At the top of my list, I would put The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones by Clare Morell. Morell wants to help parents make the “Tech Exit,” by withholding digital devices and social media from their children. The theory is simple enough: Children and younger teens do not need and should not have mobile phones or social media. They can live a better and fuller childhood if they are set free from such technologies. She offers principles for parents who have not yet given their children devices and a plan for parents who already have, but regret the decision. She rightly says that a screen-free life is the life you already want your children to have, and it falls to you to help them achieve it. Parents simply need to believe that such devices are not inevitable and take action accordingly—something that is most successfully done across faith or school communities rather than individual families.

Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age by Samuel James takes a different approach but is no less helpful. James’ book is meant to train you to think well about digital devices and the “social internet” they enable. What he means to show is that these new technologies teach a kind of liturgy, a series of practices, habits, beliefs, and desires that form us and shape us in particular ways. Just as Christians maintain a vision of the life they want to lead before the Lord and institute practices meant to foster it, these technologies hold out a vision of the good life and then promote practices that will further it. His burden is to identify and evaluate these liturgies to see where they may be opposed to the Christian faith and the Christian life. James is not anti-technology, but is very committed to ensuring Christians think deeply and accurately about the costs and benefits of these new technologies.

Another great option is The Wolf in Their Pockets: 13 Ways the Social Internet Threatens the People You Lead by Chris Martin. It can be difficult to remember the world as it was before the advent of handheld digital devices and the social media they enable. The effects go beyond ourselves and our families, extending into the wider community and, of course, the local church. In this book, Martin, who is a deep and helpful thinker when it comes to the subject, broadens the perspective to help leaders understand how the people they lead have been shaped by these technologies. Hence, where other books focus on self-leadership or leadership within the home, this one focuses on leadership in other contexts.

Most of the sociological heavy lifting for books on technology is done by non-Christian sources. Hence, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt is pretty much a must-read. Haidt carefully shows how digital technologies are affecting young people and calls clearly and persuasively for parents to withhold social media from their children until they are well into their teens. Many of the movements afoot today that ban social media for younger users have been provoked by his work.

I have no idea why, but I never reviewed Tony Reinke’s 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You. I suppose it is probably that I had read several books on the subject around the time Crossway published his. Regardless, Reinke’s book focuses on a dozen ways that smartphones have changed us—for good and bad—and comes with the rarest of literary accolades—a foreword by John Piper.

My own The Next Story: Faith, Friends, Family, and the Digital World (given a new cover and a new subtitle in this paperback edition) is a few years older than some of these, but still has an important message as it teaches some of the building blocks of a distinctly Christian approach to technology.

I appreciated the big point of Erin Loechner’s The Opt-Out Family, which calls for parents to opt their kids out of digital media to instead allow them to explore, experience, and enjoy the world around them. I found myself concerned that her strategy may depend on a level of affluence that is not applicable to every family, yet still found there is much to gain from it.

I have not read The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place by Andy Crouch, but I have seen it widely quoted by authors and writers I read. I know of many people who read and appreciated it and confidently applied its wisdom to their families.

Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, now in a second edition, is widely quoted in other books. Her burden is the ways that digital technologies have eroded real-world relationships, replacing them with someone innately inferior.

Finally, in various ways, almost everyone is dependent upon Neil Postman, whose books continue to hold up well, even though he wrote long before any of these technologies existed (and who was in many ways an interpreter and popularizer of the much harder-to-read words of Marshall McLuhan). Amusing Ourselves To Death still remains as helpful as it ever was, as does Technopoly.