Many parents believe raising a family is harder now than it was when they were growing up. Most attribute the growing difficulty to the encroachment of technology in the home. Andy Crouch offers practical ways to make home more than a charging station for electronic devices and their owners.

Kids look to their parents for connection and a blueprint for behavior, but increasingly find their parents unavailable. Since the iPhone came out in 2007, it’s created difficulty socializing not only for kids, but also for their parents. Some of today’s children have been competing with technology for their parents’ love and attention all their short lives. Parents bring work home from the office and sit in front of their laptop. Their kids feel gross after a days-long video game binge, but their parents have a similar feeling after finishing the third season of a show in as many days.

Grandparents are often the most befuddled by the rapid technological changes and the impact on their grandchildren and even their adult children. Grandparents miss out on time with grandchildren who seem fused to their devices, obsessed with pop culture and incessant communication with peers through text and social media. The reverse is true, too, that grandkids miss out on grandparents who often remain untapped sources of wisdom and love.

Many parents believe that parenting is now a more complicated job than it was when they were kids. Technology is toward the top of the list of parenting challenges. It’s an area where parents feel helpless. They see their children absorbed in their devices for endless hours and think there must be a better way, but rarely venture beyond wondering what that better way could be.

There is a better way, one that doesn’t require an outright rejection of technology, a denial of its usefulness, or becoming Amish. This better way, however, is still a radical choice by popular culture’s lights. It involves making decisions that most of your neighbors aren’t willing to make. This book isn’t an anti-technology treatise, but a guide for families hoping to become more fully human in a tech-addicted world.

What’s more important to you: creating or consuming? Consuming media, be it social media, TV shows, or video games, is certainly easier, but studies find the majority of people consider passive consumption of technology less satisfying than advertising promises. If we want to create and contribute more than we consume and take, one of the best ways to make that a habit is to bring our surroundings into alignment with that ideal.

Make the literal center of your home a place that elevates creativity and relationship. Just about everyone used to have a hearth, a place where the fire would heat the home, where people gathered for warmth and connection, cooked and ate meals, even danced. Hearths have since been replaced with furnaces, but the concept still holds: what’s your home’s hearth like? Wherever the emotional focal point of your home is, wherever your family spends the majority of time, pay attention to how you fill it. Is the TV front and center? In a lot of homes, it is.

For the author, the home’s hearth is the living room and kitchen. In these rooms are art pieces that friends and family have made: books, plants, a grand piano and other musical instruments, a craft table for kids, board games, a fireplace, a big table for mealtime, and a stove. The items in the hearth encourage making art, learning music, playing board games, sitting by a fire, cultivating plants, and creating something delicious. These all require active engagement rather than passive consumption.

In the author’s home, there are also plenty of devices, like speakers, a refrigerator, a microwave, lighting, A/C, laptops, tablets, and routers, all of which run automatically or with minimal maintenance. It’s nearly impossible to keep a home completely tech-free, but tech-free is not the goal. The goal is shifting emphasis to the things that matter most.

Electric lighting is useful, but try lighting the living room with just candles and a log fire, to create a sense of wonder and magic.

There’s some beautiful music available to listen to, but try making your own music, either by learning an instrument or using the instrument you always have at your disposal: your voice.

Wi-Fi is useful, but it is not life-support. What would happen if you went one day or an afternoon each week without it?

Living rooms are often filled with technological inventions that have been expertly assembled by the manufacturers, but what if your living room contained a foil to these finished devices? What if there were raw materials waiting to be crafted into something new? Children love to create. Are we giving them that opportunity? 

Microwavable meals are convenient, but what delicious recipe is waiting for you or your child to discover?

Things that run without much effort, need batteries, don’t require active engagement—keep these things at the periphery of the home. They are not bad. Sometimes they are necessary. But the priceless things of life—relationships and creativity—these are what we want front and center.

One of the best ways to become a fuller, thriving human being with integrity is to align our surroundings with our ideals.

The concept of boredom has only been around for a couple hundred years. The first use of the English word boredom dates back to 1850.

Boredom is a singularly modern phenomenon. This is puzzling for some, given that we are far more overworked than our grandparents were. Ironically, it is from the frenzy of non-stop activity that boredom emerges. Technologies have emerged to take the edge off our boredom, but what they actually do is intensify boredom. They deepen our appetite for mindless distractions. The more we try to entertain our kids, the more easily they will get bored.

It’s not hard to see the appeal of television for children or parents. The children are completely absorbed in the barrage of images long enough for parents to get dinner ready or recover their sanity. This is a short-term win, but the long-term results are inability to concentrate or contemplate. Film and animation are increasingly riveting, and they can desensitize us to the world around us.

Adults are usually the ones who gradually lose the ability to revel in everyday glories, and it’s children who remind us of a world teeming with wonder. But as technology enters children’s lives earlier and earlier, and in an increasingly comprehensive way, that sense of wonder is lost far more quickly. The world of grass, dirt, trees, creeks, and birds grows in magnificence the more time one spends there, but time outdoors is on the decline, and patience to explore simple joys is dwindling. Technology has conditioned an intense dependency on entertainment or distraction.

The contexts in which the word boredom is first used was 1800s British aristocracy--in other words, among people who didn’t physically exert themselves, performed no meaningful work, did not cook their own meals. Even if you’re not nobility, you might find yourself relating. 

Boredom is not a bad thing. It’s arguably a very good thing because its presence is a gauge of our own spiritual pain, much like physical pain lets us know that something’s wrong with our foot or ear. The presence of boredom is a sign that the ability to delight in simple pleasures, appreciate stillness and contemplation, and engage in meaningful work and play is running low. Unfortunately, most children and adults alike never come to realize just how bored they are because they’ll find something to distract themselves before they go through the agony of feeling it.

The problem is not tech itself, so the solution is not utter rejection. But when we come to technology, it’s in limited doses and it’s in pursuit of wonder and discovery. The screen stays off unless the family is entering into a meaningful experience together. It means finding some creative ways to survive the pre-dinner witching hour without resorting to television—however irascible the kids may be or how frustrated mom or dad is. When the screen is on, give them content that’s nourishing. We don’t fill our kids’ bodies with junk, so we must be provide media content that’s delicious and nutritious. 

In her book Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle writes that it usually takes about seven minutes for a conversation to really get going. Until that point, there’s the stock topics of conversation: the weather, weekend plans, how the family’s doing. Beyond that, one of the interlocutors has to take the plunge: either sitting with the silence or taking things deeper with a question or a piquant observation.

Conversation is a risk because it requires improvisation. It’s uncomfortable for a culture that puts a premium on safety and the elimination of risk. We don’t know what is going to come out of the other person’s mouth—nor even our own.

There are exciting things and opportunities to grow on the other side of seven minutes, but we rarely get there now because we can pull out the phone and truncate the process. Risk and potential faux pas averted—but now we are alone. Technology has sped up so many processes in life, but the process of going deep with another person cannot be sped up in the same way.

The car is an unexpectedly useful vehicle (as it were) for enriching relationships because it puts people in proximity to one another. If we resist the default of putting on music to eliminate silence, we can use those journeys—many of them seven minutes or longer—to go deeper with kids (and spouse). The dinner table is another great location, but the car is arguably an even more relational venue. This can become a place for conversations about the past, the future, dreams, faith, and questions about life.

The hecticness that can come from shuttling kids to recitals, soccer practice, and friends’ houses doesn’t exactly fill a parent’s heart with joyful anticipation—nor with nostalgia once kids get their driver’s licenses. But if your car becomes a place of conversation, you will always be glad for the depth of relationship those times in the car brought. 

In years past, crowds gathered to watch sporting events would sing the national anthem together. It was a unifying experience, even if a small one. Now, we get a professional to sing it for us. Sometimes they even do a good job. Some of the few remaining venues in the United States where people sing collectively are in its churches, but increasingly, worship through music is being designated to a few musically-inclined individuals. The music reverberates in the space, whether those in the congregation whole-heartedly participate or not. The amplified music in church has led many to see themselves as passive consumers rather than engaged worshipers if they don’t have a mic in front of them.

The black church has done an excellent job preserving a tradition of gospel choir music and Negro spirituals. In these settings, the whole church participates rather than just a few professionals. Increasingly, singing together in church and in home has fallen by the wayside in the United States. Many find the prospect of singing out loud as a group too vulnerable and embarrassing. It’s something better left to the professionals on the stage, and one can join in as the mood strikes. 

Less than a century ago, “playing music” involved someone picking up an instrument and accompanying the singing of those gathered. Now, “playing music” often means turning on music that’s already been recorded in order to listen to that music over an amplifying device.  Obviously, modern music software has made remarkable things possible. Just a few clicks and altered settings and some musicians create tracks that sound even better than their live performances. The modern trend of singing less and less is worth paying attention to, however. We consume more music than at any other time in history. We also create far less music and sing far less than any other generation before us.

Don’t let technology substitute for the use of your own voice. Even if your church doesn’t allow for the active participation in singing that has been a hallmark of church life over the centuries, you can always sing at home as a family. With or without the presence of technology, people can always use their voices. It may not be as pristine as the neatly auto-tuned productions we’ve grown used to hearing, but it’s a vital form of human expression.

To review, here are some of the commitments discussed earlier—as well as others. If you can commit to the following statements, family life will thrive and technology will become a tool rather than an integral part of an entertainment-driven lifestyle.

-Create more than you consume.

-Patterns of work and rest are vital to human flourishing. Commit to being technology-free one hour a day, one day a week, one week a year.

-Wake up without your device and put it to bed before you go to bed yourself.

-Screens are to be used purposively and together—not in isolation or inanely.

-Time in the car is for conversation.

-Spouses have one another’s passwords and complete access to their children’s electronics.

-Singing together is a priority so that it shapes our understanding of music and worship more than recorded music.

-For big life events, show up in person and stay in the present, especially in moments where we are vulnerable.

It’s one thing to talk about becoming a tech-wise family, using tech tools without building family life around them—it takes courage and wisdom to actually implement real changes in family life. Another, older word for courage is virtue. The word virtue has been watered down to an equivalent of “being nice” or avoiding bad behavior. The purpose of family is to develop wisdom and courage. In the twenty-first century, this can only be done well when technology is in its proper place.