits, and all of them give us spiritual resources for everyday life that we can't gain any other way." (36)
"The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially true with technology. 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." (37)
Ten Tech-Wise Commitments
See Notable Content
Part 1: The Three Key Decisions of a Tech-Wise Family
I. Choosing Character
"Increasingly, our lives have been colonized by things that don't just help us accomplish a task but do the task for us." (49)
"Now, technology is everywhere. I don't mean just glowing screens and digital services; I mean the whole apparatus of "easy everywhere" that has come into existence in just over the span of one human lifetime." (49)
'In its early days, the internet was more lie a tool. People would "go online." It was someplace you had to "go." And it was finicky- slow and complicated. Now it just works. And it's not somewhere you go. It's like air. It's everywhere." (50)
"We are in the midst of the greatest revolution in easy everywhere the world has ever known and it may just be getting started." (52)
"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." (52)
"Family helps form us into persons who have acquired wisdom and courage. (53)
"Wisdom is not just knowledge--mastering information about particular aspects of the world. Wisdom is understanding. It's the kind of understanding, specifically, that guides action. It's knowing, in a tremendously complex world, what the right thing to do is--what will be most honoring of our Creator and our fellow creatures." (53)
"Because we need not just to understand our place in the world and the faithful way to proceed- we also need the conviction and character to act." (56)
"Life is difficult. In fact, if you do life properly- with wisdom- life gets more difficult as you go." (56)
"And even though it's incredibly hard simply to know what we should do, it's even harder to actually act on what we should do. Because almost all the time, the most faithful, the most loving, and the wisest thing to do is scary, hard, and painful- even, in some ways, dangerous." (56-57)
"How can we become the kind of people who have wisdom and courage? The only way to do it is with other people." (57)
"As a Christian, I actually don't believe the biological family is the main place we are meant to be known and loves in a way that leads us to wisdom and courage." (60)
"The first family for everyone who wants wisdom and courage in the way of Jesus is the church- the community of disciples who are looking to Jesus to reshape their understanding and their character." (60)
"If our families are to be all that they are meant to be- schools of wisdom and courage- they will have to become more like the church, households where we are actively formed into something more than our culture would ask us to be. And if our churches are to be all they are meant to be, they will have to become more like a family--household-like contexts of daily life where we are all nurtured and developed into the persons we are meant to be and can become." (62)
"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?" (67)
II. Shaping Space
"Fill the center of your life together- the literal center, the heart of your home, the place where you spend the most time together--with the things that reward creativity, relationship, and engagement. Push technology and cheap thrills to the edges; move deeper and more lasting things to the core." (71)
"So here is a simple test of whether your home is a tech-wise space: find the place that is its emotional center-the place where your family spends the most time and the most energy- and take an inventory of what you see there?" (73)
"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." (79)
"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."(80)
III. Structuring Time
"Work is the fruitful transformation of the world through human effort and skill, in ways that serve our shared human needs and give glory to God." (83)
"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." (87)
"There is one thing most of us can do- and all of us are meant to do. It is to rediscover rest: real rest, in harmony with one another, our Creator, and all of creation. The biblical word for this kind of rest is Sabbath." (92)
"A life of abundance, gratitude, rest, and quiet. It will only happen if we choose it, but if we choose it, the experience of our family and many friends has been that God blesses it." (97)
"So I suggest 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." (98)
"In this area, as in all of life, the path toward real freedom- including the freedom to actually choose freedom, rather than imprisoning ourselves in our too-small substitutes for real life-is to embrace disciplines." (102)
"One hour a day, one day a week, one week a year-set it all aside." (105)
Part 2: Daily Life
IV. Waking and Sleeping
"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." (112)
"Nothing about our lives at home has been so thoroughly disrupted by technology as sleep." (114)
"Under the covers, as alerts light up the night, anxieties and fantasies are fed as often as they are allayed-for parents as much as children. And we lose out on what we were really made for: the deep rest that would make us more cognitively, emotionally, physically, and spiritually fit for the challenges the next day will bring. 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." (118)
V. Learning and Working
"The last thing you need when you are learning, at any age but especially in childhood, is to have things made too easy. Difficulty and resistance, as long as they are age appropriate and not too discouraging, are actually what press our brains and bodies to adapt and learn." (127)
"The truth is that our children, just like us, will spend far too much of their lives tethered to glowing rectangles. We owe them, at the very minimum, early years of real, embodied, difficult, rewarding learning, the kind that screens cannot provide." (131)
"The less we rely on screens to occupy and entertain our children, the more they become capable of occupying and entertaining themselves." (133)
VI. The Good News About Boredom
"In the history of the human race, boredom: is practically brand new- less than three hundred years old." (139)
"Boredom is actually a crucial warning sign-as important in its own way as physical pain. It's a sign that our capacity for wonder and delight, contemplation and attention, real play and fruitful work, has been dangerously depleted?" (146)
"We are not bored, exactly, just as someone eating potato chips is not hungry, exactly. But overconsumption of distraction is just as unsatisfying, and ultimately sickening, as overconsumption of junk food." (147)
VII. The Deep End of the (Car) Pool
"All true conversations, really are risks, exercises in improvisation where we have to listen and respond without knowing, fully, what is coming next, even out of our own mouths." (157)
"A conversation interrupted several times before the seven-minute mark does not get deeper more slowly; it stays shallow, as each party makes room for the other to opt out and return to their device. What might be on the other side of the seven-minute mark, we never find out." (158)
"We solve the immediate problem of how to keep small, squirmy children from going ballistic in the backseat, but we also teach our children, sometimes before they can talk, that the car is a place to be entertained, one more boring spot where, thanks to technology, you don't have to notice how bored you really are." (159)
VIII. Naked and Unashamed
"There is nothing in our society that has surrendered more completely, and more catastrophically, to technology's basic promise, easy everywhere, than sex." (165)
"With sex dissociated so completely from the family, it is perhaps not surprising that family itself, so totally the opposite of easy-everywhere life, is being reconfigured."(168)
"We rob the easy-everywhere world of its power to seduce us not so much by the rules we put in place as by the dependence on one another we cultivate- depending on one another to help us be our best selves, growing in wisdom and courage and serving one another, in a world that wants to make us into shallow slaves of the self." (178-179)
Part 3: What Matters Most
IX. Why Singing Matters
"The reorientation of our musical lives around consumption is robbing us of something deeper; it is robbing us of a fundamental form of worship." (186)
"Every family that cares about wisdom and courage needs to be part of a community larger than itself- a community that takes us deeper in our understanding of the world's beauty and brokenness, and that calls us to greater character than we would ever muster on our own." (187)
"And the most distinctive thing the church does- the thing that most directly develops wisdom and courage in us, from childhood through old age--is call us to worship the God who made us in his image." (187)
"Worship calls us out of the small pleasures of an easy-everywhere world to the real joy and burden of bearing the image of God in a world where nothing is easy, everything is broken, and yet redemption is possible." (189)
"And so worship is the most important thing a family can do. It is the most important thing to teach our children and the most important thing to rehearse throughout our lives." (190)
X. In Sickness and in Health
"Early in our marriage, Catherine and I made a commitment that has in turn dictated a hundred other decisions over the years. We decided that every time we were invited to a wedding or a funeral, unless circumstances made it truly impossible, at least one of us would go." (197)
"Only by showing up in person can we feel and grasp the full weight, joy, and vulnerability of the most important experiences in human life." (199)
"We will put love into practice in the most profound possible way, by being present with one another in person at the greatest and most difficult moments of life." (203)
"We are meant to build this kind of life together: the kind of life that, at the end, is completely dependent upon one another; the kind of life that ultimately transcends, and does not need, the easy solutions of technology because it is caught up in something more true and more lasting than any alchemy our technological world can invent." (204)
"We are meant to die in one another's arms, surrounded by prayer and song, knowing beyond knowing that we are loved." (204-205)
"We are meant for so much more than technology can ever give us- above all, for the wisdom and courage that it will never give us. We are meant to spur one another along on the way to a better life, the life that really is life." (205)
Notable Content
Six guides to know that technology is kept in its proper place. (20-21)
"The Ten Commitments begin with three choices that are especially fundamental:
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." (38-39)
"Ten Tech-Wise Commitments" (41-42)
We develop wisdom and courage together as a family.
We want to create more than we consume. So we fill the center of our home with things that reward skill and active engagement.
We are designed for a rhythm of work and rest. So one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year, we turn off our devices and worship, feast, play and rest together.
We wake up before our devices do, and they "go to bed" before we do.
We aim for "no screens before double digits" at school and at home.
We use screen for a purpose, and we use them together, rather than using them aimlessly alone.
Car time is conversation time.
Spouses have one another's passwords, and parents have total access to children's devices/
We learn to sing together, rather than letting recorded and amplified music take over our lives and worship.
We show up in person for the big events of life. We learn how to be human by being fully present at our moments of greatest vulnerability. We hope to die in one another's arms.
