"Arms dealers don't give landmines to their children" - How are Silicon Valley leaders protecting their children from technology?

“Gun dealers don’t give their kids landmines” – How Silicon Valley executives are protecting their children from technology?

“Social media is harmful to children” has been harshly ruled in court in the US states of California, Kentucky and New Mexico. While Silicon Valley has enjoyed unprecedented dominance in the technology industry, one of its most popular products, Meta, has been characterized by its appeal and lawsuits.

Public hearings in the latest social media lawsuit begin today, August 18, in Oakland, California. California and other states have filed a lawsuit against Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram. They claim that the company “used powerful and unprecedented technologies to attract, engage and ultimately enslave young people and adolescents.” Meta denies these accusations.

According to the New York Times, a number of Silicon Valley executives have their own problems with social media and screen addiction. In particular, the publication collected information on how the heads of the world's most powerful IT companies protect their families and children from digital addiction.

**Mark Zuckerberg**

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “I generally don’t want my children to sit in front of the TV or computer for a long time.” He explained that “interacting with people is good, but passively consuming content, “just switching from one video to another” – “does not provide the same positive benefits.”

When Zuckerberg’s second child was born in 2017, he and his wife wrote an open letter to their daughter. In the letter, they emphasized the importance of “making time to go outside and play.” They focused on smelling flowers and picking leaves. But the letter doesn’t mention anything about digital technology.

The publication notes that leaders like Zuckerberg don’t often talk about their families. But when they do, they openly demonstrate their caution about technology. For their children, technology doesn’t play the role of teacher, nanny, all-purpose distraction, and occasional constant companion. Technology is almost nonexistent in their lives.

Such statements by leaders are usually made without thinking or reflect a momentary state of mind. For example, Zuckerberg also spoke about his children seven years ago and has said almost nothing since. A Meta representative has also not commented on the topic at this time.

**“One and a half hours a week” of screen time**

Facebook’s first outside investor and longtime board member Peter Thiel said a few years ago that he limited screen time for his children, who are now 3.5 and 5 years old, to “one and a half hours a week.” When he mentioned it at the 2024 festival, the audience was shocked.

Because most kids that age spend 1.5 hours a day, or even a morning, staring at a screen. And Thiel called himself a typical Silicon Valley parent: “There are probably a lot of people in the IT industry who do something similar for their families. It might raise some questions for you,” Thiel said. But he also did not respond to questions later sent to the NYT by email.

**“Arms dealers don’t give their kids mines”**

Over the years, the warnings and cautions of IT leaders have accumulated. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once said, “We didn’t give our kids cell phones until they were 14.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai once said that his son “didn’t have a phone yet” when he was 11. “We didn’t have free access to television,” he added. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that he wouldn’t let his nephew use social media. By now, these prohibitions have become a cultural cliché.

For example, in the American creative series “The Audacity,” a girl at a Silicon Valley party is surprised to see a boy with a smartphone. “Arms dealers don’t give their kids landmines,” he explains.

**“The benefit of a low-tech environment”**

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel attributes his success at running a high-tech company to the low-tech environment in his home. Growing up in the 1990s, Spiegel wasn’t allowed to watch television “until he was almost a teenager.” He eventually realized that it was good. “I spent a lot of my time just building things and reading books,” he says.

Spiegel has tried to keep up the tradition: In a 2018 interview, he said that his 7-year-old gets just 90 minutes of screen time a week. He now has four children. In an April interview, Spiegel said that his 2-year-old gets “almost zero” screen time. “We mostly want to read books with him, play, explore the outdoors, and things like that. We rarely let the 6- and 7-year-olds watch movies. But beyond that, we don’t give them phones or anything like that. But my 15-year-old is “absorbed by technology,” says the Snapchat CEO.

**On boredom and anxiety**

Steve Chen, who co-founded YouTube in 2006, gave a talk to students at Stanford last year. He said he was concerned that his children would eventually “not be able to watch anything longer than 15 minutes.” “The digital world has taught kids to expect everything to be short, like a 280-character tweet or a short-form video,” Chen said. His goal is to teach his kids “how to do things the slow, painstaking way.”

Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, has said that as a new father, he’s become more tolerant of technology. On the subject of AI and his child, he says, “I don’t know when I’ll let my son talk to AI, but I’d rather it be sooner rather than later.” "I used to," Altman says.

Like other IT executives, Altman added that he was often bored as a child and hated it at the time. In fact, he says, those boredoms were "very valuable." Now he looks forward to taking his own child outside to play in the dirt.

**A school without phones near Google**

The Waldorf School of the Peninsula, located two miles from Google headquarters, has banned phones. "No phones means no distractions, no social media worries, no constant comparisons. Just real childhood," the school explains on its website. The cost of a real childhood at Waldorf is $47,500 a year.

According to the NYT, several members of the school's board of trustees work professionally in artificial intelligence. But the school has opted to use machines in favor of "human education." The school has kept teaching to a minimum. The goal is to train future leaders to think clearly. “As machines optimize tasks and automate decisions, our graduates are developing the human skills that will define leadership in 2030 and beyond,” the school said in a statement.

“It seems like people in tech have understood this from the beginning,” says Mara Fat, an artist and bookseller. Mara, who spoke to the publication, recalls the influx of programmers into San Francisco’s Upper Haight neighborhood 20 years ago: “All our neighbors worked at these companies—Facebook, Google, Apple. None of them allowed their kids to interact with any screens. They all knew how addictive these things were and how to protect their children,” she says.