8 ms·

Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent

88 points by igonvalue 12y ago

norswap 12y ago
> The dangers he is referring to include exposure to harmful content like pornography, bullying from other kids, and perhaps worse of all, becoming addicted to their devices, just like their parents. I threw up a little bit while reading this. Prohibiting rather than engaging in meaningful discussion is a surefire way to cause harm (it's the same thing with alcohol, for instance); bullying is a fact of life, and learning to deal with it is a valuable life lesson. And yes, you can spend too much time on your device. Calling it addiction, with all it entails, is a step I wouldn't make. It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. Is it really sillyness? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction
  - norswap 12y ago
    You probably can get addicted to video games. You can also get addicted to about anything. The problem is that I've heard this video game addiction thing over and over and over from random people who know nothing about them. I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games. I've however personally heard of the ordeals of many young gamers whose hobby was being prejudiced against because of this silly notion.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Ok it does happen. I have a young friend, dead now, who spent 6 months playing video games and drinking beer. Nothing else, just those two things. Slept on the couch with the controller dangling from his hand. Died of liver failure. What do you call it, if not addiction?
      - meddlepal 12y ago
        Depression? Mental illness? Sorry to hear about your friend though.
        JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Lots of things lead to addictive behavior, sure.
      - 67726e 12y ago
        First off, what was he really addicted to here, the video games or the alcohol? My girlfriends father died this past Spring because he holed himself up in his apartment, drinking himself to death and also died of liver failure. He would just drink and watch TV all day. In your case, I would call the video games incidental to the alcohol addiction just like I would call the TV binging incidental to my girlfriend's father's addiction. I'm sure there is a larger mental-health component to it all, but in the end, video games were probably not to blame here. And sorry to hear about your friend. Surely you can get addicted to video games, though I have a nagging feeling that rate of addiction is lower than any of your classical addictions like alcohol or narcotics. Of course I also recall reading an article about some poor kid in Korea dying after constantly playing video games and not sleeping or the case of the parents who neglected their own infant who later died due to their supposed addiction to video games. So then you have nicely packaged stories of "that one kid" or "those parents" in your head to pull up at a moments notice and the wonderful forces of logical fallacies cause some folks to think it's an epidemic of never-before-seen proportions. The point is that more "video game addiction" is just sensationalist bullshit. My mother surely thought I was addicted to video games in my teenage years. Of course I spent maybe an hour or two playing video games and the rest programming. In fact, even after I got a job as a software engineer right out of highschool and a full-ride scholarship, she was still convinced I was addicted to "those damn games" and I'm sure half of the folks here will one day be thinking kids are addicted to their Google Glasses or whatever technology we wind up with. It's no different than parents of yore thinking Rock n' Roll was corrupting their children. Parents, as a whole, can be some really sensationalist dumbasses.
        12y ago
    - iaskwhy 12y ago
      Well, I'm not sure I do suffer from video games addiction but whenever I start playing a game I have a really hard time to stop playing it. I feel like my brain gets extremely excited and so I stop thinking about basic things like eating, drinking or going to the toilet. It's like by playing I am overwriting this basic functionality of my brain. When this happens and I don't control myself, I can play for hours and hours, usually all night long (which is something I would never do in any other situation, I love resting in a bed). It's happened before being able to continuously play for almost 24h without that basic functionality I talked about. There's always a time when I actually get in control again and decide to stop, usually by uninstalling the game right away to avoid doing it again anytime soon. I then get a really big headache/hangover. As such, I avoid doing it but it still happens once every one or two years, it depends on Sid Meier's productivity, if you know what I mean. (Yeah, this November is going to be hard on me.) I'm ok with games with a small duration, casual games with a completion time of up to 5/10 minutes. I play chess or Carcassonne sometimes and when the game ends I'm done and just fine.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      > I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games. Is that because video game addiction would remove those peoe from the group of people you come into contact with? I hadn't met anyone with a severe OCD until I started visiting MH hospitals, and then I met a bunch.
      - norswap 12y ago
        Not especially, but I only speak from my own experience, and one should be wary of samples of size one.
    - killabeez23 12y ago
      > I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games Uhhh, what? There's a reason people called EverQuest 'Evercrack'. There was/is an entire website devoted to people who were addicted to WoW (wow-detox, no idea if it's still around) and had noticeable detrimental effects in their life from it. There are most definitely games that encourage addiction, and while the vast majority can handle it responsibly there's a sizeable minority who can't (much like gambling).
- steverb 12y ago
  I doubt he really meant addiction in the classical sense. I read it more as "Worst of all, becoming one of those assholes who can't put down their device and have a conversation like a normal human being". But I also limit my children's screen time, so I'm biased.
  - Jare 12y ago
    These "assholes" we see and are concerned about are, I think, mostly adults who did NOT grow up with such devices. Our kids are taking our screens and gadgets for granted as much as we did TV (or whatever is appropriate for your age). It is a mistake to think that the effect of early exposure is going to be the same as it is for people for whom at some point it has been a fascinating novelty.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      But careful not to conclude - TV was OK for me so these gadgets are OK for kids today. That's Pollyanna thinking. Every new gadget ups the ante on frantic messaging and addictive interaction. There's nobody looking for a sensible limit - they make the gadgets and we buy them, and one day off the cliff we will go like the lemmings.
  - thathonkey 12y ago
    Whether that is what he meant or not, there is a very strong case to be made that certain forms of content consumption enabled by computers (mostly the internet but software in general) are addictive in the classical sense (I assume you mean in the medical/DSM sense).
- cpwright 12y ago
  Gambling addiction seems to be fairly common or recognized. It does not seem that it would be too far of a logical step for the same to happen with a mobile device. You can play on the thing for hours, in fact many games encourage you to play fairly constantly to advance in progress, and you get small but consistent rewards for doing so (which are ever harder to obtain). The analogy doesn't seem that far off to me. There are a certain subset of people who can easily throw themselves at things (games, hobbies, etc.) to the point where it negatively affects the rest of their life. I'm not so much a fan of calling all of them addictions, but I can see how some people feel that way.
- fecklessyouth 12y ago
  >It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. It's never going to be over, as long as young children have access to technology. HN seems to preach a perverse gospel about this subject: that you should never limit a child's technology access, because not only will nothing bad come out of, but in fact, it will make them more capable. It will turn them into developers and engineers! I'm guessing the reason HN thinks this way is because they themselves got into technology in the first place through such avenues: dicking around as a kid, sometimes with the help of their parents, sometimes contrary to their wishes. If THEY had been restricted, they wouldn't be where they are today. But this reason suffers from selection bias. While people like yourself (unless I'm misreading you. In which case, substitute the stereotypical HN user for yourself) may have used videogames and computer access as a spring board for your career, I'm willing to wager that you are minority among videogame and computer-saavy youth.* You are a bigger majority, however, on HN, and in the tech world in general, so such reasoning becomes canon without being subject to enough criticism. Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here. *I don't have any statistics on hand to support this. But since the videogame industry is as big (and growing) as it is, where are the rising mountains of developers and engineers that supposedly spring from it? Why aren't girls, who spend comparable time with technology, catching the wave as well? My little brother has been addicted to Minecraft for the past 2 years. I keep waiting for him to "discover" something else as a result of it. To get into programming, or design, or architecture, or something more constructive. Hell, even building things in Minecraft would be more productive than what he does now: go on PvP servers and throw snowballs at people--for 12 hours a day, if my parents let him. He's tried programming lessons a few times, but he usually gives up, because learning a new skill is harder than playing (even difficult) games. He lacks the trait of perseverance. And he's not going to learn it by playing videogames.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - graeme 12y ago
    >Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here. I was a gamer, and didn't become a technologist. I had no idea what a computer program was! (If that sounds silly, consider all the things you see every day without understanding) Mostly, my gaming experience was a write-off. It stunted my social development, blocked me from doing more interesting activities, and contributed very little to my well-being. I may have learned some strategic thinking from games like Starcraft, which I think has carried over to entrepreneurship. But oh, how I wish I could get that time back. Or, I wish someone had shown me a terminal and what it could do. One glimpse would have been enough.
- graeme 12y ago
  >It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. What makes you say computers are not addictive? Or video games? If we define addiction as being able to stop despite wanting to, then I've been addicted to both. I went cold turkey on video games. The computer I need for business, research and connecting to people so I've had to devise ways to minimize it's compulsive powers while still getting the upside of using them. I run an internet business. I am not a luddite. Computers are wonderfully useful machines, and I'm glad we have them. But just because something is good doesn't mean it's also bad. You can't dismiss the experience of millions with a trite statement. I once wrote an article on going without internet for a month on my personal blog, and it's by far the most popular. It even hit the top of Hacker News. From talking with friends, some seem immune to this distraction. Others clearly suffer from it. Perhaps you are one of the fortunate ones who can use computers and the internet without compulsion. That doesn't mean you can blithely ignore the testimony of others. If computers aren't compulsive, then why was this XKCD popular: http://xkcd.com/1411/ http://xkcd.com/1411/ And why did Paul Graham write these essays? http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > If we define addiction as [not] being able to stop despite wanting to, That's not a poor definition for addiction. That's a definition of a habit. Addiction tends to include "drug seeking behaviour"; and tolerance; and perhaps withdrawal too.
    - lukifer 12y ago
      In practice, an addiction is merely a habit that is not wanted, whether by the self or others. We acknowledge that gambling can be an addiction, yet an addiction to a game or to internet browsing is taken much less seriously.
      - DanBC 12y ago
        I agree that people can be addicted to games. I say this even if we use the tighter more correct definition of addiction.
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  Agreed. And calling pornographic content "harmful" without any further characterization clearly shows that the author has some deeply rooted, unjustified bias.
mootothemax 12y ago
I have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand, giving entertainment screens to children has the potential to create all kinds of bad habits. On the other, I spent hours upon hours teaching myself to program on my Atari ST, plus learning about how computers work from it, and nowadays I've made a pretty good living from my passion for IT. (That's not to say that I didn't also spend many, many hours gaming, or generally wasting time.) As with most things in life, I think we can only say that the extreme ends are unlikely to be good, and the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  But there's a difference here. Tablets and similar items, including Gameboys and the like, are consumption devices. Playing games, watching Netflix, reading Facebook. It's all passive entertainment. Teaching yourself to code on a home PC, that's way different.
staunch 12y ago
What kind of hack tries to peddle Steve Jobs' memory while explaining his child rearing philosophy based on a single comment in a phone call to someone he didn't know? A NY Times hack.
ceejayoz 12y ago
I don't see Angry Birds being much different than doing a puzzle on the floor, and my daughter has taught herself to read at a third grade level at age 5 by watching YouTube phonics videos and the like (along with picking up sign language). "Screen time" on devices is different from screen time on TVs.
- dzhiurgis 12y ago
  > "Screen time" on devices is different from screen time on TVs. It can go both ways. You can either grow up as psychopath programmer or shallow creative. Either way, I bet that real social interaction is best for kids. Obviously the key is steering them in the right direction. The challenge is doing in a way, that they do not notice being managed.
- slashedzero 12y ago
  > I don't see Angry Birds being much different than doing a puzzle on the floor, You're missing a huge part of tactile development going on when she's playing a puzzle on the floor vs. touching a flat surface. The fine motor skills involved with physically handling a puzzle will come in handy later, not to mention that there is an element of combining tactile response with mental strategy missing on the iPad.
  - chillingeffect 12y ago
    Yup, plus the style of recall for a puzzle is tree-like. The puzzle is a "natural" form, that encourages "natural" skills. Whereas Angry Birds is an addictive game pattern. Any skills it "teaches" are incidental to its commercial goals. My point is invalid if the whole entire world turns into a giant commercialized strip mall and recall no longer becomes a valued skill. :<
    - ceejayoz 12y ago
      Angry Birds is just a single example (and one that has him interested in the physical versions). It's hardly the only option - plenty of creative puzzle apps, reading apps, etc. are available and a lot of them are quite good. That said, I'd say Angry Birds has given my son a lot of practice in perseverance, problem solving, and not getting frustrated when something doesn't work first time.
davidw 12y ago
> Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter and Medium, and his wife, Sara Williams, said that in lieu of iPads, their two young boys have hundreds of books (yes, physical ones) that they can pick up and read anytime. One of the things that pains me a great deal about buying books for the Kindle is that they won't be sitting around the house for my kids to look at one day. However, given what it costs to order a physical book in English over here in Italy, Kindle books make way more sense economically.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
Sucks to be their kids. Being denied of something other kids take for granted should surely ruin child's esteem.
selmnoo 12y ago
I would not so easily put so much stock or value in the way Steve Jobs did things as a parent or even as a human being. This is the guy who unfortunately refused to pay child support (while being more than able to) as well as refuse to acknowledge the existence of his daughter (ignoring all her contact efforts and so on). And then there's that whole thing with corruption at unholy levels and treating his employees and people in general like crap.
- kar-kub 12y ago
  Did you read the article? Mentioning Jobs is just for catchy title. There are few quotes from other tech-related people who also limit smartphones and tablets for their children.
- archildress 12y ago
  I don't think it's a designed to be a ringing endorsement of Jobs as a parent or person; rather his views on one aspect of parenting that could surprise many people.
- graeme 12y ago
  This comment really shouldn't be at the top. The author appears to have read only the headline, and has taken the opportunity to turn the thread into a discussion of Steve Jobs. The topic of the article was screen time for children. It quoted examples of many technologists who limit screen time. Steve Jobs was just "click bait". At HN, we should be beyond merely commenting on headlines. I would far prefer the top comment to be a discussion of the merits of the article and the issues raised.
  - idlewords 12y ago
    Indeed! I dropped my monocle into my bone china cup when I saw that this was the top comment. There are standards to maintain here at Hacker Towers.
    - enroxorz 12y ago
      Bully! snorts cocaine off of a silver plate held my a kangaroo servent-man
sjtrny 12y ago
> The dangers he is referring to include exposure to harmful content like pornography The linked article in the tele doesn't even mention porn. Furthermore since when is it harmful to see people participating in sex acts? What a joke.
- allegory 12y ago
  Two girls, one cup. That hurts the stomach muscles... Other than that it isn't :)
- kyberias 12y ago
  Without commenting whether it is harmful or not, showing pornography to children is considered sexual abuse by law in many countries.
- chillingeffect 12y ago
  > when is it harmful to see people participating in sex acts? I'm no conservative, but kids copy what they see, even before they understand language and responsibility. There are no absolutes, but it's wise to moderate showing sex acts to children until it's likely they won't repeat it responsibly.
harryf 12y ago
What I've seen with my kids (under 10) is when they get an hour of phone or tablet, after they have to give it up again, they become very aggressive and behave in a manner which is comparable to someone with a chemical addiction. That usually lasts 10-15 minutes then they calm down and start acting like themselves again. Talking to other parents they report similar behavior There's something about shifting your attention from one "space" to "another" ( game vs. real life ) that kids under 10 seem to particularly struggle with. And as a parent that they become so aggressive when making that context switch tells me there's something I need to watch closely and control, despite the fact that it's great to have my kids silently occupied and leaving me to get stuff done.
- rayiner 12y ago
  > What I've seen with my kids (under 10) is when they get an hour of phone or tablet, after they have to give it up again, they become very aggressive and behave in a manner which is comparable to someone with a chemical addiction. My kid does that too. She also flips and starts screaming if you try to cut up her food instead of letting her try to eat pizza with a fork. I don't think it means what you think it does.
  - fsloth 12y ago
    Well. My kid started throwing chairs when it was time to do something else than play on the computer. He does not usually do that. I would suggest contexts vary. As a parent I'm not as concerned that the games would somehow "eat their brains". I'm more concerned about the noticeable negative long term effects too much screen time have on their behaviour. Whatever the underpinning psychological and longterm effects may be I mostly become annoyed at the poor behaviour. Social dynamics vary, of course. With our children too much screen time means more scream time.
- ensignavenger 12y ago
  Interesting. I have a two year old and he will often get my 3DS down and play Zelda for 5-10 minutes. He puts it down after that and show none of the behavior you observe. He may just be too young to have a long enough attention span to care. However- he gets very angry when he has to come inside- the longer he is allowed to play outside, the more angry he gets.
albeva 12y ago
"harmful content like pornography" LOL. Think of the Children! :D
michaelochurch 12y ago
Steve Jobs is a terrible example. He gets a lot of love for being a Buddhist (which is, of the world religions, the one I am closest to) and having, for a businessman, a 99th-percentile design sense. In actuality, he was a huge dickhead. I could overlook his personal issues (you'll never get to the bottom of a stranger's personal life, to try is useless gossip) but the collusion with Eric Schmidt cemented my contempt for the man, co-religionist or no. I wish he had lived two years more to see that his legacy would be a great crime, not the iPhone. When you're 13, tech is fun. Dragon Warrior! Final Fantasy! Tales of Phantasia! I'm sure that anyone born before 1965 or after 1990 is going to be taking me on faith, but these games were awesome. When you're 19, tech is even more fun because you actually learn how things work and discover mind-bending ways of solving problems. Assembly code! C! Lisps! Machine learning! Haskell! When you're 25, tech is important because it holds the power to solve some of humanity's most pressing issues. We may get to a point where we can prolong life as long as people wish at 1/100 the cost of the current expense-sink we call "health care". We may avert a global warming catastrophe with clean nuclear power (thorium fission? fusion?) We might escape this disgusting arrangement in which one nation being rich requires others to be poor, and arrive at a post-scarcity world in the next few decades. If any of this happens, technology will play a key role. After 30, you realize that while technology still can be fun and holds promise and importance, the tech industry is run by megalomaniac 21st-century robber barons with the ethical fibre of Zombie Hitler's taint sweat. Technology becomes just work, for most people. When they see their kids addicted to lit screens and possibly falling into the in-app purchase suckholes that they spent months of their life optimizing for addictiveness and "whale" recruiting, well... they have reasons to be concerned. Stay away from that shit! I helped cook it!
- yuhong 12y ago
  On Eric Schmidt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    I'm curious what point you're trying to make by linking my comment, because I don't think it means what you think it means. I actually really enjoyed working at Google when Eric was CEO, and I can respect Larry's Google as well even though I choose not to work there. My comment was intended to illustrate the difference in culture under the two CEOs, as well as the choices they have to make in response to the outside environment, and not as a value judgment on those choices.
deleted 12y ago
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kohanz 12y ago
Yet these tech C.E.O.’s seem to know something that the rest of us don’t. Even if I might agree with this parenting style. I find the perspective here to a bit a condescending - implying that because tech CEO's are doing it, it must be something that others "don't know". What does the qualification of tech CEO have anything to do with parenting?!
- corin_ 12y ago
  Certainly sounds condescending, but there's is a valid point if they worded it better - the CEOs may not know better but they think they do, in that they're the exception to the rule of "if you can both afford and understand <phones, tablets, TVs, etc.>, your kids will enjoy that technology" (obviously not the only exception, but they're an exception). So unless you're also that sort of person, they either know something the rest of us don't or they at least have an opinion on the subject that the rest of us don't.
  - kohanz 12y ago
    I disagree with the premise that this line of thinking is somehow exclusive or original to tech CEO's though. At least in my own experience, most parents I know can afford tech, but limit it in some way. Unfettered access to tech for young children seems to be the exception, rather than the rule, in my experience.
rayiner 12y ago
Most articles on how to raise your kids are crap, in the same vein as all those articles that told you salt would raise your blood pressure or eggs would raise your cholesterol levels. I didn't realize until I became one that parents are faced with a mountain of old wives tales, superstitions, luddism, etc, when it comes to their kids. We're 'high tech' parents, and it works great. Our toddler has a 64GB iPad, and uses it to watch Doc McStuffins, Veggie Tales, etc. Our generation grew up in front of the TV, and the iPad is way better. It let's us control her exposure to content and pernicious advertising, for example.
fredrikcarno 12y ago
Interesting thread.. I've got twin boys that now are 2 years old. We made the descision to get rid of the tv, computers and smart phones when they were born. Now they are not that interested if you show them a tablet, they want to go outside and play instead. A extra upside is the amount of extra time you get each day
rokhayakebe 12y ago
The sad part of this conversation is adults should be first to follow this advice. Have you been out in the mall lately? How about a restaurant? How about just walking the streets? Un()Believable, yet.
mncolinlee 12y ago
I had limited screen time as a child, but I had up to two hours per day on our Radio Shack TRS-80. This meant I was copying and then writing my own BASIC programs at age six. I wonder how the situation would be different if iPads and computers nowadays didn't spoon feed our children an unlimited amount of instant gratification-- entertainment superior to what they could likely create themselves through play and creativity.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
For someone who built his fame and fortune on technology, Steve Jobs was surprisingly anti-tech and anti-learning in many ways. Another example of this is that he didn't trust traditional medicine and he decided to fight his then benign cancer with some unproven fruit based diet. One year later, his cancer had progressed to the point of being terminal and even traditional medicine could no longer save him then.
jroseattle 12y ago
We took a different approach from the parents in the article to technology with our kids, and I think it was the right thing (for us). My goals were to provide good exposure so that our kids would view technology in a healthy way: tools to help them create and learn, devices that can bring the world to them, and a healthy understanding that there are dangers beyond our walls. I wanted them to be technologically astute, instead of taking an aversion or negative view. I wanted them to burn through the "magical" effect of tech early on. We put desktop PCs in our kids' rooms when they were in 3rd grade (twins). I completely controlled any outbound access they had (they knew nothing about web browsers, so I removed those from access). And while we limited their unattended screen time, I also spent a good amount of time introducing them to keyboards, mice, and applications. After a few months, both were up and going with Minecraft. To keep things in the walls, I setup a private Minecraft server to which they attached in the house so they could play with each other. They've grown into 8th graders, and the desktop PCs have been replaced with Macbooks, iPhones and Kindles. Sure, they use Snapchat and Instagram with their friends, but by far they use the camera for videos and pictures. Those things end up in iMovie or slideshows that they put together and distribute over my Youtube account. They are voracious readers, pushing content through their kindle at an alarming rate. These are now fundamental devices they use in/for school projects and homework. They're good at it, to the point that they often help their friends with troubleshooting. As I said, our approach has worked for us. It has been a lot of work as well, ensuring the kids aren't LatchKey 2.0, where the TV has been replaced by something you can hold in your hands. We had to be committed to being attentive and watchful, but we felt that was an investment in time that would help our kids succeed in an increasingly connected world.
- prawks 12y ago
  This is the approach I've always had in mind to take with my future children. I hope they can have similarly successful results. Any big learnings you found during the process which you didn't anticipate starting out? I'm always interested in different perspectives and experiences in raising children.
  - jroseattle 12y ago
    > Any big learnings you found during the process which you didn't anticipate starting out? Always big learnings when it comes to rearing children. Limiting in scope to my previous comment: - I started with the "basics", which had nothing to do with browsing the internet (which came later.) Ease-of-use in services such as Google is a nightmare when it comes to providing a safe environment for your kids to explore. I think making the online world one of the latter components of exposure is best; otherwise, kids can get lost really fast in it's expanse. For anyone else following this approach, I'd say "keep it local". - Kids are much more adept at technical adoption than adults. It speeds up conversations very quickly. For anyone else following this approach, I'd say be prepared to see what's coming. It will happen much faster than you might expect.
jayvanguard 12y ago
Re: CEOs tending to limit their kids "screen time" more than the average parent. A more likely explanation is that CEOs don't see much of their children so they try to exercise control when they are around. Likewise their kids are probably more prone to being out of control since they are less supervised. That or the article is just based on his confirmation bias.

88 points by igonvalue 12y ago

> The dangers he is referring to include exposure to harmful content like pornography, bullying from other kids, and perhaps worse of all, becoming addicted to their devices, just like their parents. I threw up a little bit while reading this. Prohibiting rather than engaging in meaningful discussion is a surefire way to cause harm (it's the same thing with alcohol, for instance); bullying is a fact of life, and learning to deal with it is a valuable life lesson. And yes, you can spend too much time on your device. Calling it addiction, with all it entails, is a step I wouldn't make. It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not.

jacquesm 12y ago
> I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. Is it really sillyness? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction
- norswap 12y ago
  You probably can get addicted to video games. You can also get addicted to about anything. The problem is that I've heard this video game addiction thing over and over and over from random people who know nothing about them. I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games. I've however personally heard of the ordeals of many young gamers whose hobby was being prejudiced against because of this silly notion.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Ok it does happen. I have a young friend, dead now, who spent 6 months playing video games and drinking beer. Nothing else, just those two things. Slept on the couch with the controller dangling from his hand. Died of liver failure. What do you call it, if not addiction?
    - meddlepal 12y ago
      Depression? Mental illness? Sorry to hear about your friend though.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Lots of things lead to addictive behavior, sure.
    - 67726e 12y ago
      First off, what was he really addicted to here, the video games or the alcohol? My girlfriends father died this past Spring because he holed himself up in his apartment, drinking himself to death and also died of liver failure. He would just drink and watch TV all day. In your case, I would call the video games incidental to the alcohol addiction just like I would call the TV binging incidental to my girlfriend's father's addiction. I'm sure there is a larger mental-health component to it all, but in the end, video games were probably not to blame here. And sorry to hear about your friend. Surely you can get addicted to video games, though I have a nagging feeling that rate of addiction is lower than any of your classical addictions like alcohol or narcotics. Of course I also recall reading an article about some poor kid in Korea dying after constantly playing video games and not sleeping or the case of the parents who neglected their own infant who later died due to their supposed addiction to video games. So then you have nicely packaged stories of "that one kid" or "those parents" in your head to pull up at a moments notice and the wonderful forces of logical fallacies cause some folks to think it's an epidemic of never-before-seen proportions. The point is that more "video game addiction" is just sensationalist bullshit. My mother surely thought I was addicted to video games in my teenage years. Of course I spent maybe an hour or two playing video games and the rest programming. In fact, even after I got a job as a software engineer right out of highschool and a full-ride scholarship, she was still convinced I was addicted to "those damn games" and I'm sure half of the folks here will one day be thinking kids are addicted to their Google Glasses or whatever technology we wind up with. It's no different than parents of yore thinking Rock n' Roll was corrupting their children. Parents, as a whole, can be some really sensationalist dumbasses.
      - 12y ago
  - iaskwhy 12y ago
    Well, I'm not sure I do suffer from video games addiction but whenever I start playing a game I have a really hard time to stop playing it. I feel like my brain gets extremely excited and so I stop thinking about basic things like eating, drinking or going to the toilet. It's like by playing I am overwriting this basic functionality of my brain. When this happens and I don't control myself, I can play for hours and hours, usually all night long (which is something I would never do in any other situation, I love resting in a bed). It's happened before being able to continuously play for almost 24h without that basic functionality I talked about. There's always a time when I actually get in control again and decide to stop, usually by uninstalling the game right away to avoid doing it again anytime soon. I then get a really big headache/hangover. As such, I avoid doing it but it still happens once every one or two years, it depends on Sid Meier's productivity, if you know what I mean. (Yeah, this November is going to be hard on me.) I'm ok with games with a small duration, casual games with a completion time of up to 5/10 minutes. I play chess or Carcassonne sometimes and when the game ends I'm done and just fine.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games. Is that because video game addiction would remove those peoe from the group of people you come into contact with? I hadn't met anyone with a severe OCD until I started visiting MH hospitals, and then I met a bunch.
    - norswap 12y ago
      Not especially, but I only speak from my own experience, and one should be wary of samples of size one.
  - killabeez23 12y ago
    > I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games Uhhh, what? There's a reason people called EverQuest 'Evercrack'. There was/is an entire website devoted to people who were addicted to WoW (wow-detox, no idea if it's still around) and had noticeable detrimental effects in their life from it. There are most definitely games that encourage addiction, and while the vast majority can handle it responsibly there's a sizeable minority who can't (much like gambling).
steverb 12y ago
I doubt he really meant addiction in the classical sense. I read it more as "Worst of all, becoming one of those assholes who can't put down their device and have a conversation like a normal human being". But I also limit my children's screen time, so I'm biased.
- Jare 12y ago
  These "assholes" we see and are concerned about are, I think, mostly adults who did NOT grow up with such devices. Our kids are taking our screens and gadgets for granted as much as we did TV (or whatever is appropriate for your age). It is a mistake to think that the effect of early exposure is going to be the same as it is for people for whom at some point it has been a fascinating novelty.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    But careful not to conclude - TV was OK for me so these gadgets are OK for kids today. That's Pollyanna thinking. Every new gadget ups the ante on frantic messaging and addictive interaction. There's nobody looking for a sensible limit - they make the gadgets and we buy them, and one day off the cliff we will go like the lemmings.
- thathonkey 12y ago
  Whether that is what he meant or not, there is a very strong case to be made that certain forms of content consumption enabled by computers (mostly the internet but software in general) are addictive in the classical sense (I assume you mean in the medical/DSM sense).
cpwright 12y ago
Gambling addiction seems to be fairly common or recognized. It does not seem that it would be too far of a logical step for the same to happen with a mobile device. You can play on the thing for hours, in fact many games encourage you to play fairly constantly to advance in progress, and you get small but consistent rewards for doing so (which are ever harder to obtain). The analogy doesn't seem that far off to me. There are a certain subset of people who can easily throw themselves at things (games, hobbies, etc.) to the point where it negatively affects the rest of their life. I'm not so much a fan of calling all of them addictions, but I can see how some people feel that way.
fecklessyouth 12y ago
>It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. It's never going to be over, as long as young children have access to technology. HN seems to preach a perverse gospel about this subject: that you should never limit a child's technology access, because not only will nothing bad come out of, but in fact, it will make them more capable. It will turn them into developers and engineers! I'm guessing the reason HN thinks this way is because they themselves got into technology in the first place through such avenues: dicking around as a kid, sometimes with the help of their parents, sometimes contrary to their wishes. If THEY had been restricted, they wouldn't be where they are today. But this reason suffers from selection bias. While people like yourself (unless I'm misreading you. In which case, substitute the stereotypical HN user for yourself) may have used videogames and computer access as a spring board for your career, I'm willing to wager that you are minority among videogame and computer-saavy youth.* You are a bigger majority, however, on HN, and in the tech world in general, so such reasoning becomes canon without being subject to enough criticism. Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here. *I don't have any statistics on hand to support this. But since the videogame industry is as big (and growing) as it is, where are the rising mountains of developers and engineers that supposedly spring from it? Why aren't girls, who spend comparable time with technology, catching the wave as well? My little brother has been addicted to Minecraft for the past 2 years. I keep waiting for him to "discover" something else as a result of it. To get into programming, or design, or architecture, or something more constructive. Hell, even building things in Minecraft would be more productive than what he does now: go on PvP servers and throw snowballs at people--for 12 hours a day, if my parents let him. He's tried programming lessons a few times, but he usually gives up, because learning a new skill is harder than playing (even difficult) games. He lacks the trait of perseverance. And he's not going to learn it by playing videogames.
- deleted 12y ago
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- graeme 12y ago
  >Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here. I was a gamer, and didn't become a technologist. I had no idea what a computer program was! (If that sounds silly, consider all the things you see every day without understanding) Mostly, my gaming experience was a write-off. It stunted my social development, blocked me from doing more interesting activities, and contributed very little to my well-being. I may have learned some strategic thinking from games like Starcraft, which I think has carried over to entrepreneurship. But oh, how I wish I could get that time back. Or, I wish someone had shown me a terminal and what it could do. One glimpse would have been enough.
graeme 12y ago
>It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. What makes you say computers are not addictive? Or video games? If we define addiction as being able to stop despite wanting to, then I've been addicted to both. I went cold turkey on video games. The computer I need for business, research and connecting to people so I've had to devise ways to minimize it's compulsive powers while still getting the upside of using them. I run an internet business. I am not a luddite. Computers are wonderfully useful machines, and I'm glad we have them. But just because something is good doesn't mean it's also bad. You can't dismiss the experience of millions with a trite statement. I once wrote an article on going without internet for a month on my personal blog, and it's by far the most popular. It even hit the top of Hacker News. From talking with friends, some seem immune to this distraction. Others clearly suffer from it. Perhaps you are one of the fortunate ones who can use computers and the internet without compulsion. That doesn't mean you can blithely ignore the testimony of others. If computers aren't compulsive, then why was this XKCD popular: http://xkcd.com/1411/ http://xkcd.com/1411/ And why did Paul Graham write these essays? http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
- DanBC 12y ago
  > If we define addiction as [not] being able to stop despite wanting to, That's not a poor definition for addiction. That's a definition of a habit. Addiction tends to include "drug seeking behaviour"; and tolerance; and perhaps withdrawal too.
  - lukifer 12y ago
    In practice, an addiction is merely a habit that is not wanted, whether by the self or others. We acknowledge that gambling can be an addiction, yet an addiction to a game or to internet browsing is taken much less seriously.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      I agree that people can be addicted to games. I say this even if we use the tighter more correct definition of addiction.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
Agreed. And calling pornographic content "harmful" without any further characterization clearly shows that the author has some deeply rooted, unjustified bias.

mootothemax 12y ago

I have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand, giving entertainment screens to children has the potential to create all kinds of bad habits. On the other, I spent hours upon hours teaching myself to program on my Atari ST, plus learning about how computers work from it, and nowadays I've made a pretty good living from my passion for IT. (That's not to say that I didn't also spend many, many hours gaming, or generally wasting time.) As with most things in life, I think we can only say that the extreme ends are unlikely to be good, and the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

joezydeco 12y ago
But there's a difference here. Tablets and similar items, including Gameboys and the like, are consumption devices. Playing games, watching Netflix, reading Facebook. It's all passive entertainment. Teaching yourself to code on a home PC, that's way different.

staunch 12y ago

What kind of hack tries to peddle Steve Jobs' memory while explaining his child rearing philosophy based on a single comment in a phone call to someone he didn't know? A NY Times hack.

ceejayoz 12y ago

I don't see Angry Birds being much different than doing a puzzle on the floor, and my daughter has taught herself to read at a third grade level at age 5 by watching YouTube phonics videos and the like (along with picking up sign language). "Screen time" on devices is different from screen time on TVs.

dzhiurgis 12y ago
> "Screen time" on devices is different from screen time on TVs. It can go both ways. You can either grow up as psychopath programmer or shallow creative. Either way, I bet that real social interaction is best for kids. Obviously the key is steering them in the right direction. The challenge is doing in a way, that they do not notice being managed.
slashedzero 12y ago
> I don't see Angry Birds being much different than doing a puzzle on the floor, You're missing a huge part of tactile development going on when she's playing a puzzle on the floor vs. touching a flat surface. The fine motor skills involved with physically handling a puzzle will come in handy later, not to mention that there is an element of combining tactile response with mental strategy missing on the iPad.
- chillingeffect 12y ago
  Yup, plus the style of recall for a puzzle is tree-like. The puzzle is a "natural" form, that encourages "natural" skills. Whereas Angry Birds is an addictive game pattern. Any skills it "teaches" are incidental to its commercial goals. My point is invalid if the whole entire world turns into a giant commercialized strip mall and recall no longer becomes a valued skill. :<
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    Angry Birds is just a single example (and one that has him interested in the physical versions). It's hardly the only option - plenty of creative puzzle apps, reading apps, etc. are available and a lot of them are quite good. That said, I'd say Angry Birds has given my son a lot of practice in perseverance, problem solving, and not getting frustrated when something doesn't work first time.

davidw 12y ago

> Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter and Medium, and his wife, Sara Williams, said that in lieu of iPads, their two young boys have hundreds of books (yes, physical ones) that they can pick up and read anytime. One of the things that pains me a great deal about buying books for the Kindle is that they won't be sitting around the house for my kids to look at one day. However, given what it costs to order a physical book in English over here in Italy, Kindle books make way more sense economically.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

Sucks to be their kids. Being denied of something other kids take for granted should surely ruin child's esteem.

selmnoo 12y ago

I would not so easily put so much stock or value in the way Steve Jobs did things as a parent or even as a human being. This is the guy who unfortunately refused to pay child support (while being more than able to) as well as refuse to acknowledge the existence of his daughter (ignoring all her contact efforts and so on). And then there's that whole thing with corruption at unholy levels and treating his employees and people in general like crap.

kar-kub 12y ago
Did you read the article? Mentioning Jobs is just for catchy title. There are few quotes from other tech-related people who also limit smartphones and tablets for their children.
archildress 12y ago
I don't think it's a designed to be a ringing endorsement of Jobs as a parent or person; rather his views on one aspect of parenting that could surprise many people.
graeme 12y ago
This comment really shouldn't be at the top. The author appears to have read only the headline, and has taken the opportunity to turn the thread into a discussion of Steve Jobs. The topic of the article was screen time for children. It quoted examples of many technologists who limit screen time. Steve Jobs was just "click bait". At HN, we should be beyond merely commenting on headlines. I would far prefer the top comment to be a discussion of the merits of the article and the issues raised.
- idlewords 12y ago
  Indeed! I dropped my monocle into my bone china cup when I saw that this was the top comment. There are standards to maintain here at Hacker Towers.
  - enroxorz 12y ago
    Bully! snorts cocaine off of a silver plate held my a kangaroo servent-man

sjtrny 12y ago

> The dangers he is referring to include exposure to harmful content like pornography The linked article in the tele doesn't even mention porn. Furthermore since when is it harmful to see people participating in sex acts? What a joke.

allegory 12y ago
Two girls, one cup. That hurts the stomach muscles... Other than that it isn't :)
kyberias 12y ago
Without commenting whether it is harmful or not, showing pornography to children is considered sexual abuse by law in many countries.
chillingeffect 12y ago
> when is it harmful to see people participating in sex acts? I'm no conservative, but kids copy what they see, even before they understand language and responsibility. There are no absolutes, but it's wise to moderate showing sex acts to children until it's likely they won't repeat it responsibly.

harryf 12y ago

What I've seen with my kids (under 10) is when they get an hour of phone or tablet, after they have to give it up again, they become very aggressive and behave in a manner which is comparable to someone with a chemical addiction. That usually lasts 10-15 minutes then they calm down and start acting like themselves again. Talking to other parents they report similar behavior There's something about shifting your attention from one "space" to "another" ( game vs. real life ) that kids under 10 seem to particularly struggle with. And as a parent that they become so aggressive when making that context switch tells me there's something I need to watch closely and control, despite the fact that it's great to have my kids silently occupied and leaving me to get stuff done.

rayiner 12y ago
> What I've seen with my kids (under 10) is when they get an hour of phone or tablet, after they have to give it up again, they become very aggressive and behave in a manner which is comparable to someone with a chemical addiction. My kid does that too. She also flips and starts screaming if you try to cut up her food instead of letting her try to eat pizza with a fork. I don't think it means what you think it does.
- fsloth 12y ago
  Well. My kid started throwing chairs when it was time to do something else than play on the computer. He does not usually do that. I would suggest contexts vary. As a parent I'm not as concerned that the games would somehow "eat their brains". I'm more concerned about the noticeable negative long term effects too much screen time have on their behaviour. Whatever the underpinning psychological and longterm effects may be I mostly become annoyed at the poor behaviour. Social dynamics vary, of course. With our children too much screen time means more scream time.
ensignavenger 12y ago
Interesting. I have a two year old and he will often get my 3DS down and play Zelda for 5-10 minutes. He puts it down after that and show none of the behavior you observe. He may just be too young to have a long enough attention span to care. However- he gets very angry when he has to come inside- the longer he is allowed to play outside, the more angry he gets.

albeva 12y ago

"harmful content like pornography" LOL. Think of the Children! :D

michaelochurch 12y ago

Steve Jobs is a terrible example. He gets a lot of love for being a Buddhist (which is, of the world religions, the one I am closest to) and having, for a businessman, a 99th-percentile design sense. In actuality, he was a huge dickhead. I could overlook his personal issues (you'll never get to the bottom of a stranger's personal life, to try is useless gossip) but the collusion with Eric Schmidt cemented my contempt for the man, co-religionist or no. I wish he had lived two years more to see that his legacy would be a great crime, not the iPhone. When you're 13, tech is fun. Dragon Warrior! Final Fantasy! Tales of Phantasia! I'm sure that anyone born before 1965 or after 1990 is going to be taking me on faith, but these games were awesome. When you're 19, tech is even more fun because you actually learn how things work and discover mind-bending ways of solving problems. Assembly code! C! Lisps! Machine learning! Haskell! When you're 25, tech is important because it holds the power to solve some of humanity's most pressing issues. We may get to a point where we can prolong life as long as people wish at 1/100 the cost of the current expense-sink we call "health care". We may avert a global warming catastrophe with clean nuclear power (thorium fission? fusion?) We might escape this disgusting arrangement in which one nation being rich requires others to be poor, and arrive at a post-scarcity world in the next few decades. If any of this happens, technology will play a key role. After 30, you realize that while technology still can be fun and holds promise and importance, the tech industry is run by megalomaniac 21st-century robber barons with the ethical fibre of Zombie Hitler's taint sweat. Technology becomes just work, for most people. When they see their kids addicted to lit screens and possibly falling into the in-app purchase suckholes that they spent months of their life optimizing for addictiveness and "whale" recruiting, well... they have reasons to be concerned. Stay away from that shit! I helped cook it!

yuhong 12y ago
On Eric Schmidt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005
- nostrademons 12y ago
  I'm curious what point you're trying to make by linking my comment, because I don't think it means what you think it means. I actually really enjoyed working at Google when Eric was CEO, and I can respect Larry's Google as well even though I choose not to work there. My comment was intended to illustrate the difference in culture under the two CEOs, as well as the choices they have to make in response to the outside environment, and not as a value judgment on those choices.

deleted 12y ago

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kohanz 12y ago

Yet these tech C.E.O.’s seem to know something that the rest of us don’t. Even if I might agree with this parenting style. I find the perspective here to a bit a condescending - implying that because tech CEO's are doing it, it must be something that others "don't know". What does the qualification of tech CEO have anything to do with parenting?!

corin_ 12y ago
Certainly sounds condescending, but there's is a valid point if they worded it better - the CEOs may not know better but they think they do, in that they're the exception to the rule of "if you can both afford and understand <phones, tablets, TVs, etc.>, your kids will enjoy that technology" (obviously not the only exception, but they're an exception). So unless you're also that sort of person, they either know something the rest of us don't or they at least have an opinion on the subject that the rest of us don't.
- kohanz 12y ago
  I disagree with the premise that this line of thinking is somehow exclusive or original to tech CEO's though. At least in my own experience, most parents I know can afford tech, but limit it in some way. Unfettered access to tech for young children seems to be the exception, rather than the rule, in my experience.

rayiner 12y ago

Most articles on how to raise your kids are crap, in the same vein as all those articles that told you salt would raise your blood pressure or eggs would raise your cholesterol levels. I didn't realize until I became one that parents are faced with a mountain of old wives tales, superstitions, luddism, etc, when it comes to their kids. We're 'high tech' parents, and it works great. Our toddler has a 64GB iPad, and uses it to watch Doc McStuffins, Veggie Tales, etc. Our generation grew up in front of the TV, and the iPad is way better. It let's us control her exposure to content and pernicious advertising, for example.

fredrikcarno 12y ago

Interesting thread.. I've got twin boys that now are 2 years old. We made the descision to get rid of the tv, computers and smart phones when they were born. Now they are not that interested if you show them a tablet, they want to go outside and play instead. A extra upside is the amount of extra time you get each day

rokhayakebe 12y ago

The sad part of this conversation is adults should be first to follow this advice. Have you been out in the mall lately? How about a restaurant? How about just walking the streets? Un()Believable, yet.

mncolinlee 12y ago

I had limited screen time as a child, but I had up to two hours per day on our Radio Shack TRS-80. This meant I was copying and then writing my own BASIC programs at age six. I wonder how the situation would be different if iPads and computers nowadays didn't spoon feed our children an unlimited amount of instant gratification-- entertainment superior to what they could likely create themselves through play and creativity.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

For someone who built his fame and fortune on technology, Steve Jobs was surprisingly anti-tech and anti-learning in many ways. Another example of this is that he didn't trust traditional medicine and he decided to fight his then benign cancer with some unproven fruit based diet. One year later, his cancer had progressed to the point of being terminal and even traditional medicine could no longer save him then.

jroseattle 12y ago

We took a different approach from the parents in the article to technology with our kids, and I think it was the right thing (for us). My goals were to provide good exposure so that our kids would view technology in a healthy way: tools to help them create and learn, devices that can bring the world to them, and a healthy understanding that there are dangers beyond our walls. I wanted them to be technologically astute, instead of taking an aversion or negative view. I wanted them to burn through the "magical" effect of tech early on. We put desktop PCs in our kids' rooms when they were in 3rd grade (twins). I completely controlled any outbound access they had (they knew nothing about web browsers, so I removed those from access). And while we limited their unattended screen time, I also spent a good amount of time introducing them to keyboards, mice, and applications. After a few months, both were up and going with Minecraft. To keep things in the walls, I setup a private Minecraft server to which they attached in the house so they could play with each other. They've grown into 8th graders, and the desktop PCs have been replaced with Macbooks, iPhones and Kindles. Sure, they use Snapchat and Instagram with their friends, but by far they use the camera for videos and pictures. Those things end up in iMovie or slideshows that they put together and distribute over my Youtube account. They are voracious readers, pushing content through their kindle at an alarming rate. These are now fundamental devices they use in/for school projects and homework. They're good at it, to the point that they often help their friends with troubleshooting. As I said, our approach has worked for us. It has been a lot of work as well, ensuring the kids aren't LatchKey 2.0, where the TV has been replaced by something you can hold in your hands. We had to be committed to being attentive and watchful, but we felt that was an investment in time that would help our kids succeed in an increasingly connected world.

prawks 12y ago
This is the approach I've always had in mind to take with my future children. I hope they can have similarly successful results. Any big learnings you found during the process which you didn't anticipate starting out? I'm always interested in different perspectives and experiences in raising children.
- jroseattle 12y ago
  > Any big learnings you found during the process which you didn't anticipate starting out? Always big learnings when it comes to rearing children. Limiting in scope to my previous comment: - I started with the "basics", which had nothing to do with browsing the internet (which came later.) Ease-of-use in services such as Google is a nightmare when it comes to providing a safe environment for your kids to explore. I think making the online world one of the latter components of exposure is best; otherwise, kids can get lost really fast in it's expanse. For anyone else following this approach, I'd say "keep it local". - Kids are much more adept at technical adoption than adults. It speeds up conversations very quickly. For anyone else following this approach, I'd say be prepared to see what's coming. It will happen much faster than you might expect.

jayvanguard 12y ago

Re: CEOs tending to limit their kids "screen time" more than the average parent. A more likely explanation is that CEOs don't see much of their children so they try to exercise control when they are around. Likewise their kids are probably more prone to being out of control since they are less supervised. That or the article is just based on his confirmation bias.