Parenting in the Digital World

This is the second installment in a six-part series, “Reclaiming Humanity in the Digital Age.” Check back for more installments soon.

By Joshua Pauling

In Part 1 of this series, we laid the groundwork for why Christians must think clearly and act intentionally regarding the role of screen-based, internet-connected devices in our lives. (To summarize: Such devices and technologies easily nudge us in ways contrary to human flourishing and contrary to our design as enfleshed souls.) We don’t have to go along with the myth that technological advancements will always solve our problems or improve our lives. Instead, we can be discerning users and consumers who make deliberate and countercultural decisions to follow the path less traveled, but more freeing — because, as Christians, we have a true understanding of our embodied and relational nature as human beings made in God’s image and remade in Christ.

Here in Part 2, we will begin to discuss how to go about this, focusing specifically on parenting and raising children in the digital age.

Of course, each family is unique, and what works for one family might not work for others. However, this shouldn’t prevent us from considering prudent wisdom, general principles and proven concepts that can be applied fruitfully in various family situations. And even if you are not a parent or don’t have children still at home, the principles outlined below can still be helpful. Most of the ideas that will be shared throughout this series are applicable to a variety of stations and phases of life.

Principle 1: Situate the “No” Within a Better “Yes”

One of the most important principles I will highlight repeatedly in this series is this: When we decide to implement specific boundaries, rules or restrictions — if we want them to actually stick and work as we hope — they should be situated within a larger positive framework. In other words, when we decide to remove something detrimental, we must also replace it with something positive.

This is the time-tested, two-fold way that human desires and affections are reordered toward proper ends. First, boundaries and limits help diminish technology’s dehumanizing and addictive aspects. Second, more embodied and relational activities are put in their stead, awakening our hearts through a more beautiful vision than what the digital world can offer. This takes work, but pays dividends over time. As children’s tastes (and our own!) are refined and redirected toward what is true, good and beautiful, the allure of digital amusements begins to wear off.

Principle 2: Consider the Default Settings of the Environment

The “no and the “yes” that parents establish for their family are manifested in large part through the home environment that we create. What do we allow or not allow into our home? Where are things located? What do we do with our time? What are the default activities of the home? These may seem like simple questions, but they play a massive role in nudging us towards healthy or unhealthy habits and activities.[1] And how we answer such questions should always be grounded in a proper understanding of our nature as whole persons created by God with a body and soul, who are designed for embodied relationships with God and one another (Gen. 1:26–27, 2:7–24).

For each room, consider how you can craft and shape an environment that leads to human flourishing and faith formation. As an example, consider your living room. What are the default activities in this space? Does the TV, computer, tablet, or other screen figure prominently? What if such things were moved to the side, unplugged, or out of the way, and were replaced with books, board games and musical instruments? To put it another way: How can you increase the barrier to entry for device or screen-based activities and lower the barrier to entry for embodied, creative, relational activities?

Perhaps a good place to start is this: that the default setting for screens is off, and that they only are turned on for specific activities or tasks that necessitate their use. Special attention should also be paid to the dinner table and bedrooms: Many people have found great benefit and freedom in designating these as screen- and device-free spaces, and have been blessed by the conversations and creativity that blossom in their place. Set apart times and spaces in your home that are free from the dings and beeps and flashing lights, free from the pull of our glowing glass boxes — and focused on embodied and relational activities such as music, art, reading, devotions and conversation.  

Principle 3: Build a Huge Reservoir of Real-World Experiences

Intentionally shaping the home environment helps to build a reservoir of real-world experiences for our children — both indoors and outdoors. Children need experiences that cause them to bump up against reality: to experience the friction of disagreements with peers and siblings; to experience skinning their knee, climbing trees, shoveling dirt, pushing the limits of their bodies, submitting to the discipline of learning a musical instrument or sport. For those of us who grew up before the digital revolution, we have at least some reservoirs of real-life experiences. Kids growing up today will not build up their reservoirs unless we make efforts to ensure they do, because the screen offers a simulation of the pleasures without the pain. The screen is just easier. But when children are raised on a steady diet of the shallow simulated pleasures of digital experience, we are reducing their chances of being prepared for life, relationships and challenges.

The friction and challenge of real-life experience helps kids grow because human beings get stronger through challenge and difficulty (within reason, of course).[2] Much like how lifting weights strengthens the body by pushing its limits, so it is with children and their mental and physical experiences in the real world. However, in today’s world we tend to overprotect children in the real world, cutting them off from the rich and varied experience necessary for personal growth, and we tend to under-protect them in the digital world, granting them access to media and content that atrophies their human capacities and malforms their expectations and tastes for real life.[3]

Principle 4: Be Fully Present

In our day, when so much of life is mediated to us through a screen, it is vital to be fully present with our children. What your children need is you. Your real, bodily presence. Your eyes looking into theirs. Your hands holding theirs. Your conversation together with theirs. Your close attention to the songs they play or the speeches they give. This is the humbling and convicting truth: More than anything, your children see you modeling what you value. And if we don’t want our kids always on screens, perhaps we shouldn’t be either.

Your screen doesn’t need your gaze; your children do. Your smartphone doesn’t need to be held in your hands; your children do. This is a challenge to us all, and reminds us of the great power and mystery of the incarnation of God in the flesh, where the principle of being fully present finds its perfection. God didn’t send a message, email or YouTube video to communicate His true identity with us. He sent Himself — born as babe in our flesh, who touched, healed, spoke, cried, laughed, lived, died — and rose — to unite Himself fully with us (John 1:1–17, 1 John 1:1–3). 

You’re Not Alone

With the groundswell of research and parental concern about the harms of digital living on children, it would not surprise me that within a decade or so, we might view giving children smartphones, tablets or other forms of access to digital media much like we view giving children cigarettes today. I will just say it: Digital technology is not necessary for children to live flourishing lives. In fact, the data is telling us loudly that inordinate digital technology use tends to decrease their flourishing. So give your children the gift of a true childhood, where they develop a rich imagination and experience the joys of unstructured play indoors and outdoors. Let your children discover how boredom awakens creativity, how silence brings forth peace, how challenges foster growth, and how other people bring us outside of ourselves.

Make your home into a haven of real-world experiences. Let it be free from digital chatter and the ever-present glow of the screen. And let it be filled with creativity and life, with musical instruments and wooden blocks, with board games and great books, with crochet hooks and whittling knives, with cooking aprons and tool sets. And most of all, let it be filled with you.

You can be a part of this movement to reclaim childhood from the screen. Around the country parents are banding together to dethrone the screen by planning phone-free activities, dances, picnics, parties, maker days, and the like.[4] You don’t have to do this alone; many other families are desiring the same thing. And perhaps here is where the church can help provide community and support as families with shared values craft a healthier relationship to technology together.[5] None of this if from a place of fear or legalism, but a place of freedom in Christ, knowing that there is a better way. No matter where we are on this path, we go forward under the cross, covered by His mercy, and trusting in His promises that He is at work for the glory of His name and the good of His people.

In Part 3, we will highlight the unique challenges faced especially by teens and twenty-somethings coming of age in the digital world.

[1] For more on this topic, see Joshua Pauling, “What Would Borgmann Do? Wisdom for Life in the Digital Age,” The Epimethean, March 15, 2025, epimethean.substack.com/p/what-would-borgmann-do-wisdom-for.

[2] For more on how humans are anti-fragile, see Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2014), where he argues that complex systems like economies, education, and even human beings are strengthened and gain resiliency from some measure of “volatility, randomness, and stressors.” However, instead “we have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything” by removing such risks and challenges. “Just as spending a month in bed … leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions … which [are] … an insult to the antifragility of systems. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”

[3] For more on this, see Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin Press, 2024).

[4] Matt Stewart, “Planting Our Flag in the Real World: Taking the Postman Pledge,” Front Porch Republic, Aug 21, 2023, frontporchrepublic.com/2023/08/postman-pledge.

[5] There are many good resources for families trying to navigate questions of digital technology: Melanie Hempe, Be Screen Strong Substack; Katherine Martinko, The Analog Family Substack; Emily Harrison, Dear Christian Parent Substack; Clare Morrell, Preserving Our Humanity Substack; Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family; Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule.