Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 312 | Technology in the Home

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Ep. 312 | Technology in the Home · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  One is, you know, Andy Crouch kind of uses this phrase of put the technology on the fringes, not the center of your life.
• 0:09
  What's up, guys? Welcome to 5 Minute Fatherhood. So we get a question, questions oftentimes about technology. We got this one from our homeroom group. It's from Jessica. She says, hey, guys, can you direct me to any info you guys have about the use of technology in the family? I've read the Bethke's Tech Manifesto, and that's super helpful. In fact, a lot of what we've been doing. But now that our kids are older, 12, 10, 8, 4, we are seeing...
• 0:32
  We need to adjust some of how we've been doing tech, like the kids using computers to research a school project we homeschool, using an iPad to create stop-motion videos, Legos, or type of creative story, communicating with friends. We're not there yet, but when and how to use social media, not to mention with the shutdowns and social distancing, tech is a useful tool for staying in touch with friends, family. How do you guide that? Great question. Man, great.
• 0:56
  I'm really curious what your thoughts on this, Jeff. One thing that I would say for us that has been really critical is that I don't remember back when Steve Jobs first announced the new iPhone. It was just the kind of glorious moment where he's described...
• 1:14
  the coming together of like these three technologies, you know, basically your audio player, your phone and your internet all wrapped up into one. And basically what I think this is all about is, is taking what Steve jobs did by beautifully wrapping those into one package and pulling them back apart.
• 1:31
  And saying, okay, you know, you got to get like, you can't think about these devices, like all in one devices. You got to introduce your kids to one element at a time in a way that will really bless them for the stage that they're at. So for us, like the youngest stages, all we want our kids to have access to is audiobooks. And so I love audiobooks. We're a huge audiobook family.
• 1:52
  So we got like MP3 players, or we found ways to find old iPods or whatever, iPhones, it just locked everything else down, deleted everything. Zero, this is just an MP3 player. That was actually really hard to pull off, believe it or not. And then it was like slowly introducing to one extra thing at a time. Okay, so now you got that.
• 2:10
  Now we want you to do some creative stuff like you're describing. So we're going to put the camera on there. You can make videos. We'd love to see those videos. It's awesome. Take pictures, but there's no social media on there. There's no internet access. There's no browsers, you know? And so, and what we did is just slowly, carefully, every single app that got downloaded was a conversation. There was like, there was opportunity to test, to kind of pull back.
• 2:33
  So that that's definitely but the idea of just all of a sudden handing your 10 year old or even your 15 year old a complete phone with everything, complete access to the app store, total access to the Internet, total access to every social media app out there. That that does seem like it's kind of designed to fail. But Jeff, you thought a lot about this. Yeah.
• 2:54
  Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think, you know, helpful principles that never, there's helpful principles that never go away regardless of how you're implementing them, right? So like, yeah.
• 3:05
  Excuse me. On the on the toddler side of things. Yeah, I think we're, you know, low tech, you know, like you got it. You got to go super minimal. I think super, you know, just brain development, all the different types of stuff. I won't get into that. People kind of have seen us talk about that. But yeah, just low tech there. But then, yeah, as they get older, you have to start opening horizons. But.
• 3:25
  Principles don't change. And so what I mean by that is, you know, one is, you know, Andy Crouch kind of uses this phrase of put the technology on the fringes, not the center of your life. Right. So that should be true whether you're 50, whether you're 20, whether you're 15, whether you're five. Technology shouldn't be like at the center of your life. Humanized connections should be.
• 3:43
  Secondly, another one would be like contribution over consumption, right? Do you use technology to contribute or to consume? Not all tech. One thing I don't like in these conversations is a lot of times it gets conflated of like all tech use is the same. It's all. No, it's not. You know, like watching a watching a movie over in the corner by yourself is radically different than having like an identity shaping family movie night.
• 4:01
  But it's technically the same thing if you're watching the same thing. Right. But it's not. So that's the that's the that's the difference. And so, yeah. So for us and our kids, I'm already starting with Kinsley probably in the next couple of years of like, yeah, I want her to learn, you know, video editing. I want her to learn, you know, like music making and all these different types of things that will be contributing with technology, like let it be a tool to assist.
• 4:21
  creativity and imagination, not to suck creativity and imagination out of you. And so I think asking those questions, staying philosophical with it, then allows you to be a little bit more light footed on how you come down and apply it.
• 4:33
  So good. If you guys want to get deeper into this topic, Jeff's got an awesome book to help with the hustle. So you can check that out. A lot of discussion on technology. And then also the podcast that Jeff and John Mark Homer did on their books on the same topic. You guys check those out. Those are super helpful. Yeah.
• 4:51
  What's that called again with the podcast? I think we called it like end hustle and fight hurry or something. But I just call it like the hustle and hurry podcast. Hustle and hurry podcast. Yeah, guys, check that out. You know, yeah, because this is this is not a topic that you're going to be able to figure out with very little time invested. It's going to take some research, some thought. Yes. Some writing, some policymaking for your family, but it's going to be worth it. So, yeah, take the time.