. . . Beware the Greeks Inside
A piece appeared recently in the New York Times which is essential reading for all responsible parents. We always ought to be cautious about pieces of general scaremongering, since it is easy to fall under the influence of wacko conspiracy theories. We, as Christians, are commanded to reckon ourselves to be soldiers, pressed into service of the King of kings. It is not becoming to be racked with fear and intimidation.
However, for a long time we have been deeply sceptical about the usefulness of IT. In fact, there are signs of it being not a boon, but a curse--unless it is managed carefully.
The NY Times piece, written by Nellie Bowles, calls our attention to the phenomenon of parents working in the tech world being deeply sceptical, if not fearful, of the impact of electronic devices upon their children. Consequently, they actively reduce, police, and control their children's access to electronic devices--even while "officially" the companies they work for actively promote these devices and their applications to young children.
A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon ValleyThese are not wacky conspiracy theorists. These are folk who have become critically aware of how electronic devices can imprison their children into a mental, spiritual, social, and experiential strait jacket--a kind of solitary confinement where their children are cut off from the real world.
“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.”
Nellie Bowles
New York Times
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.
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 those involved in the tech industry and who have become critically self-aware of the danger and damage cell phones and other devices can inflict upon their children they have all had an awakening moment. All along they have been consorting with a form of poison. It is Silicon Valley's "Silent Spring" moment.
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 child 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.”
The warnings have been coming "from the top" for some time now.
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. . . . .
Nellie Bowles covers tech and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter: @nelliebowles
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