Welcome back to The Family Stack! We interview families about their technology stack. That's not just their devices and apps, but their rules, rituals, and resistance strategies. How do they handle phones at dinner? What's their bedtime protocol? When do kids get devices? How do they preserve attention, presence, and humanity while living in 2025? These aren't the pristine success stories, they're real families figuring it out, sharing what works, what failed spectacularly, and what they're trying next.
I’m excited to present this week’s guest: Mark Edelen. Mark is a mechanical engineer and former Dean of the Engineering Department at Howard Community College. I had the fortune of meeting Mark when I was a remarkably awkward freshman in college, and we’ve happily stayed friends ever since! Mark also has older, very smart, very tech-forward children and provides insight into how that factors in.
Enjoy!
Who are you, and what does your family look like?
I am a 45 yr old husband, father, and Christ-follower. My faith is central to my marriage, parenting, and hopefully how I interact with technology. I have been blessed with 19 years of marriage and 5 children, ages 17, 16, 13, 11, and 4 - yes, we had a little COVID surprise! Given the age range of our children, we currently encounter the full spectrum of challenges associated with parenting in general, and certainly with the myriad challenges of technology use.
We live in Columbia, MD, a fairly progressive and ethnically diverse town, in an upper-middle class neighborhood. Our county is politically strongly left-leaning, highly-educated, and high-income. Technology-adoption tends to occur rapidly in our area; it quickly became boring to see Teslas a few years ago, and now we are bored with Cybertrucks.
Professionally, I consider myself both an engineer and educator. I currently work for a defense contractor developing subsea vehicles as a mechanical engineer, but spent 13 years teaching engineering at a local community college. About half of my time at work is currently spent managing and mentoring recent college graduates. I don’t consider myself a “techie,” but generally follow technological trends. I am a huge 3D printing nerd and was very involved in helping my college wrestle with the educational implications of AI when chatGPT appeared.
I have long noticed and objected to some of the emerging downsides of technology - particularly those related to smart phones. In a farewell soapbox speech to a group of peers during my senior year of college, I spoke out against the inexorable tide of cell phone (not even smartphone, yet!) adoption. I was one of the last holdouts in my friend group to get a cell phone (in 2002), as I noticed how immediately it made people less present in social situations. A common mantra from that time in my life was “wherever you are, be all there.” I felt then - and how much MORE now - that our individual devices robbed us collectively of presence and engagement in the here and now of our everyday lives. I might have also infamously referred to cell phones as “the mark of the beast” - which felt like overkill then but almost feels prescient now! Please understand that I now own a smartphone, and have for many years…but I don’t have to like what it does to me!
Walk us through a typical day with technology in your home.
There are really two types of typical days in our home - weekdays and weekends.
On weekdays, we are fairly restrictive when it comes to “screen time”. The younger children (middle school and younger) are only permitted to use laptops or a locked-down shared phone for school work or listening to audio books. They do the latter obsessively, which has actually become a problem. Multiple of our children have taken to listening to audiobooks on 2X to 3X speed for multiple hours per day, if given the option. I can’t decide if that is good or bad for their brains, so we’ve put some limits on playback speed and listening hours per day. Our two high schoolers have more latitude with phone use during the day, but this changed recently when their school (public high school) prohibited phone use for the entire school day. To our delight, our highschoolers now have several hours per day when they get to learn and interact the old fashioned way. This change was LONG overdue, in my opinion, but our county finally got on-board with the regional trend of school systems limiting phone use. After school and through the evenings, we strongly encourage our high schoolers to prioritize family time and academics over phone time. The only devices allowed at bedtime are reading Kindles - we feel strongly about keeping the internet out of bedrooms, especially at night.
On weekends, we are more permissive, but still within limits. All of the children get 1-2 hours per day of entertainment screen time on most weekend days, although that can be modified by travel, company, or our soccer schedule. We try to give equal time to each kid, even in the midst of our complicated overlapping activity schedules. This failed pursuit of equity is a significant source of conflict. There are few injustices as cruel as one sibling feeling that another received an unfair amount of screen time!
Any shared meal times are held sacred - no phone use at the table, no matter how badly you want to read that message or ask chatGPT a burning question. We manage to have dinner together 4-5 nights per week amidst a full schedule of soccer practices and other kid-specific engagements. Holding the line on family dinners together, to the extent possible, is something I would recommend to every parent.
What technology is essential in your home?
This could be a really long answer! Time to bulletize:
Essential Devices:
Smartphones, for adults and teenagers 14+. This probably goes without saying. My wife and I definitely have a love/hate relationship with our phones. For the teens, it is primarily love.
Pinwheel phone(s). When our kids first get their own phone around age 13, it is a special “locked down” phone with access to a curated list of safe apps that excludes all social media.
Kindle readers. To my wife’s credit, everyone in our family loves to read. We love our readers, especially at bedtime and when we travel.
Chromecast. Do they even make these anymore? We still love ours.
Skylight. Combination photo-frame, chore-tracker, calendar display, and to-do list tool.
Microsoft XBox and Nintendo Switch. We do enjoy some gaming, but exclusively on weekends during the school year.
Custom docking/charging station. At bedtime, all of the devices are stowed in two custom designed and 3D printed stations that are intentionally NOT on the same floor as our bedrooms.
Essential Apps and Services:
Google Calendar. Ours is an insane seven-colored kaleidoscope that drives everything.
Google Family Link. This is one of many ways that we manage phone time limits, app limits, content restrictions, etc.
openDNS. Another layer of protection for monitoring and restricting content for our home Wifi.
Tether (router mgmt app). Yet another layer of control, allowing us to turn on/off groups of devices and set specific hours/days when our Wifi network is completely disabled.
Capital One app. We’ve found this to be a pretty efficient way to automate allowance, money transfers, debit cards (for the older kids), etc. Each child has their own “MONEY Teen Checking” account - they don’t actually have to be teenagers.
What technology do you actively avoid or limit?
Long before the advent of smartphones and social media, I was concerned about my own individual susceptibility to technology-based problems. So much so that I made a promise to myself not to play video games at all during my undergraduate years - I ended up keeping that promise for about 3.5 years, and I firmly believe that it made a huge difference in my college experience and possibly saved me from developing an all-consuming gaming addiction. I was not a huge gamer in high school, but mostly because I had healthy limits in place from my parents and simply from living a structured life within a family. I knew that college would afford vastly more freedom, and that I was prone to abusing that freedom to excess in terms of how I spent my time. I still vividly remember some of the other college freshmen in my dorm whose skin turned a sickly shade of white for lack of sun exposure. People would game through the night for weeks on end, skipping class and sleeping during the day. When you give 18 yr old young men unlimited access to broadband internet, for the first time in their lives (at that time, most of us had dial-up at home, at best), you are just asking for trouble. The combination of gaming and porn just ruined people - and that continues today in a largely-silent epidemic that is ravaging young people. I am thankful for the recent work of Haidt (see Anxious Generation) and others in bringing this issue to the forefront of public consciousness.
Fast-forwarding to my marital and parenting years, my wife and I both place different limits on our phone usage. We each limit specific apps and avoid phone use in the bedroom. I quit social media entirely about 5 years ago and don’t miss it one bit. That said, I am fortunate to have a group of about 15 very close male friends - all from college. This group stays connected via Slack. We share a bunch of channels on various topics from theology to sports, and this tight network satisfies much of my day-to-day social connection need.
Our two high-schoolers both have smartphones, so we have four active users plugged into glowing rectangles for multiple hours per day. Both high-schoolers have some limits on overall hours per day, hours in specific apps, and a requirement of parent-approval for all apps. For example, we only recently allowed our 16 yr old daughter to install and use Instagram, but she is still not allowed to use other social media apps like TikTok or Snapchat. Our 17 yr old son gets a bit more latitude in app selection, but we have frequent conversations and spot-checks on both of their “digital well-being” phone menus.
We have tried MANY different strategies to fairly, judiciously limit screen time in our house. I won’t begin to describe all of them in detail. In general, we only allow “for fun” individual screen time on weekends and during school breaks. Each child typically needs to complete chores before they start that time, except in rare circumstances. Family screen time is treated separately, which attempts to signal to our children that we value time spent together…even if that time is spent watching a show or movie. Of all the systems and strategies we’ve tried, I’m confident in the efficacy of one thing: screen time fasts. We don’t do these on a regular schedule, even though that might be a good idea, but we do institute intermittent fasts from screen time. During these fasts, the children go a few weeks without any “for fun” individual screen time. These fasts are typically triggered by the realization, on the part of my wife and I, that the priorities of our children have drifted too far out-of-whack. Since “out-of-whack” is quite imprecise, I will give an example. If we have company over for dinner and a child pulls us aside (or, worse yet, just says it out loud in their hearing) to ask when our guests will leave so they can do screen time, then we know it is time for a fast. Another category of triggers for a fast is seeing in our children a prioritization of screen-based activity over all other forms of leisure or entertainment. If they start wanting to choose screen time over EVERYTHING else, whether that is going on a hike or playing a board game, then we know things need to be rebalanced. Lastly, when we see that our children react with excessive grumbling, complaining, or plain old fit-throwing when screen time is taken away or restricted, it is time to start a fast. Invariably, we find that these fasts of 1-2 months accomplish a remarkable resetting of expectations and priorities. During the fast - as soon as screen time options are taken off the table - the children will return to playing together, creating imaginative games, pulling out board games they had forgotten about, and doing things outside for hours. They return to the childhood I remember! Their behavior also generally improves and attention spans lengthen. I can’t recommend this highly enough to other parents. On average, we probably do fasts like this 2-3 times per year for 3-6 weeks at a time.
How do you handle Social Media?
I addressed much of this above. I consider social media to be, on balance, a social ill. It probably isn’t controversial anymore to say that. The research is in. We know that social media has measurable, substantial negative impacts on mental health - especially in girls. We have a continuous dialogue about this in our home with all of our children. I have often compared it to smoking. Giving my adolescent child a smartphone with unrestricted social media is comparable to handing her a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Both are known to be highly addictive and highly destructive.
We feel so strongly about this that my wife and I recently held a “book club” with our two oldest children (then 15 and 17) to read and discuss Haidt’s Anxious Generation together. Haidt makes a compelling case that social media has a causative relationship with dramatic declines in teen mental health in the past 10-15 years. I didn’t need to be convinced, but this book more than any other gave voice to many of the concerns and positions I already held. Reading it with our children generated some great discussion and gave us a common language for talking about restrictions and rationales. It is not uncommon for me to urge my son or daughter (or wife!) to put away their phone by good-naturedly yelling, “Put away your experience-blocker!” (a term used by Haidt to describe our smartphones). We hope that we are helping them to start independently managing their own usage as they get closer to adulthood.
How do you handle AI?
I recently made a career change from academia back to industry. One of the many reasons for leaving academia was the monumental question of how to deal with AI in education. This is a massive problem - and a problem that most institutions are ill-equipped to deal with. I was one of the leading proponents for discussing AI at my college as soon as chatGPT hit the scene. I led several professional development sessions for both faculty and staff. As a collective, neither faculty nor administration were prepared to thoughtfully re-orient pedagogy and assessment in the face of AI. AI is advancing on many fronts and it seems clear that hardly anyone knows what we are getting ourselves into or how specific industries will be affected. Plenty of folks are trying to guess and project, but we are in uncharted waters. Even comparisons to other transformative technologies have questionable utility. AI could be an order-of-magnitude more transformative, and two orders-of-magnitude faster, than other major technological advances like the printing press, electricity, or the internet.
I am equal parts terrified and amazed. I show both parts to my children, but definitely show a greater share of amazement to the younger children. Most of my children will be AI-natives. I have no idea what that will mean, but AI will be as normal to them as Nintendo or XBox is to me…they will scarcely remember a time when the technology didn’t exist. They will be scoffing at my lack of AI comfort when I hit retirement age, or more likely a couple of years from now. Our oldest child, who is very tech-savvy anyway, has already integrated AI heavily into his daily life, for everything ranging from mundane tasks to software development. My main admonition regarding AI is related to integrity. I want my children to learn to use AI, but want them to be honest about when they use it. If their teacher intends for it to be used, great - I probably won’t challenge that. But if something is meant to be brain-generated, I expect my children to genuinely produce authentic content. With or without AI, I want my children to be honest and commit to not cheating on the schoolwork. AI is a problem in terms of increasing the temptation to cheat, but it is a far greater problem in reducing the need to think. The latter is what really concerns me, and I am just starting to wrestle with what that means for parenting. Thankfully, we do homeschool our youngest three children, so we have a good measure of control over their education and will strive to hold the line on instilling critical thinking.
What surprises you about raising kids in today's digital world? What would you keep and what would you change?
Surprises:
The extent to which parents will throw their children to the wolves in terms of their access to the online world. How did we get so far off-track as a society before calls for change started to gain momentum?
The power of tech companies and “news-feed” algorithms in shaping the lives of both young and old. The same parents who wish their children weren’t doom-scrolling barely have the self-control to moderate their own behavior. The endless feed of instant gratification is powerful, and growing more gratifying and attention-holding every day.
The market saturation of Apple across teens and pre-teens. One study found that 87% of teens own an iPhone. This might be inflated, but even if it is 80%, Apple has a strangle-hold, and our daughter felt the social stigma of having an Android and sending green - gasp - text message bubbles. This is absurd.
How long it took for school systems to start restricting device usage during the school day. If you cared about learning OR social development, this seemed like an obvious move at least 5 years ago.
The difficulty in managing technology access for my household. I am a reasonably tech-capable person and an engineer by training, and yet I struggle to set up and maintain the multiple systems it takes to have some measure of protection covering five kids and 10+ devices.
The addictive power of screens. Psychologists who want to study withdrawal symptoms should visit my house when our 4 yr old returns home from a three days of heavy screen use at his grandparents’ house! Screen-harvested dopamine addiction is as real as any other addiction. On our worst days, parenting sometimes feels very much like managing a bunch of addicts.
What I would keep:
Being able to communicate with my older kids whenever and wherever they are. It is comforting to know that they can get in touch with us, and vice versa, should an urgent need arise.
The ability to stay in close touch with geographically distant friends. Our kids have close friends and cousins who live in other states and countries. These friendships are much easier to maintain in today’s world.
Access to high-quality, often free, educational tools like Khan Academy, certain YouTube channels, etc.
What I would change:
There is a very long list of things I would change, but there is one that rises to the top, so I will state only that: If I could magically change one thing about raising kids in today’s digital world, I would take access to pornography completely off the table. Pornography exposure and addiction are incredibly damaging to both individuals and society, and I wish so badly that my children could grow up in a world where it wasn’t so easily accessible. The average age of first exposure to pornography is around 12 or 13 years old. To me, this is a tragedy and one of the greatest fears and challenges I face as a parent. I mourn the collective loss of innocence of our society’s children and can scarcely comprehend the cumulative downstream effects on adolescence, dating, marriage, and families.