Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NC Family. And each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. Thank you for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters.
I'm NC Family Vice President Mitch Prosser in for Tracy this week. Today, finding yourself is considered a rite of passage for most young people and even some not-so-young people. But too many of us don't even know what it is that we are trying to find, partly because technology has so negatively impacted our understanding of what it means to be human. This is the first episode of a two-part interview with our special guest today, Andy Crouch. Andy has written extensively on the intersection of technology and faith.
He is an accomplished author, musician, and public speaker, and he joins us to explore how we can form positive relationships with technology as individuals and as families, and why that effort is so important. This is the subject of his newest book, The Life We're Looking For, Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. Andy, welcome to Family Policy Matters. Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
Thank you so much for joining us. I want to jump right into this book and what it looks like and how we can help families with this. Do you think it's fair to characterize your book, The Life We're Looking For, as an exploration of what it means in the fullest sense to be a person? Yes, that's a wonderful way to put it, actually. It started out as a book about technology in a way, but it began with a question, really, which is why is it so hard to be a person in this world that in some ways is going so well?
Like technology has given us all kinds of benefits. We're all grateful for it. And yet, it feels like it's a more impersonal world than ever in some ways, a world where it's harder to raise children in many ways. When you ask parents, what is their number one challenge? Overwhelmingly, their answer has something to do with technology.
So, this book started out as an exploration of like, how can things be going so well kind of in one way? You know, our devices work a lot of the time. Like, my dishwasher just washed all my dishes overnight. My grandmother would have been amazed, right? And at the same time, it's getting harder to actually live the life I think we were made for, the life we're looking for, which is a personal life.
So, it is very much in the end a book about what is it to be a person and how does technology kind of get in the way of that in a sense? That's a great lead-in to this thought. How do you think that technology has displaced our real need to be recognized? Yeah, so when a baby is born, that baby, within minutes, his or her eyes are open. And if and when the baby sees a face, we are neurologically prepared before we're even out of the womb to recognize a face.
As long as it comes into our field of vision, the baby's looking for a face that's looking for them. There's this beautiful phrase from my friend Kurt Thompson: Every human being comes into the world looking for someone looking for us. And that's what we're all born with that quest. We all need that through the rest of our lives. Every day, we need, in a way, someone to see us, to know us, to notice us, and to have the chance to do that for someone else.
So, you know, you asked, How does technology affect that?
Well, the danger, I think, of our screens basically is that, first of all, they get between us and other people.
So, I tell a story early in the book of this friend who had a two-year-old niece visiting. And every time someone in the room would take out their phone, even for a moment, she'd run over and say, No, no, no. Because as a two-year-old, she's like, No, I want your attention. I want you to be with me. And now you're with this other thing.
And I think any of us who are parents have experienced the kind of sad realization: my gaze is being drawn away from my child, even at moments when they really need me or really want my attention, to this blank rectangle that fills with glowing things that seem really important somehow, more important than a human face.
So, on the one hand, there's the way that just the screens get in the way. But the more subtle threat is that Siri talks to me. They give you a simulation of being recognized. They give you a simulation of being personally attended to. And the simulations are getting better and better.
So that now there are chatbots powered by modern AI that absolutely seem to talk to you, seem to recognize you. And so it's not just that, I mean, for about 15 years now, the screens have been getting in the way, but now the screens are. Starting to substitute and simulate and replace the recognition that we're actually made for, which is personal. And all they're giving us is personalized, not personal. But it's a pretty powerful drug, that feeling that I'm being paid attention to.
And I worry, very much like many powerful drugs that it actually substitutes for the harder but more real thing that is real personal relationship. Does that make sense? Absolutely. And that feeds into this idea of depression. And the reports tell us that we live in the most connected and yet most depressed generation possibly ever.
What a lot of my friends who are in that field of study and are seeing people on a regular basis are saying is that people aren't genuinely depressed as much as they are truly lonely because they disconnected from real people. And everyone wants to talk about this idea of, well, my iPhone can connect me with people. I can even see grandma on FaceTime. And that's great. But how would you say that loneliness and disconnectedness abound, even in a world where we are so digitally connected to virtually everything, including the dishwasher?
I'm sure my dishwasher will start talking to me on the next upgrade.
Well, connected just isn't the same thing as relationship.
So if you have a meaningful relationship with your grandmother that you've formed through personal presence, that you form by being there in real life, in all the complexity and beauty and messiness and all that of real life, a FaceTime connection can be a wonderful addition to that relationship, but it doesn't constitute the relationship. And you and I, right now, we have only met to do this podcast. We are able to build on other relationships we've had with real people, and we're able to kind of build on that to actually know how to form a relationship with someone we might only connect with on the screen. But the connection of a screen is not enough. And the more that people of all ages, but especially at formative ages, that is childhood, adolescence, as well as infancy, the more that your time is spent not in real relationship, but in kind of pseudo-connections on screens, especially.
They're what we call parasocial connections, which are the connections we have through screens, not with people we have any two-way relationship with, but rather with essentially celebrities, or these days on social media, we call them influencers. And what's happening for a lot of kids right now is that four to six hours of their day would be the median in the United States, is being spent watching people, yes, people that in some sense you're connected to, but mostly not people they have any other relationship with. They're really just watching TikTok celebrities. And what you're doing, you're getting all kinds of human input, but you have no human relationship. And then when you go to try to actually navigate and negotiate a human relationship, you are so unprepared because this is very hard work being human.
But the connections we get, the so-called connections, do very, very little to actually equip us for the hard work of being persons together. Like we ask, why are we so lonely in a connected world? It's like, no, we're lonely because we're in a connected world, but we're not in a personal world. And every hour that's being spent in front of a screen is not being spent, you know, frankly, either alone, which doesn't sound so fun, except as a Christian, I believe God is present even when I'm by myself. And I learn in solitude things about myself, things about the world, and ultimately things about God that actually equip me to be a person that I don't learn if I distract myself with a screen or I go out to find somebody and go out into a world where maybe there are some other people to connect with, to be with.
So this is a, frankly, a relational disaster of our time. And we've allowed it to happen because these screens are very useful to some of us at some of the time. And most parents give their kids screens actually not to solve the kids' problems, but to solve the parents' problems. They're like, how are we going to know that it's that soccer practice is over? Digital pacifier.
Or yes, earlier it's, oh gosh, this is getting out of hand, but if I give you a screen, I know you're going to calm down. That's not actually the kids. Problem like kids have problems self-regulating, but it's really the parents' problem that we kind of forgotten. What are our strategies? What are our options?
When the kid's not really regulating themselves very well, other than the screen.
So, it's a tough time to be human, honestly. And that's why it shows up as loneliness, anxiety, depression, this kind of triumvirate of things that are just spiking among people of all ages, but especially, especially among the young. I love your distinction there between a personal and a connected world. Even though we're connected, that doesn't mean it's personal. I've seen bits of the interview done a couple of weeks ago by a cable news network who put an AI avatar on the screen of a young man who is no longer living and had an interview with that young man who is no longer living.
And people tried to pass that off as if it was real, if it was substantive. And of course, AI was feeding the monologue, but they tried to create this disembodiment of connection. But as you Pointed out, that wasn't personal at all. As we look at ways we could parent our children successfully and intentionally, how can parents, especially during the early years of their child's development, bring in healthy relationships with technology? Are there ways to do this?
Okay, I'm just going to give you my straight answer, which is going to sound crazy in this current moment, but I don't think it would have sounded crazy 20, 30 years ago. And I don't think it'll sound crazy 20, 30 years from now. In our home, we raised two kids. They're now in their 20s. They are actually more radical in their limits on technology as 20 somethings than their parents are now.
So they've gone way beyond even what we do in many ways. But when we were raising them, when we were responsible for their environment until double digits, there were no screens.
So I say no screens before double digits.
So that meant with extremely rare exceptions, and I'm talking about in our own home, I know that when they went to visit other friends' homes, the TV was on, or sometimes my son would play video games with friends at other kids' houses. We weren't legalistic about it, but in our home they just didn't see a glowing rectangle in front of them they saw mom and dad using it for work until they were about 10. and the reason is i think these precious irreplaceable unrepeatable primary years of life the first 10 years of life are when you learn so much about other people yourself the world you begin to discover something about god and to substitute even a minute of that for the simulation that comes through screens to me is a missed opportunity now they had lots of books and so they had lots of ways to expand their imagination they spent lots of time outside we were fortunate to live in a place where that felt safe but i will say if more of us raised our kids this way it would be safer outside because more people would be outside there'd be more to do the other big thing of course we had to do was they got bored a lot we had active restless kids they would come to us and say we're bored and we would say creativity is on the other side of boredom yeah you're bored now but i promise you'll find something to do or there are always chores would you like to sweep like you can always help clean it's amazing How a child gets creative when chores are the alternative, right?
So, creativity is on the other side of boredom. And what this did then was by the time our kids were in double digits, we did get a TV at that point. I remember a friend of mine had heard we got a TV and he texted me and he said, So, how's it going with the TV in your house? And my daughter was sitting next to me, she was about 11 at this point.
So, I said, Well, Amy, what do you think has changed in our family now that we have a TV? And she was reading a book. She kind of half looked up for her book and said, Do we have a TV? and went back to her book.
So, it made no fundamental difference because we also had changed the way Catherine and I lived, right? We had found ways to interact.
Now, I know this will sound hard, though, frankly, more and more schools. I just actually came back from a walk. The local elementary school doesn't allow phones. I don't think they even allow watches at this school.
So, I watched all these kids streaming in, walking in this neighborhood to school. None of them are on their devices. They're all interacting with each other, with their parents who might be walking with them, with the world around them. Like, it's not impossible. It's just that we sort of.
If you follow the default settings of our culture, you will hand the toddler a screen when they start to act up. But there's another way, and we got to find our way back to the other way. When we get older, then the issue becomes rhythms.
So, one of the things my own kids would say in their 20s now is: if there's just one change you could make in your home, it's that the phones don't sleep in our bedrooms. They go to bed in our house, it's in the kitchen, they go to bed before we do, we get up before they do. No phones in bedrooms for kids or adults. Because this is the number one thing that parents do not know. Most parents at this point are aware that especially boys will access sexual content and so forth on their phones.
What parents are not even aware of is that boys and girls are kept up all night by messages coming in on their phones from their friends who want to connect, as we were talking about. But 2 a.m. is not the time for a 12-year-old to be helping another 12-year-old with a problem. But what these phones are doing is they're really interfering with kids' sleep. That has all these massive mental health implications.
I had a neuroscientist say to me, if you don't get a good night's sleep, it's like you've taken five psychoactive drugs. He said, it's like the worst thing you can do for your mental health. And we're just letting our kids take their phones into their bedrooms. And then we don't know that it's keeping them up all night, but they know. And they're very distressed by it, but they don't know how to stop.
So help your kids stop by just having a blanket rule: no phones in bedrooms, ever, especially at night. That's great. This has been part one of a two-part interview with Andy Crouch. Make sure to tune in next week for part two to hear more of his insights. on building healthy habits with technology.
Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy.
Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
