Technology drives change in every area of human experience, including the home. We are not the first generation to have to figure out new ways of doing family because of a technological shift. Prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century most income generating work done by adults was done either in the home or on the family property. Dads were farmers, butchers, bakers or candlestick makers – and their sons generally worked alongside them. Moms were moms, of course, but they also frequently sewed, stitched, baked and brewed, again, with their daughters working and learning the trade alongside them. Once production was mechanized, however, everything changed. Now fathers left for work at 5 am and returned at 7 pm such that the children only experienced him as a tired, dirty, and probably angry man. Mom lost her side hustle as well, because things made in the home were not as cost effective as things made on the assembly line. Work was now something done “out there” and “away”, with parents in general and fathers in particular spending less quality time with their children.
This state of affairs persisted until the next great technology disruption in the 20th century due to the invention of household appliances. Women in the late 19th century and early 20th century spent an average of 6-8 hours a day doing laundry. A typical mother would have had to do the entire process by hand. She would wet the clothes, soap the clothes, scrub the clothes, then run them through a wringer. She would then hang them on a line to dry. Later she would bring them inside, iron them, fold them and put them away. Laundry was not something she did on a commercial break – it was a lifestyle.
All of that changed in the 1940s and 50s when household appliances became commonplace in most North American homes. A decent argument could be made that the washing machine had the greatest impact on the home since the invention of the steam engine roughly 200 years before, and it wasn’t just the washing machine, it was household appliances in general. Women started living longer and having more time to do other things as a result of these labour saving devices.
One of the immediate impacts of this change was that women started spending more time with their children. Most of us don’t realize how little time our great grandparents spent with their children. Our great grandparents lived after the Industrial Revolution, so most of them were not farmers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, most of them worked outside and away from the home. Fathers spent long hours each day working in a factory. Mothers were spending 6-8 hours a day doing laundry – while making butter in a churn, raising chickens, tending a garden and mending socks, as such, they were not making slime, pushing carriages or supervising play dates – but household appliances changed that. From 1960 onwards, mothers began spending more time each day with their children – even factoring in the increased number of hours moms spent working outside of the home. By 1975, with 47% of moms working outside the home, moms were still able to spend 8.8 hours a week, on average, interacting with their children, which was a significant increase relative to the previous generation. By the year 2000, with 68% of moms working outside the home, the amount of time spent interacting with children had risen to 12.9 hours.[1]
I think the vast majority of people would characterize that development as a win. At the same time, I imagine that the vast majority of people would characterize the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution as a loss, which would seem to suggest that technological changes can be positive or negative depending on what they are and how they are managed. Which leads us to the question of how to understand, manage and mitigate the technological revolution we are currently experiencing. The introduction of the internet in the late 20th century, the release of the first iPhone in 2007 and the explosion of social media apps in the last 15 years have completely changed the dynamic of the home. These new technologies are different than a washing machine or a toaster in the sense that they aren’t things that you turn on so that you can go and do other things, rather they are things that absorb your attention and keep you from doing other things. Kids today are literally living their lives on their phones. According to Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU, children are spending 5.5 hours a day on their smart phones, in addition to the time they are spending on other screens.
Over the course of a lifetime that works out to over 25 years of non-stop scrolling. 25 years spent watching people fall down the stairs, watching cats knock over toddlers, watching people fight like animals in the street and watching all manner of hard-core porn. No wonder that 65% of parents think that the number one reason parenting is more difficult today is technology.[2]
There is plenty of data to back up that perception. According to Jean Twenge of San Diego State University: “Every indicator of mental health and psychological well-being has become more negative among teens and young adults since 2012.”[3] “The number of teens and young adults with clinical-level depression more than doubled between 2011 and 2021.”[4] “The teen suicide rate nearly doubled between 2007 and 2019.”[5]
As to why all these terrible things started happening at the same time, Twenge attributes this to the rapid embrace of the internet and social media, noting that these realities, “arose from the fastest adoption of any technology in human history.”[6]
As a parent of 5 Gen Z children, I can identify with that.
Gen Z includes children born from 1995 – 2012. I’ve got 5 of those people in my family. My oldest daughter is 27, born in 1997 and my youngest child is 13, born in 2011. When smart phones first came out my oldest daughter was 10 years old. At the time, the technology didn’t raise any red flags for me as a parent. It looked like a phone, calculator, camera and Walkman all rolled into one. What could be wrong with that?
The first research I read that seemed to discourage giving children smart phones came out in 2016. Of course, by that time, we felt like the horses had already left the barn. We did our best to claw back the permission we had given, but it was difficult with our older children. We put far better safeguards in place with the younger ones coming up behind, but like a lot of parents our age, we felt like we were working without a map. The picture is much clearer now. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU, in a recent article declared:
“There is now a great deal of evidence that social media is a substantial cause, not just a tiny correlate, of depression and anxiety, and therefore of behaviours related to depression and anxiety, including self-harm and suicide.”[7]
As a result of this avalanche of data, and the committed advocacy of scholars like Haidt, Twenge, Brad Wilcox, and others, school boards all around the world are going phone free and the early results are encouraging. The Dutch school system was an early adopter of this policy and already 75% of students are indicating that they are finding it easier to concentrate and 59% of the schools are reporting an improvement in the social environment.[8]
There is also a push being made to require age authentication for all social media. Australia recently announced that it will include YouTube in its list of social media apps and sites that will require age verification. You will have to be 16 years old to use YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat in Australia, and any platform found circumventing this requirement will be subject to fines of up to $50,000,000[9].
Governments are getting involved, but as always, the primary responsibility for protecting and preparing our children rests with mom and dad, so what can we do to manage and mitigate the impact of these technologies on the home?
To be clear, I think that is the proper question. I don’t think that we turn the clock back to 1995, however much we might wish to do so. These technologies are here to stay, and they are not entirely without benefit. Some social media use appears to be helpful in reducing dementia rates amongst seniors. YouTube is teaching people all over the world how to change the oil on their cars. There are apps you can get for your phone that will notify your neighbours if have a heart attack. There are apps that help you read and understand the Bible. Remote work is allowing some moms and dads to earn income without ever leaving the home – something that hasn’t been the norm in this culture for over 200 years. These new tools can be a blessing – but they can also do incredible harm and therefore, they will need to be carefully managed. Towards that end, I offer the following 10 suggestions for managing and mitigating the impact of these technologies on the home.
Follow the rule of “13 and 16”
The rule of 13 and 16 refers to the suggestion being made now by doctors and researchers that children not have access to smart phones until they are 13 and social media until they are 16. All the best research right now indicates that social media is most harmful to children in the early teenage years. It is particularly harmful for early teen girls. As Jean Twenge points out: “Girls … spend more time on social media than do boys, are more likely to be targets of insults and slights, and are more sensitive about their looks and their popularity.”[10]
The psychological impact of social media on girls peaks in the early puberty years and then levels off dramatically at 24, so some kind of age restriction appears to be common sense. Until other governments follow the lead of countries like Australia, parents will need to band together, because no one wants to be the only parent in the neighbourhood enforcing a new standard. Collective action makes it easier for everyone. I suggest working together with parents in your church or school system to create alternative social environments for children aged 10-13 so that individual children do not feel isolated. If we work together, hopefully in concert with legislation and social change, hopefully within a few years, seeing a smart phone in the hands of a 10-year-old will be as jarring as seeing a cigarette in the hands of a 10-year-old.
Avoid online and digital approaches to education
Whatever you think about COVID, it provided an opportunity to test the utility of online learning. What we learned is that it doesn’t work:
“The grade from students, teachers, parents and administrators is already in: it was a failure.” Preliminary research finds that “students nationwide will return to school in the fall of 2021 with roughly 70% of learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year, and less than 50% in math, according to projections by NWEA, an Oregon-based nonprofit that provides research to help educators tailor instruction.”[11]
Children doing school online are learning about 50-70% of what their peers are learning in class, covering the same subjects. While I think there is a role for online learning, in terms of allowing students to stay engaged while sick or travelling, I do not think it should be allowed to become a central plank in our education strategy as a society. If the government over adopts this approach, I imagine we will see more and more parents opting for homeschooling or private schooling, if they are able to afford it.
Parents would also be wise to exercise caution with respect to the use of digital tools in the educational process. There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that the use of laptops and tablets in the classroom is actually a barrier to retention and comprehension. Many students are able to type so fast that they are essentially creating transcripts of class lectures, without analyzing and processing what they are hearing. Researchers have found that: “we retain information better when we write by hand because the slower pace of writing forces us to summarize as we write, as opposed to the greater speed of transcribing on a keyboard.”[12]
Writing by hand also seems to play a critical role in learning to read.
“Neuroscientist Karin James at Indiana University in Bloomington published a study comparing the learning styles of a small group of pre-literate five-year-olds who were instructed to type, trace, or handwrite letters and shapes. Using functional MRI scanning before and after the training, she found that a “reading circuit” in the brain that had been documented by previous research “was recruited during letter perception only after handwriting – not after typing or tracing experience… In some significant way, writing by hand, unlike tracing a letter or typing it, primes the brain for learning to read.”[13]
In person, by hand, should be the general rule when it comes to the education of our children.
No digital privacy in your home
The statistics on pornography use are absolutely staggering. Ninety-one percent of men consumed it in the last month[14]. PornHub received an astounding 11.4 billion visits in one month in 2024.[15] Research shows that children are being exposed to pornography on average between the ages of 9-13.[16] Children are not just seeing pornography, in many cases, they are producing and distributing it. According to the Barna Group: “An astonishing 62 percent of teenagers say they have received a nude image on their phone, and 40 percent say they have sent one.”[17]
Obviously, this is a serious problem.
Pornography is like a fungus that grows in the dark and that can be killed by bringing it out into the light. Towards that end, there should be absolutely no digital privacy in your home. We had a rule with our kids when they were teenagers that if they wanted to have a phone then they needed to surrender that phone to mom or dad upon request so as to review recent texts and browser history. Failure to comply would result in the loss of the phone.
No one really liked that rule, and there were protests aplenty, but it was applied fairly and consistently across the board – even to mom and dad. My wife has all my phone codes – as do the kids – and anyone is welcome to take my phone and look through my pictures and scan my browser history. I’m more than happy to play by the same rules as everyone else. In the current technological environment, privacy is the price we will all have to pay for purity, and it will be well worth it.
Prioritize family dinner
Family dinner is a must. Even with 5 kids of various ages we’ve tried to maintain a minimum of 4 family dinners a week over the last almost three decades of parenting. There has been plenty of complaining about this one as well. “Why can’t we just make our own dinner and eat it in our rooms? None of my friends have to do this. It’s boring!”
My reply was usually some version of: “First of all, for the sake of human civilization, I really hope that’s not true, and secondly, I am not parenting all your friends, I am parenting you and I would like you to have social skills. I would like you to be able to look another human being in the eyes and have a meaningful conversation. So, yes, we will be eating dinner together tonight and we will each be talking about our days.”
Slowly but surely the habit took hold and the complaints became less frequent. Our routine is fairly simple: we eat, we talk, we clean up, we get our Bibles, we read a chapter, we discuss and we pray. Doing that multiple times a week has been a game changer for us as a family. Now that our adult children are out of the house we have instituted a monthly “all together” family dinner where the adult children come back and we fold in spouses, significant others, grandmas and grandpas.
Everyone loves it!
I give a little speech at the start of the meal strongly encouraging that we put our phones away so as to enjoy some face-to-face connection and conversation. By and large, everyone voluntarily and happily complies. We need this! Christin Rosen in The Extinction of Experience says:
“We are meant to look at one another, and doing so triggers a host of physiological responses. Intense eye contact increases one’s heart rate and triggers the release of phenylethylamine, an organic compound that functions as a neurotransmitter in the human central nervous system and serves as a mood and stress regulator.”[18]
In person conversation improves physical and mental health.
Eat together.
Slowly.
Intentionally.
And often.
Make the most out of your car rides
Sherry Turkle has found that most conversations take at least 7 minutes to really begin.[19] This probably explains why most of my most important parenting conversations happened in the car. My son played high level soccer and we spent at least a couple nights a week for about a decade driving around the province to various games and practices. When he got in the car, I’d ask him how his day was, and I’d usually get a one-word answer: “Fine.”
Did you do learn anything interesting?
“No.”
Perfect. One wonders why one pays taxes at all.
However, at around the 15-minute mark of the drive he would start to loosen up. I get a few anecdotes about class and possibly even a story or two about him and his friends.
On the way home from the game, with all those endorphins coursing through his body, he would talk non-stop. The first 20 minutes would be a recap of the game or practice, but then after that, all bets were off. We talked about everything. Girls, school, culture and faith. It was absolute parenting gold! Knowing that gold was out there, if I was persistent and willing to wait for it, kept me from getting frustrated with those one-word answers in the first few minutes of the ride.
Do everything you can to avoid retreating into your own privatized space while riding in the car with your kids. Get them talking before they put the earbuds in. Don’t give up after the first couple of bored and curt responses. Press on and make the most of that car ride.
For longer trips consider making use of an audio book or a shared play list. On our recent summer road trip with our two youngest girls, we created a musical playlist that had songs from the 80s and 90s for mom and dad along with lots of newer stuff for them. There were worship and “secular” songs, and we sang together for about 2 hours before our voices started getting sore. On a road trip with my dad and son we listened to an audio book for about 11 of the 22 hours. We’d pause the book every so often to talk about it.
Car rides offer unique opportunities to bond and connect as a family, but you have to push back against the tendency to retreat into privatized digital space.
Practice digital Sabbaths
Given the addictive nature of these new technologies, and given their tendency to function as experience blockers, it is important to implement a program of digital Sabbath. In his book The Tech-Wise Family, Andy Crouch suggests a Sabbath routine of 1 hour a day, 1 day a week and one week a year.
Put the phones in a box, or charge them in an out of the way place for 1 hour a day. The best time to do this is during family dinner. We try to enforce a “no phones at the table” rule, and by and large, it works pretty well.
For the 1 day a week part of the plan, you could use Sunday, with phones being left on charge from 10 am until 10 pm.
The 1 week a year aspect might seem more challenging, but could perhaps be combined with a hike, camping trip or family holiday.
Whatever plan you develop, work on it as a family and do it together.
Facilitate free-range play
As mentioned above, parents today spend far more time interacting with their children than was common in previous generations. In fact, some psychologists are starting to wonder if we are spending too much time engaging with our children. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, for example says:
“Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other. Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment. When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less painful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting.”[20]
Children need to explore the world through unsupervised, unstructured play, and parents typically get in the way of that. Parents today are more engaged and more anxious about safety issues, largely because of social media. They are worried their children will be kidnapped, despite that violent crimes of all types are currently at a 30 low. Social media is functioning as an experience blocker by convincing parents that children need to be supervised every hour of the day. They put them in organized sports, dance, music lessons and tutoring, all of which cuts into unstructured play time. While done with the best of intentions, and while each of those things can be wonderful in moderation, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. The Chronicle of Higher Education puts it this way:
“Whether children play enough isn’t an obscure debate among developmental psychologists. If it’s true that children who spend too little time playing struggle with executive function, then we may be raising a generation of kids with less self-control, shorter attention spans, and poorer memory skills.”[21]
Let the kids play. Let them ride their bikes, climb trees, invent games and settle disputes with other children on their own. You stay in the car, drink coffee and read a book while they do.
They’ll be fine.
And so will you.
Engineer outdoor experiences
As human beings we were created to have a connection to the earth. Humans are adam adamah – ‘man from the earth’. Indigenous people all around the world seem to understand this, whereas modern western society seems intent on denying it, much to our individual and collective detriment.
We need to spend time outside!
The great irony is that for the last 20 years parents have been over vigilant in terms of protecting their children from outside threats and under vigilant with respect to inside threats. We sent our children downstairs with a smart phone or a video game controller not realizing that the worst dangers are online. Many psychologists are now encouraging parents to be less protective with respect to outside play and more protective with respect to inside play. The monsters are on the device. The miracles are out in the woods!
Get your children walking, riding bikes, swimming, hiking and climbing trees. Go camping. Plant a garden. Get a pet. Visit a farm. Go fishing. Do whatever you have to do to facilitate a sense of connection between your family and the natural environment.
Fill your home with actual books
Read to your children and let them see you reading on your own. According to recent article in the Guardian, “Fewer than half of gen Z parents called reading to their children “fun for me”, and almost one in three saw reading as “more of a subject to learn” than something to be enjoyed – significantly more than their gen X counterparts.”[22]
Dawna Duff, an associate professor of speech language pathology at SUNY’s Binghamton University, says:
“Kids who don’t get a head start reading at home often have trouble catching up to those who do. Books are a really rich source of learning new words, and if kids don’t have that experience reading at home, they’re likely to come to school knowing less vocabulary – and that makes a big difference in how successful you’re going to be throughout school.”
Children who don’t read don’t achieve their full potential. Reading is a superpower. It literally changes the way a human brain works. Joseph Heinrich, in his book The Weirdest People In The World, writes that: “Learning to read forms specialized brain networks that influence our psychology across several different domains, including memory, visual processing, and facial recognition. Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code.”[23] While not a believer, Heinrich’s thesis is that reading in general, and reading the Bible in particular, is what shaped and elevated the western world and made it a particularly advanced and prosperous society. On this matter he appears to agree with Jesus in John 10, who said, quoting Psalm 82:6:
“he called them gods to whom the word of God came” (John 10:35 ESV)
Literacy, and particularly biblical literacy, makes human beings almost divine. Do not let iPads, YouTube and Tiktok turn your human children back into animals. Be a book family, and most importantly, be a Bible family.
Worship and participate in a local church
Though self-describing as an unbelieving Jew, Jonathan Haidt makes sure that his family regularly attends synagogue service. According to Haidt:
“In the virtual world there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things. Nothing ever closes, so everyone acts on their own schedule. In short, there is no consensual structuring of time, space or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to create religious or quasi-religious communities. Everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort. There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane.”[24]
According to Haidt, human beings are wired for rhythms of work and rest, sacred and profane. By ‘profane’ he doesn’t mean sinful, he just means practical and earthy. Human beings need to spend time thinking about what they will eat, where they will sleep, how to keep warm and how to make, feed and protect their babies. A human mind is wired to spend most of its time thinking about that, but not all its time. Haidt argues that we also need time to focus on the real, the spiritual and the ultimate. Human minds that don’t have that rhythm eventually break down and thus, Haidt as an unbeliever, nevertheless prescribes regular experiences of corporate worship, particularly for anxious teenagers. He says:
“A healthier way to live would be to seek out more in-person communal events, especially those that feel as though there is an elevated or moral purpose and that involve some synchronous movement, such as religious services”[25]
That’s what, arguably the most famous psychologist in America is prescribing for anxious kids these days: more time in church!
They need to sing with the congregation.
They need to experience sacred rhythms.
They need to connect again with the Divine.
In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt brings his argument to a conclusion with these words:
“Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.”[26]
I think that’s true.
Of course, I’d say it differently as a Christian. I’d say that to heal our kids and to mitigate the damage done by over exposure to these technologies, they need to build thicker human relationships, they need to embrace the work and calling of human beings and they need to reconnect with their Creator.
In other words, they need the gospel, they need grace, and they need the local church.
Thanks be to God.
Pastor Paul Carter
This article is a summary of an in-person talk given by the author at the Engaging Culture event at Muskoka Bible Centre in August of 2025. If you are interested in further teaching from Pastor Paul you can access the entire library of Into The Word episodes through the Audio tab on the Into the Word website. You can also download the Into The Word app on iTunes or Google Play.
[1] Timothy Carney, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder than It Needs to Be, First edition (HarperCollins, 2024), 31.
[2] Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place (Baker Books, 2017), 23.
[3] Jean M. Twenge, Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents–and What They Mean for America’s Future, First Atria Books hardcover edition (Atria Books, 2023), 392.
[4] Twenge, Generations, 396.
[5] Twenge, Generations, 398.
[6] Twenge, Generations, 401.
[7] Jonathan Haidt, “Social Media Is A Major Cause.”
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/04/dutch-schools-phone-ban-has-improved-learning-study-finds
[9] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/30/tech/australia-youtube-social-media-ban-intl-hnk
[10] Nicholas G. Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, 1st ed (W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2025), 174.
[11] Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, First edition (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2024), 73.
[12] Rosen, The Extinction of Experience, 62.
[13] Rosen, The Extinction of Experience, 60.
[14] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30358432/
[15] https://www.thefp.com/p/how-to-de-addict-gen-z-from-porn?
[16] https://www.addictionhelp.com/porn/statistics/
[17] Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family, 169.
[18] Rosen, The Extinction of Experience, 32.
[19] Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family, 157.
[20] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024), 52–53.
[21] Rosen, The Extinction of Experience, 74. Citing The Chronicle Of Higher Education
[22] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/02/gen-z-parents-reading-kids
[23] Joseph Patrick Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, First Picador paperback edition (Picador : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 5.
[24] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin Press, 2024), 204.
[25] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin Press, 2024), 206.
[26] Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic Books, 2006), 239.
