By Nellie Bowles
SAN
FRANCISCO — The people who are closest to a thing are often the most
wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have
decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.
A
wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide
consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and
the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate
in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.
“Doing
no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin
Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook
engineer. “If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”
Ms.
Stecher, 37, and her husband, Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and
came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their
house. Their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time “budget,” no
regular hours they are allowed to be on screens. The only time a screen
can be used is during the travel portion of a long car ride (the
four-hour drive to Tahoe counts) or during a plane trip.
Recently she has softened this approach. Every Friday evening the family watches one movie.
There is a looming issue Ms. Stecher
sees in the future: Her husband, who is 39, loves video games and thinks
they can be educational and entertaining. She does not.
“We’ll cross that when we come to it,” said Ms. Stecher, who is due soon with a boy.
Some of the people who built video programs are now horrified by how many places a child can now watch a video.
Asked
about limiting screen time for children, Hunter Walk, a venture
capitalist who for years directed product for YouTube at Google, sent a
photo of a potty training toilet with an iPad attached and wrote:
“Hashtag ‘products we didn’t buy.
Image
Athena
Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook and is now
at Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arm, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,
said: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking
havoc on our children.”
Ms.
Chavarria did not let her children have cellphones until high school,
and even now bans phone use in the car and severely limits it at home.
She
said she lives by the mantra that the last child in the class to get a
phone wins. Her daughter did not get a phone until she started ninth
grade.
“Other parents are like,
‘Aren’t you worried you don’t know where your kids are when you can’t
find them?’” Ms. Chavarria said. “And I’m like, ‘No, I do not need to
know where my kids are every second of the day.’”
For
longtime tech leaders, watching how the tools they built affect their
children has felt like a reckoning on their life and work.
Among
those is Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the chief
executive of a robotics and drone company. He is also the founder of GeekDad.com.
“On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine,” Mr. Anderson said of screens.
Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said.
“We
thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond
our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of
the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to
understand.”
He has five children and
12 tech rules. They include: no phones until the summer before high
school, no screens in bedrooms, network-level content blocking, no
social media until age 13, no iPads at all and screen time schedules
enforced by Google Wifi that he controls from his phone. Bad behavior?
The chil
d goes offline for 24 hours.
“I
didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to
observe the symptoms and the consequences,” Mr. Anderson said.
“This
is scar tissue talking. We’ve made every mistake in the book, and I
think we got it wrong with some of my kids,” Mr. Anderson said. “We
glimpsed into the chasm of addiction, and there were some lost years,
which we feel bad about.”
His
children attended private elementary school, where he saw the
administration introduce iPads and smart whiteboards, only to “descend
into chaos and then pull back from it all.”
This
idea that Silicon Valley parents are wary about tech is not new. The
godfathers of tech expressed these concerns years ago, and concern has
been loudest from the top.
Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said earlier this year
that he would not let his nephew join social networks. Bill Gates
banned cellphones until his children were teenagers, and Melinda Gates
wrote that she wished they had waited even longer. Steve Jobs would not let his young children near iPads.
But
in the last year, a fleet of high-profile Silicon Valley defectors have
been sounding alarms in increasingly dire terms about what these
gadgets do to the human brain. Suddenly rank-and-file Silicon Valley
workers are obsessed. No-tech homes are cropping up across the region. Nannies are being asked to sign no-phone contracts.
Those who have exposed their children to screens try to talk them out of addiction by explaining how the tech works.
John
Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners
and the former C.E.O. of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old
son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the
technology.
“I try to tell him
somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him
understand how things are made, the values that are going into things
and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And
he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”
And
there are those in tech who disagree that screens are dangerous. Jason
Toff, 32, who ran the video platform Vine and now works for Google, lets
his 3-year-old play on an iPad, which he believes is no better or worse
than a book. This opinion is unpopular enough with his fellow tech
workers that he feels there is now “a stigma.”
“One
reaction I got just yesterday was, ‘Doesn’t it worry you that all the
major tech execs are limiting screen time?’” Mr. Toff said. “And I was
like, ‘Maybe it should, but I guess I’ve always been skeptical of
norms.’ People are just scared of the unknown.”
“It’s
contrarian,” Mr. Toff said. “But I feel like I’m speaking for a lot of
parents that are afraid of speaking out loud for fear of judgment.”
He said he thinks back to his own childhood growing up watching a lot of TV. “I think I turned out O.K.,” Mr. Toff said.
Other Silicon Valley parents say there are ways to make some limited screen time slightly less toxic.
Renee
DiResta, a security researcher on the board of the Center for Humane
Tech, won’t allow passive screen time, but will allow short amounts of
time on challenging games.
She wants
her 2- and 4-year-old children to learn how to code young, so she
embraces their awareness of gadgets. But she distinguishes between these
types of screen use. Playing a building game is allowed, but watching a
YouTube video is not, unless it is as a family.
And
Frank Barbieri, a San Francisco-based executive at the start-up
PebblePost that tracks online activity to send direct mail advertising,
tries to limit his 5-year-old daughter’s screen time to Italian language
content.
“We have friends who are screen abolitionists, and we have friends who are screen liberalists,” Mr
. Barbieri said.
He
had read studies on how learning a second language at a young age is
good for the developing mind, so his daughter watches Italian-language
movies and TV shows.
“For us, honestly, me and my wife were like, ‘Where would we like to visit?’” Mr. Barbieri said.
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