San Francisco: Technologists are now debating on the high risks of addiction of cellphones and many have decided that they don’t want their own children anywhere near them. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is OK.
Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer 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 are not allowed to be on screens. They have limited screen time to once in a week; every Friday evening the family watches one movie.
Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook and is now at Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg feels that the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children. 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.
Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the chief executive of a robotics and drone company has five children his rules for them 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. Anderson is quoted to have said “I didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences.”
Reportedly, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said 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.
John Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners and the former CEO of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the technology.
During the past year, high-profile Silicon Valley defectors have cautioned of dire consequences of these gadgets to the human brain.