Every few years, the same headline makes the rounds. Big Tech executives, it tells us, seriously limit their own kids’ access to technology. The latest version stars Peter Thiel and Evan Spiegel, who reportedly cap their children’s screen time at 90 minutes a week. But this story is much older than the current news cycle. It first appeared in 2011, when The New York Times profiled a Waldorf school in Los Altos, California. The classrooms were stocked with chalkboards and knitting needles, the campus sat a short drive from Apple’s headquarters, and roughly three-quarters of the students had parents working at companies like Google, Apple and Yahoo.
The story ran again in 2014, when a Times columnist revealed that Steve Jobs never let his own kids use the iPad. Then it ran again when a wave of coverage reported that Bill Gates didn’t allow his children to have phones until they turned 14. It surfaced yet again when we learned that Silicon Valley parents were asking their nannies to sign contracts promising to keep phones away from their kids. And now it’s back for the AI era, with a new cast of characters and the same familiar plot. That adds up to fifteen years. Most of the kids in the current headlines weren’t even born when the first version ran.
It’s easy to see why the story does so well every time it circulates. There’s something tantalizing about the idea that the people building our technology won’t let their own children near it. It suggests they know something the rest of us don’t. They tell us publicly that what they build is safe, but behind closed doors, their behaviour seems to say otherwise.
I won’t speculate on whether it’s all true. There’s enormous pressure on parents to look like they have everything under control, and these particular parents live in the public eye. Maybe their kids get more screen time than the news outlets hear about. Maybe they’re every bit as strict as they claim. I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think it matters much.
What interests me is the story itself. I’m interested in its staying power, and in what that staying power says about what Big Tech has built over the years. I think the story persists because it confirms a distrust that parents already carry. For years, many of us felt that something was off about screen time before we could quite name it. We felt the pull of the feed, the tug of the notification and the strange difficulty of putting certain apps down, and we suspected our kids were feeling it too.
Then the industry kept confirming the suspicion. Former executives came forward to describe products engineered around what one of them called a social validation feedback loop. Leaked internal research showed that companies knew about harms they had downplayed in public. Parents weren’t being paranoid. They were being proven right.
But here’s what I think the story gets subtly wrong. The problem was never technology itself. The problem was a specific set of choices: engagement-maximizing feeds, algorithmic recommendations tuned to keep us scrolling and business models where a child’s attention is the product being sold. Those choices were made by people, which means different people can make different ones.
Notice what the executives’ answer concedes. Rationing screen time down to 90 minutes a week, or withholding a phone until age 14, treats their own products like a vice to be managed. It accepts the premise that the technology can’t be built better, only used less. Coming from the people with the most power to build it better, that’s a striking admission.
And it reinforces the false binary this story sets up every time it circulates: abstinence or addiction. Either you lock the devices away like the executives do, or you surrender your kids to the feed. Those are presented as the only two options.
I don’t accept that they are. The third option is to build technology that’s actually worth sharing with your kids in the first place. That’s what we’re doing at Kinzoo. I didn’t start this company in spite of being a parent. I started it because I’m one, and my own kids aren’t an edge case we design around. They’re our first users.That, to me, is the real litmus test for any technology: are the people who created it excited to share it with the people they love?
If not, that’s certainly a headline.
A deeper dive
Here are a few helpful resources in case you want to really dig into today’s topic:
Peter Thiel and Evan Spiegel apparently both limit their children to 1.5 hours of screen time a week. This is a great deal less than average. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, children in the U.S. ages 8 to 18 spend 7.5 hours per day watching or using screens. More often than not, when parents hear that tech executives limit their kids to just over 12 minutes a day of screen time, they feel guilty, inadequate or like they’re not doing enough for their own children. But we’re not really comparing apples to apples, since most parents don’t have access to the same resources that tech billionaires do.
As I mentioned, this idea that tech executives don’t let their own kids near the technology they build is not new. It rears its head every few years. And here’s one of the original articles about Steve Jobs’ approach to tech in his home, which was first published back in 2014.
TL;DR
Too long; didn’t read. It shouldn’t be a full-time job to keep up on industry news, so here is a mercifully quick summary of some other notable developments:
We’ve all been there: you’re trying to get your kid’s attention, but they’re totally, completely absorbed in their phone. It’s almost a cliché, but kids aren’t the only ones who struggle to put their screens down. According to new research, when parents ignore their kids in favor of their phones, it can exacerbate anxiety and insecurity in children and teens. It’s a good reminder for everyone to put their phones down and enjoy some face-to-face time.
Instagram recently debuted a controversial new feature that allowed users to create AI-generated imagery of anyone with a public profile. Users who weren’t set to private were automatically opted in, including celebrities and public figures. They had to dig deep into their settings to opt out. After a lot of public backlash, Instagram removed the feature entirely, saying it “missed the mark.” It’s hard to imagine anyone thinking a feature like that would go over well.
And lastly
Here are a few more pieces of original writing from me and my team—just in case you’re keen for more:
“Screen-free summer” is all the rage on social media, and it seems like an especially tempting goal after reading that some tech executives limit their own kids’ screen time to 1.5 hours a week. If you’re aiming to reduce your kids’ screen time this summer, here are some realistic strategies that avoid the “all or nothing” trap.
The hit Roblox game Grow a Garden is back with a sequel, and this one introduces a stealing mechanism. Here’s everything parents need to know.
Great take, Tech execs rationing screens says more about design than devices. As a teen finance educator, how can parents teach money skills through better apps instead of just limiting them?