IN THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, the media has produced a steady stream of stories about Silicon Valley tech executives who send their children to tech-shunning private schools. Early coverage included a widely discussed 2011 New York Times article about the preponderance of “digerati” offspring, including the children of eBay’s chief technology officer, at the tech-adverse Waldorf School of the Peninsula. A 2017 article in the Independent discussed the technology-free childhoods of Bill Gates’s and Steve Jobs’s kids. Haplessly conflating correlation and causation, it linked teens’ technology use to depression and suicide and smugly concluded, “wealthy Silicon Valley parents seem to grasp the addictive powers of smartphones, tablets, and computers more than the general public does.” A 2018 New York Times article called smartphones and other screens “toxic,” “the devil,” tantamount to “crack cocaine,” and intoned, “[t]echnologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.”
These articles assume that techies have access to secret wisdom about the harmful effects of technology on children. Based on two decades of living among, working with, and researching Silicon Valley technology employees, I can confidently assert that this secret knowledge does not exist.
To be sure, techies may know more than most people do about the technical details of the systems they build, but that’s a far cry from having expertise in child development or the broader social implications of technologies. Indeed, most are beholden to the same myths and media narratives about the supposed evils of screen time as the rest of us, just as they can be susceptible to the same myths about, say, vaccines or fad diets. Nothing in their training, in other words, makes them uniquely able to understand arenas of knowledge or practice far from their own.
As a case in point, many techies’ conviction that they must monitor and cultivate — with concerted effort — their children’s technology habits is firmly and prosaically rooted in the values and worldviews shared by many non-techie middle-class parents. Private schools almost by definition have to craft stories that appeal to privileged strivers anxious about their children’s futures. Some of these stories recount how their graduates’ creative brilliance was spawned in their school’s tech-free environment. Related ones ply anti-contamination themes, and fetishize the purity of childhood. Techie parents are as susceptible as anyone else. Moreover, the ways in which technology fits into these narratives — or is actively excluded from them — has far more to do with parents’ age-old fears about social change and new media than with any special knowledge vouchsafed to tech workers. Indeed, such stories are similar to widely held beliefs in 18th-century England that novels corrupted the soul. In the latter half of the 20th century, first television and then video games became the sources of this alleged corruption, joined by the internet at the dawn of this century.
This isn’t to say that these media are universally good for us — not at all — but their influence is far more nuanced and contextually dependent, and far less dystopian, than the stories quoted above lead us to believe. Research consistently shows that what really matters is the context of children’s technology use (is this time for the family to be together or a digital babysitter?), the content they consume (is this videochatting with grandparents or violent videos?), and how adults communicate with them about what they are seeing.
The more important point here is that believing techie parents have secret insider knowledge about the harmful effects of children’s technology usage reinforces the dangerous myth that techies are always the smartest people in the room — and that the more technical they are, the more wide-ranging their expertise.
As an example of how a technical background does not insulate people from specious reasoning, we need look no further than the vaccination rates at the elite, technology-shunning Waldorf schools in and around Silicon Valley. Scientific consensus has long upheld the safety and importance of vaccines. Yet at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, which is the techie-dominated, tech-shunning school featured in the 2011 New York Times article, an average of only 36 percent of kindergarteners were fully vaccinated in the five years before California’s personal belief exemption was removed in 2016. If so many techie parents at this school are susceptible to vaccine misinformation, they are surely just as susceptible to screen time dystopianism, unfounded fears of “contamination,” and other forms of misinformation.
And yet I encounter this myth almost every day. As a culture, we look to tech company founders and executives for advice on solving the world’s problems, whether through their charismatic philanthropy, their shepherding of the high-profile TED Talk ecosystem, or their calls to simply “l
