Five Stars for“The Tech-Wise Family” by Andy Crouch

A Review of The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in its Proper Place by Andy Crouch. Baker Books, 2017 by Cynthia S. Fischer

Recommended for Parents, Book Clubs, Adult Christian Ed, and Small Groups.

Reading Crouch’s book is a frog-in-the-kettle experience that will likely remind you of what you know to be true and challenge you to consider your own relationship with those “glowing rectangles” in your pockets and their cousins. 

Despite the title, the book is not really about technology as much as it is about our longing to shape ourselves and our families to reflect what we really desire. It’s about creating godly character and lasting, intimate relationships with our children. It’s a call to return to being present as parents in the high challenge of helping our children learn not only about God, but most anything. And it is a treatise on how all those goals are being circumvented by technology with sobering graphs and pie charts from the Barna Group. 

This book is not merely for families. It’s for all of us young and old. I used my first computer at age 30, purchased my first phone, a flip phone, in my 50s and yet I was both convicted and encouraged by this book. I think it’s especially valuable for young couples who haven’t started their families.

I gave Tech-Wise  five stars for:

• Crouch’s honesty regarding his personal and family-shaping struggles. His clearly-stated rationale for shaping character in families.

• The refresher on how learning occurs especially in young children. 

• Readability.

• Barna Group citations.

Some of the hors d’oeuvres inside:

“If we don’t learn to put technology, in all its forms, in its proper place, we will miss out on the many of the best parts of life in a family.” 

“Skip the plastic, skip the batteries, skip the things that work on their own or put them at the periphery. 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, area actually what press our brains and bodies to adapt and learn.” 

“The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life.”

As an educator and a new grandmother my favorite is:

“The best and richest experiences of learning, it turns out, are embodied ones. They require and build on physical experience and activity.”