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Jobs and Gates banned their kids from iPads and other devices they created
- smoldesu 3y agoYou think the Sacklers take opiates?
- goodbyesf 3y agoJust like the executives of tabocco companies didn't smoke either. Why are 'people' downvoting you? Is there a small but dedicated Sackler family fan club on this forum?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fullshark 3y agoHmm that reminds me, my kids are up, watching some idiot scream on youtube about video games. Time to go enjoy my weekend.
- trallnag 3y agoDo your your kids watch Skibidi Toilet?
- jimmytucson 3y agoThe part I struggle with is, how do I let my kids program and be creative on the computer without being online when daddy can’t program without an internet connection? How will they develop “street smarts” about being on social media without a social media account? How do I let them have the same positive experiences I had playing games without having the deeply negative ones too (I lost that breastplate that took weeks of grinding to get because the Bloodwood forest swallowed my corpse).
- blackoil 3y agoInstead of a complete blockade create an allow list. So Stack Overflow and MDN are allowed but general Internet is not. You can also keep offline copies of books, courses and videos.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoGet them an Amiga? Or maybe load up a laptop with EndlessOS?
- vb6sp6 3y agoTwo things: 1. Set the example and model positive behavior. - Stop using social media. If they see you doom scrolling they are going to doom scroll. - Stop playing mmo or games that require subscriptions or have egregious monetization. -I'm sure you have other skill you can teach them that don't require an internet connection, and if you don't, you can show them how to use the internet for educational purposes instead of watching idiots on social media. 2. Monitor and correct. Your kids are going want the same apps their friends have. Monitor their usage so you can help them get the street smarts. A lot of the apps have privacy settings so you will need to get familiar with them. iOS and android both have tools to limit the amount of time they can use the app for as well. Unfortunately this takes a lot of time and effort on your part. Try your best and good luck.
- soligern 3y agoDo they really need to develop street smarts for social media? Most people I know don’t use it or are only consumers.
- prmoustache 3y agoAnyone can program without an internet connection. You just need the local documentation.
- jejeyyy77 3y agonot practical
- jcutrell 3y agoI don’t think we should look at these people as the paragon of parenting. It’s easy to imagine that every decision they made is some blessed path, but that’s just a halo effect. It’s easy to engage in some magical thinking about Jobs or Gates as if they know something distantly ominous about screens that told them to ban their kids from them, that they kept secret from the public in order to sell the screens. I don’t think so. I think it’s pretty obvious that “too much screen time is bad” for kids, but it’s not that simple either. As a parent, I struggle to find the right balance for my kids, but I also don’t think it’s some weird sinister plot to ruin humanity, and I’m just a sheep for letting my kids veg out on YouTube and Minecraft on the weekends.
- barbariangrunge 3y agoParagons? You don’t need to be a paragon if you’re creating something you think is bad for kids and then hesitate to give it to your kids
- spondylosaurus 3y agoJobs and Gates also are(/were) extremely wealthy, which has to be a factor here. If you can afford to pay someone for in-home childcare 30+ hours a week, it's a lot easier to avoid the temptation of parking your kid in front of a screen for a few hours to give you time to eat breakfast and do laundry and take a quick breather.
- benreesman 3y agoI started working on social media in 2006. I did it for a big name for most of the 2010s. It can be a good thing, it’s easier to make it a good thing. It’s expensive as hell to make a screen more destructive than narcotics, you need PhDs and server farms and shit for that. The problem is that software companies aren’t “allowed to mature”. Sometimes you tap out the market, you aren’t doing 20% next year without pushing the envelope. Until it’s ok to win in a market and that’s enough, you can’t trust any of this shit.
- Buttons840 3y agoHow could we remove the temptation to squeeze every last dollar from a company, even if it crushes society in the process? What if the market leader in an industry was taxed such that there was no incentive to make more money than the 2nd or 3rd place company in the market? This would encourage competition, and also remove many of the perverse incentives when a single company is dominant.
- burroisolator 3y agoWhat incentive would there be to take the risk of being the first in the market? One idea I've been mulling is a progressive corporate tax. It would encourage companies to split up if there aren't massive synergies to justify the increased tax.
- lostlogin 3y agoHow would that work? Is the market a town, a city, a country or the world? What about companies that supply other companies with goods or materials? What about natural and logical monopolies (eg roads, railways, water supplies). It’s gets messy instantly.
- mcny 3y agoI have another idea. What if we could hold the board and the CEO personally liable with prison time for crimes by all the agents, contractors, employees, and so on of a company (with exception when they explicitly went against company policy to commit said crimes)? You'd think that was already the law but given that the Wells Fargo CEO avoided any prison time when management misused blacklist on employees who didn't meet their illegal quota, I am not holding my breath.
- gardenhedge 3y agoDid either of these billionaire's do much actual parenting in the same way us non-billionaires do?
- blackoil 3y agoYou need not spend a lot of time, couple of high-quality hours a day suffice. Considering billionaires have to spend 0 hrs on chores and setup, it should be entirely possible.
- gardenhedge 3y agoIs that a joke?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dubeye 3y agoEasy enough when you have a manager for your nannies
- karaterobot 3y agoPeople have been raising kids without devices for a long time. They've even been telling kids they can't have what they want. Kids have even survived not having consumer device parity with their peers, if you can believe that. They did fine for quite a while, inventing things like every great work of art, the Pythagorean theorum, airplanes... heck, even the iPad! There's no real reason it couldn't be done today, it just isn't.
- kredd 3y agoDisclaimer: I don’t have children, but have nephews of different ages. It’s way easier to say than actually do it, since completely banning your children from devices will just make them an outcast in most of the circles. When they’re hanging out in school, or after sports, they talk about about either games they’ve played or some stuff they saw online. This is one of the cases where all families should come together or some sort of weird regulation to ban children (reads: impossible to control). I can’t even judge, growing up I had unrestricted internet access in a shared family PC. Spammed WoW and Runescape for hours every day, and that’s what I talked about with friends. Now we didn’t have social media, but we still were on MSN and its derivatives all the time. There should be some sort of ramp up from no internet access to social media-esque exposure to the entire world so the kids would know what they’re dealing with. How? I don’t know.
- seydor 3y agoSo what? i dont know anything about the performance of the gates/jobs offspring
- mdanger007 3y agoIt's reasonable to assume they knew or suspected what we know about kids and too much screen time
- hluska 3y agoWacky question but does anyone know if this is a paid placement? The last three paragraphs seem to be soliciting investors for some random company I haven’t heard of, but most media declares something is paid. It’s yahoo so nothing surprises me but between the obvious sales tone and the fact an article this low quality front paged has me feeling marketed to.
- Stratoscope 3y agoYes, this is typical Benzinga.
- throw_m239339 3y agoYes, that "article" is clearly some ad spam. And the advertised business is barely related to the rest of the article.
- zod50 3y ago> Gates and his then-wife Melinda took a decisive step by limiting screen time to 45 minutes for games, with an additional hour allowed on weekends. This was in addition to the time required for homework. Bit of a misleading title. Not really banned, limited use, which should the case with consumption of any of these technologies anyways.
- mr_00ff00 3y agoI’d also argue the implication of the title is also misleading. “Look Gates and Jobs ban their kids from what they made!” Yeah and if someone brews beer but doesn’t let their kids drink it, I guess that also makes them a hypocrite?
- antran22 3y agoIMHO, the key thing that we need to do is to teach our kids how to create "things" instead of just "consuming". This is important no matter which era you are in, but the average 15th century kid didn't have that many stuffs laying around for him to just consume. This problem is suddenly in our face now and we are scrambling around to try and keep our children away from the cacophony of information, but the better thing to do is to teach kids to see computers or phones as tools, and they are there for them to wield and command. What you should actually do varies based on your kids' preferences, your experiences. You can teach them to code, to do graphic design, write stuffs. Hell, if my child feel inclined I will allow them to learn to create TikTok video, but they have to actually *create* a piece of original content, instead of regurgitating other people's ideas.
- HPsquared 3y agoIt's the Internet's big class distinction: the "creators" (0.1% with decent audience, 1% with any audience, 10% commenters) and pure lurkers/consumers (the rest).
- amelius 3y ago> IMHO, the key thing that we need to do is to teach our kids how to create "things" instead of just "consuming". This is important no matter which era you are in You say it as if kids prefer reading books over building with LEGOs :)
- antran22 3y agoI mean, that's a very specific example of looking at it. But let me try and rationalize it: - Books are not purely consumption. Rather, working through a good book is a very good creative exercise, because you are "creating" critical thinking for yourself. You still have to filter the intake of book for your kids, but imo there are very few books that have no value at all, because producing a book is costly to just put out junks on a massive scale. - On the contrary, we have to agree that nowadays there are things that give your kids unbounded consumption. Very little critical thinking can be had after 2 hours of viewing mindless Youtube video. If you restrict your kids to only good content that provoke thinking, it's alright, but there is just too much crap on Youtube that lulls them to be mindless. So, our kids are "consuming" at record high rate and "producing" at record low rate.
- gretch 3y agoIMO clickbait title > Gates and his then-wife Melinda took a decisive step by limiting screen time to 45 minutes for games, with an additional hour allowed on weekends. This was in addition to the time required for homework. "Banned" sounds like zero, but they actually got 2 hours (per day?) on weekends. That's a pretty good amount. Since when are kids allowed to have unlimited access to whatever they want? whether it be entertainment or foods. Even if there was a kid who spent too many hours reading, you'd probably be like "hey you need to go outside once in a while"
- drdec 3y ago> Even if there was a kid who spent too many hours reading, you'd probably be like "hey you need to go outside once in a while" This was my mother. So I read outside.
- mattlondon 3y agoBanned their kids from iPads ... but probably had an entire 24/7 staff on hand to look after/feed/entertain/keep-quiet their kids for them. This removes probably 90% of the time people give their kids the iPad (the "I just need 15 mins" thing).
- version_five 3y agoI have a niece and nephew ~10yo that whenever I see them are just staring at their devices. I don't want that happening to my 1yo son, I don't want him to miss out on normal life stuff either. When do and how do people normally introduce devices to their kids? So far we haven't shown him any technology, other than seeing himself on the screen when we take a selfie.
- flskafdslaf 3y agoMy oldest is turning 5, and the answer is "not yet". But then neither my wife nor I carry a smartphone.
- polishdude20 3y agoI feel like it sneaks up on you. You want your kid to be quiet for a few minutes so you say "10 mins of ipad time won't hurt". It happens slowly in every moment of weakness. Every moment you're too exhausted to take the hard way out. That said, I have no advice other than to just restrict it as often as possible or just limit how many you have at home.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoDoes Yahoo seem to heavily publish sensationalist, possibly unsubstantiated, and questionable nonsense?
- torcete 3y agoThis is like the rule of thumb of drug dealers. Don't consume the merchandise you are selling.
- julianeon 3y agoThe problem with this type of article is that Jobs and Gates have no real world limitations whatsoever. They can do anything with their kids and it won't matter. So that's not relatable to me as a person not in that position. Example: pretend Gates & Jobs decided to remove their kids from school and teach them full time to be musicians. Completely impractical for me and would not set my kids up for success financially. But for them? Easily done, and their kids would still have hundreds of millions to fall back on at maturity. Why does that matter here? Because if their kids don't have screen time, and they get bored and complain, they could hire a dozen people to entertain their kids and look after them (and while the number is probably not that high, they do, actually, use that type of solution). Whereas for me giving kids device time is a practical solution, without those resources: it keeps them entertained, while I work to make money. These kinds of articles are basically just fun trivia if the people in them have no constraints on their resources.
- ghusto 3y agoI don't have unlimited resources. I work to keep my family afloat. I don't let my kids be on the iPad so I can get on with work. It's not a practical solution, it's an _easy_ solution. I'm sorry the article makes you feel like a bad parent, but don't go into denial mode to make yourself feel better about what you're doing.
- deely3 3y agoYou have absolutely no idea about family situation or financial situation or where parent commenter live (and in which circumstances), yet you indirectly call she/him bad parent and accuse she/him of denial. And yet looks like you 100% sure that you solution of blocking access to iPads is the best solution for kids. By the way, by blocking access to iPad, in your opinion, what exactly you achieved?
- ghusto 3y agoI don't presume anything about their situation, but I know about mine, and my parents before me. My situation could have been described as difficult by most. This (and where and how I grew up) means I have little sympathy for people with excuses. I'm not saying this to put people down, but drag them up. Don't let excuses limit you. Those where I grew up who did, are still there. I my comment back and I definitely came across too strong, and think this is a sore point for me. > By the way, by blocking access to iPad, in your opinion, what exactly you achieved? Wouldn't have gotten into it because I know it's divisive without being constructive, but since you ask; I believe what we're doing to our kids as a society by allowing them consumer devices like the iPad will only be felt fully in 10-15 years from now. I think it's turning the next generation into people who can't take discomfort, quiet, or a still mind — and that's the tip of the iceberg.
- _8j50 3y agoDiscipline is the most valuable and precious thing a parent can give their child. They did good but ideally, the ban would not be a mere removal of ipads and electronics but developing trust with them and teaching them to resist the temptation and possible peer-pressure and FOMO.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- orwin 3y agoMy computers launch without XSession. And I have all the documentation about how to launch a basic X server on root. My SO found how to use my computer by 'spying' on me (it was more of a game tbh), and hopefully my future kid will too.
- number6 3y agoNice. Greeters are overrated
- Nellyz 3y ago[dead]
- Guvante 3y agoThey both had more money than God. Everyone would do different things with their children if money was literally not a problem.
- tizzy 3y agoThe only trouble I have with all of this is that I became who I am by being obsessed with my computer. I’m fairly confident many people on this site would not have become software engineers if not for playing hours of counter strike for mouse skills, mmos for touch typing and editing files and installing scripts. The computer (and the internet) is different now, but the new things are additions. We definitely can nurture the same wanderlust we had growing up. I’m getting more and more convinced the solution is to ban all short form content.
- xctr94 3y agoI empathize with the sentiment, but we grew up in a different ecosystem. (I’ve assumed your age bracket a bit judging from the comment.) The lack of online ‘low effort’ content to consume was part of why the tool itself was fascinating. “Okay, what is this terminal thing for?” is something that happens _in boredom_. Your curiosity has space to come up if you’re not constantly overloaded with content to consume.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Nellyz 3y ago[dead]
- lea900 3y ago[dead]