\n<\/p>\n
My husband and I are hardliners when it comes to kids and tech. Granted, our twin eldests are only four, so you might say we haven\u2019t been at it long enough to claim victory here\u2014and fair enough. Even if teenage demands for a smartphone<\/a> are the tech battle royale of modern parenting, getting through the toddler years without screens is no small skirmish.<\/p>\n I wouldn\u2019t say strictly curtailing screen time for our kids has been easy. I\u2019ve felt the allure<\/a> of digital entertainment for our children many, many times. When you\u2019ve got two screaming infants on your hands, the prospect of multiple consecutive minutes without crying\u2014bought by a few replays of \u201cBaby Shark\u201d on YouTube\u2014can look awfully like the Promised Land, glittering there across the Jordan.<\/p>\n But avoiding screen time has been comparatively<\/em> easy for me because our family is fortunate in many ways. My husband and I both work from home, have semi-flexible schedules, and can afford full-time childcare. I can hold out against resorting to a screen to afford me a moment of blessed peace because I have many such moments, like this one\u2014where I\u2019m able to write alone, in my office, in a quiet house.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not the norm for parents of young children, especially for those with more practical constraints than I have: single parenthood, a long commute, a lower income, disability or persistent illness in the family, unreliable or inadequate or unaffordable childcare, less help from nearby family and friends, or less tangible support from local institutions like church and school.<\/p>\n And that reality makes me worry about how we\u2019re communicating the emerging consensus that too much tech use is bad for kids\u2014and particularly how we\u2019re communicating it at church.<\/p>\n On the one hand, it\u2019s a good thing that American society generally\u2014and Christians specifically\u2014are realizing just how negative the excessive smart phone, social media, and other screen use can be on our mental<\/a>, emotional<\/a>, and spiritual health<\/a>.<\/p>\n I\u2019m thankful for the work of people like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt<\/a>, his colleague Jean Twenge<\/a>, and Christian authors, including Alan Noble<\/a> and Andy Crouch<\/a>, who helped burst our naive optimism about networks like Facebook and our digital attention habits<\/a> more broadly.<\/p>\n I\u2019m glad it\u2019s increasingly understood that our tech and media habits have formative effects, even competing with Scripture and trusted pastors as discipling influences<\/a> in our lives. I\u2019m thrilled that it\u2019s ever more conventional wisdom to recommend, as I\u2019ve done at length<\/a>, putting limits on our tech use and that of our children and building good digital habits so intellectual virtues have room to grow<\/a>.<\/p>\n But on the other hand, I\u2019ve \u201cbeen entrusted with much,\u201d so it\u2019s right that \u201cmuch more will be asked\u201d of me here (Luke 12:48). What about families with less\u2014who can\u2019t<\/em> get through the toddler years without screens?<\/p>\n I grew up in just such a family. My mom was a single mother, and when I was little, she would sometimes plop me in front of the television so she could exercise. I loved it, of course, plowing through episodes of vintage Looney Toons<\/em> or enjoying the gentle patter of Mr. Rogers. I don\u2019t do the same thing with my kids when I go running, but that\u2019s because I don\u2019t have to: My husband can hold down the fort. My mom never had that option, because my dad wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n Or here\u2019s a more contemporary example from a friend of mine, Austin, who\u2019s a youth ministry worker in Texas.<\/p>\n For several years, Austin told me, his church was recommending Crouch\u2019s rightfully popular book, The Tech-Wise Family<\/em><\/a>: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place<\/em>, to families of teenagers who participated in the youth group.<\/p>\n But for a subset of those families, whom he described as \u201cmostly working-class,\u201d \u201cwith a handful of single parents in the mix,\u201d Crouch\u2019s suggestions simply were not viable the way they were for the congregation\u2019s \u201cfairly educated, mostly white-collar families in stable living situations.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMany of the solutions in Tech-Wise Family<\/em> assume a stable nuclear family with some degree of education, disposable income, and access to free or low-cost public attractions,\u201d Austin said in our conversation over email. But outside \u201csome public parks, there\u2019s little to do\u201d in his town \u201cthat\u2019s cheap or free,\u201d and \u201cmany of the families we were working with had some degree of instability with little disposable income and\/or lower education levels.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, the \u201chandful of families who took our recommendation to read the book quickly put it down,\u201d Austin said, \u201cbecause they realized it wasn\u2019t written for them and their lives.\u201d They couldn\u2019t take much of Crouch\u2019s advice even if they tried.<\/p>\n The first time Austin told me this story, I was mortified to realize how oblivious I\u2019d been to this class element when reading and recommending Tech-Wise Family<\/em> myself. (Worse, I was oblivious even after<\/em> reading and agreeing with multiple<\/a> articles noting<\/a> that limited screen time has become a \u201csocial signifier\u201d for middle- and upper-class parents like me.)<\/p>\n For instance, Crouch has a chapter about arranging your home in a way that\u2019s conducive to good habits, which is wonderful advice\u2014if you have the space. \u201cMove the TV to a less central location\u201d than the living room, he suggests. It\u2019s a great idea, and I\u2019ve done it. It\u2019s possible for me because we live in Pittsburgh, where post-industrial population slump means rambling old houses are quite affordable, so we put the TV in a spare bedroom.<\/p>\n But how many people have a spare bedroom? How many have any<\/em> \u201cless central location\u201d that could house a TV?<\/p>\n Austin wasn\u2019t so oblivious, though, because of his previous career as a pest control technician, largely in low-income neighborhoods. Around the time he quit that job, he said, he was reading a book about the attention economy, which included a brief aside on how the author, in Austin\u2019s paraphrase, \u201cdidn\u2019t want her solutions to take away an iPad from a single mother living in a dingy apartment, when that iPad may be the only valuable thing she has for work, school, and play.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAs someone who had regularly intruded into the apartments of single mothers and other families whose most valuable possession was their TV, gaming console, smartphone, iPad, or PC,\u201d Austin said, \u201cthat comment hit me like a ton of bricks.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that the deleterious effects of screen time don\u2019t matter in those circumstances\u2014or that the youth group families who abandoned the Tech-Wise<\/em> approach don\u2019t need discipleship around tech use, Austin reflected. It\u2019s that the discipleship must account for their circumstances, some of which may be unalterable.<\/p>\n Since we talked, I\u2019ve tried to keep Austin\u2019s youth group families in mind when writing about digital habits and virtues, though I\u2019m not sure how well I\u2019ve done. As Austin observed, \u201cthose insights land differently if the advice is asymmetrical\u201d\u2014that is, if it\u2019s coming from someone with the privileged means to fight these battles and going to someone without those same resources. And some asymmetry (or, at least, some lack of accommodation) might be unavoidable when the advice is coming from a journalist like me, writing to people whose faces I cannot see and whose lives I cannot know.<\/p>\n But the same is not true of the local church. Pastors and ministry workers, like Austin, can give advice informed by the specific needs and constraints of the people they know and love. They can disciple not \u201cteens with smartphones\u201d in general, but this<\/em> teenager with these<\/em> habits and that<\/em> home life. They can take care to heed Jesus\u2019s warning, in Matthew 18:6, not to cause \u201cone of these little ones\u201d to stumble.<\/p>\n Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today<\/span>.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n