Introduction
Help!
If there is one word that sums up how many of us feel about technology and family life, it’s Help!
Parents know we need help.
We love the way devices make our lives easier amid the stress and busyness that fill our days. 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. We admire the ease with which our children master technology, the prowess they show with video games, the bursts of creativity in the arts, movies, and music that devices help them produce.
But we also sense the precious days of childhood are passing by, far too fast, in a haze of ghostly blue light. We watch as the inevitable intensity of teenage relationships is raised to near-toxic levels by a sleep-depriving, round-the-clock deluge of messages. We feel helpless to prevent them from overexposure, far too early, to the most violent and intimate facts of life. (Medieval Jewish rabbis, it’s said, used to discourage anyone under thirty from even reading the Bible’s poetically erotic Song of Songs. If only that was our problem.)
Technology Is the Number One Reason Parents Believe Raising Kids Today Is More Complicated Than in the Past
Raising kids today is more complicated than it was when I was a kid.
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17
Parents feel out of control, hopelessly overmatched by the deluge of devices. And we can’t even count on one another to back us up. Parents who set limits on their children’s use of technology often experience intense peer pressure—from other parents!
The kids know we need help too.
They see how addicted their own parents are to devices. Apple introduced the groundbreaking iPhone in 2007. 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. They see their parents tethered to their laptops, trying to stay ahead of work that has spilled out of the office into evenings and weekends. Older kids know the sick-to-the-stomach feeling of having binged on a video game for days on end (just as their parents know that queasy too-much-Netflix feeling). They’ve watched as their most media-savvy peers, the ones with a thousand followers from their high school or a million followers from all over the world, first expose themselves, then overexpose themselves, and go from reveling in the attention to breaking under the weight of others’ expectations and derision.
What makes it more difficult to raise kids today?
n = 780 US parents who agree raising kids today is more difficult
To be a child, teenager, or young adult these days is to have to navigate a minefield of potentially life-altering choices, often with strangely little guidance from older adults, who are, after all, glued to their own screens.
They know there must be a better way.
And the grandparents? They aren’t necessarily free of their own overdependence on technology, but I’ve heard more distress about our current technological addictions from grandparents than anyone else. They love their grandchildren—and, with slightly less infatuation, their children—and want to spend time with them, not just as young children but as middle schoolers, high schoolers, and beyond. But they see their grandchildren absorbed in their devices, preoccupied with popular entertainment and chatter with their peers, just when they could be having the time of their—and their grandparents’—lives. The grandparents most of all may know we need help.
Almost Almost Amish
There is a better way. It doesn’t require us to become Amish, entirely separating ourselves from the modern technological world, and it doesn’t require us to deny the real benefits that technology provides our families and our wider society. But let me be direct and honest: this better way is radical. It requires making choices that most of our neighbors aren’t making. 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.
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. No matter what advertising says (even those beautiful, tear-jerking Apple ads), the very best of life has almost nothing to do with the devices we buy. It has a lot to do with the choices we make, choices that our devices often make more difficult.
The good news is that it is absolutely, completely possible to make different choices about technology from the default settings of the world around us. I’ve seen other families do it—I’ll tell some of their stories in this book—and my wife, Catherine, and I have done it, along with the (mostly!) enthusiastic participation of our children, Timothy and Amy (nineteen and sixteen years old as this book is published). I’ll tell you about the bumps in the road along the way, for sure, but the main thing we all want you to know is that it is possible to love and use all kinds of technology but still make radical choices to prevent technology from taking over our lives.
Our family is radical, but we are definitely not Amish—although we love to eat the fruit, vegetables, meat, and cheese produced by our Amish neighbors forty miles away in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. We find much to admire and learn from in the way they live with one another, their animals, and the land. As Nancy Sleeth puts it in the title of her wonderful book about a life lived in conscious resistance to technology’s default settings, maybe you should call us “almost Amish.”1
Or maybe “almost almost Amish.” The number of Apple devices we collectively own is easily in double digits, and in the basement there’s a pretty sweet TV, purchased just before those gorgeous plasma screens were phased out.
We eat home-cooked meals most nights, often by candlelight, which no one loves more than our kids (there is always an intense competition to be the one who lights the candles). On the other hand, the very night I type these words, my daughter and I shared a microwaved dinner—and a great conversation about her new semester at school.
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.
Here’s an example of that almost-almost-Amish approach: We chose not to have a TV at all in our house until our children reached double digits (more about that later). But we did buy that pretty sweet TV I mentioned when my daughter was ten. Eighteen months later, a friend who knew of our unusual lifestyle emailed me to ask how adding a TV was turning out.
“Amy,” I asked, “how has having a TV changed our lives?”
She barely looked up from the book she was reading and said vaguely, “Do we have a TV?”
Build your life around not having a TV, and when you finally do have a TV, almost nothing will change.
Four Areas Emerge as Most Challenging for Parents
What are the most difficult things about family life and raising children?
Select up to three.
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17
Start to put the commitments in this book into practice, and if you have kids old enough to form the word “no,” let alone to hack their way through the internet firewall, they will probably complain, loudly, for two weeks. You will complain, for two weeks. But very soon, you’ll wonder why you ever waited this long to pursue the real life you were made for.
The Value of the Nudge
We didn’t just hold off on buying a TV for our kids’ sake. I find TV’s moving images nearly irresistible. This is a problem in America, because in an awful lot of public places and homes, there’s an awful lot of TV. If there is a screen in view, I’ll find myself following a college basketball game, or, for that matter, local-car-dealer advertisements, with far keener attention than I’m giving to the person right across from me.
So I make it a practice to find a seat where I simply can’t see a screen. I know I’m not capable of resisting the urge to watch, so I remove the temptation whenever I can, especially when there’s a person with me who deserves my full attention. (That, of course, describes every single person who’s ever been willing to share a meal with me.)
I suppose that I could try to change my own mental circuitry—perhaps through a program of desensitization, watching so many local-car-dealer ads that I lose interest in seeing another. Or I could try to build up my willpower or my ability to concentrate on a conversation in spite of distractions. Those would be worthy goals, and they might become necessary if screens become even more unavoidable. But to achieve that level of inner transformation would require time and effort. 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.
As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, 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.2 Nudges don’t generally make us do anything, but they make certain choices easier and more likely. They don’t focus so much on changing anything about our own preferences and ability to choose well; they simply put the best choice right in front of us and make the wrong choice harder. An increasing body of psychological research suggests that our supply of willpower—the ability to make hard decisions that go against our instincts or preferences—is limited. Nudges help us make some of those right decisions without having to use up that precious limited supply of willpower, leaving it available for the moments when we really need it.
The world around us is nudging us all the time. Restaurants arrange their buffet lines with the salad and soup (which cost the restaurant very little) ahead of the roast beef (which costs a lot). Grocery stores put the chips and soda (with their high profit margin) right in front of us as we shop, and they put the milk and eggs (which are often sold at a loss) at the back of the store. If an employer wants employees to contribute to a retirement plan, the participation rate goes up dramatically simply by asking them to opt out of the plan rather than opt in.
My wife, Catherine, who thinks a lot about how to get all of our family eating more healthy food, puts salad on the dinner table almost every night. I think it’s fair to say that none of the rest of us, if salad were missing, would get up to go look for it (something we regularly do for ice cream). But with it sitting on the table, and with Mom passing it around, most nights we eat it. She doesn’t insist, but she does nudge.
The makers of technological devices have become absolute masters at the nudge. Every notification that comes in on your smartphone is a nudge—not a command or demand, but something that makes it easier to stop whatever you’re currently doing and divert your attention to your screen. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms help apps manage the number of nudges so you never get tired of responding to them. The mere presence of your smartphone in your pocket is a nudge, a gentle reminder that just a tap away are countless rewards of information, entertainment, and distraction. If you sit down on your couch and the TV remote is sitting in front of you, inviting you to press the power button and see what’s on—that’s a nudge. The TV itself is a nudge—if it weren’t there at all, you’d have to go somewhere else (maybe out to dinner!) to watch a game or a sitcom or, for that matter, car-dealer ads. But with it sitting right there, it’s easy to make the choice to stay put and turn it on.
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.
Disciplines and Choices
Nudges, however, will never be enough. Nudges play to our weakness—our tendency to take the easy road most taken. They change the environment outside us in order to make good choices easier. But nudges will never, on their own, build the wisdom and courage we need—partly because we often can’t control our environment, no matter how much we’d like to. We need to change something inside of us as well: to develop the strength to make good choices even when everything around us is nudging, or pushing, us in the wrong direction. And for that we need disciplines.
Disciplines are very much like what weight lifters call progressive overload. The best way to gain strength is by pushing your muscles to the very edge of their current capacity, for a relatively brief time. No one can spend twelve hours a day bench-pressing hundreds of pounds, and no one should want to. But spend an hour a day, a few days a week, in that kind of focused, strenuous exertion, and you will see gains in strength that come no other way, strength that will then be available for everything else you do. The point of working out is not just to be able to complete more reps with higher weight a few times a week—it’s to develop and train our bodies to be healthier all the time. (Indeed, it seems that regular strength training, by building muscle tissue, helps us burn more calories even when we are sitting still!)3
This is how spiritual disciplines work as well. 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.
Very few of us, for example, are meant to spend our lives largely alone, but the person who has not experienced or cannot bear solitude is missing an essential part of maturity. (“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. . . . Let him who is not in community beware of being alone”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer.)4 We are not meant for perpetual silence—we are meant to listen and speak. But the person who has not experienced or cannot bear silence does not understand what they hear and has little to offer when they speak. And of course we are meant to eat, and even to feast, but only when we fast do we make real progress toward being free of our dependence on food to soothe our depression and anesthetize our anxieties.
The disciplines, by taking us to our very limits, gradually move those limits. They move us toward being the kinds of people we were meant to be and want to be. So the discipline of Sabbath, for example, doesn’t just help us take one day a week to enjoy deep and restorative rest (with all the preparation, concentration, and commitment that requires); it helps us make choices the rest of the week to avoid anxiety and pride.
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.
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.
So Here’s the Plan
The rest of this book is about the commitments we can make toward that better life. I’ve suggested “ten commitments” for a healthy family life with technology—one in each of the following chapters. The ten commitments are definitely not the same as the Ten Commandments! Even though I recommend each one wholeheartedly, you’ll discover as you read that our family has not kept all of them equally well. (Though the same is true, it occurs to me, with the Ten Commandments.) Your family may choose to emphasize a few of these commitments more than others, and perhaps to set one or two aside—and there may be other commitments that are important for your family that are not covered here. I offer these simply as a good starting point for nudging and disciplining ourselves in a better direction.
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.
So we’ll begin, in the first part of the book, with those three basic choices, the foundation for everything else.
In the second part, we’ll look at some nudges and disciplines we can put in place every day to have a healthier life with technology, from the moment we wake up until the end of the day.
And in the third part, we’ll look at the two biggest tasks we were made for: to worship God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to care for one another at our most vulnerable—at our birth, at our times of great sickness, and at our death.
This book is about much more than just social media, or even screens. It’s about how to live as full, flourishing human beings. Maybe it will even turn out that in that quest for flourishing, technology in its proper place can actually help.