Social media is bad for children.
That was the blunt verdict in a recent spate of high-tech court cases in California, Kentucky and New Mexico. At a moment when Silicon Valley has never been more dominant or ambitious, one of its signature products has all the allure — and the lawsuits — of cigarettes circa 1990.
On Tuesday, opening statements begin in Oakland, Calif., for the latest social media trial. California and other states have brought a case against Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, saying the company “harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage and ultimately ensnare youth and teens.”
Meta denies the allegations. But you know who else has some issues with social media, screen time and the addictive nature of devices? Quite a few of the tech executives in Silicon Valley, at least when it comes to their own households.
“I don’t generally want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or computer for a long period of time,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, once said. Interacting with people is good, but passively consuming content — “just going from video to video” — was not associated with “the same positive benefits,” he explained.
When Mr. Zuckerberg’s second child was born in 2017, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, wrote in an open letter to her that “it’s important to make time to go outside and play.” Smelling flowers got a shout-out. So did picking up leaves. Nothing digital rated a mention.
Tech executives like Mr. Zuckerberg don’t talk about their own families often. When they do, however, they usually make clear their wariness of tech. For their children, tech does not play the same role it does for the rest of society: teacher, babysitter, all-purpose distraction and, increasingly, constant companion. It seems barely there at all.
The executives’ comments are generally off the cuff and are snapshots of a moment. Mr. Zuckerberg, for instance, talked about his children seven years ago and has said little since. A Meta representative declined to say anything more.
Peter Thiel, who was the first outside investor in Facebook and a longtime board member, said he limited his children — then 3½ and 5 — to “an hour and a half a week” of screen time. When he mentioned this at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2024, the audience gasped. Many children that age experience that amount of screen time in a day, or even a morning.
But Mr. Thiel said he was a typical Silicon Valley parent.
“There are probably a lot of people in tech who do something quite similar for their own families,” he said, adding pointedly, “There’s some questions that that might lead you to ask.” Mr. Thiel did not respond to emailed questions.
Even as the new Meta case was heading to trial, British researchers raised new alarms about tech and young children.
“The benefit of digital screen exposure for babies is negligible, while the potential risks of use on physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development are substantial,” the interdisciplinary Action on Digital Device Immersive Conditions Team, a group of university academics, said in a May report.
Tech people seemed to realize this from the beginning, said Mara Fath, an artist and bookseller who recalled the influx of programmers into her Upper Haight neighborhood in San Francisco 20 years ago.
“All our neighbors worked for those firms — Facebook, Google and Apple. None of them would let their children interact with any screens,” Ms. Fath said. “They all knew how addicting they were and how to protect their own children.”
Cautions and caveats from tech leaders piled up over the years. “We didn’t give our kids cellphones until they were 14,” Microsoft’s co-founder, Bill Gates said. When Sundar Pichai’s son was 11, the Google chief noted, he “still doesn’t have a phone,” adding that “our television is not easily accessible.” Apple’s Tim Cook said he would not let his nephew on a social network.
By now, it’s a cultural cliché. In “The Audacity,” Jonathan Glatzer’s new AMC series, a girl at a Silicon Valley party is surprised that a boy has a smartphone. “Arms dealers don’t give their kids land mines,” she explains.
Phones are banned at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, two miles from Google’s headquarters. “No phones means no distraction, no social media anxiety, and no constant comparison. Just real childhood,” the school explains on its website. Waldorf’s price for a real childhood: as much as $47,500 a year.
Several Waldorf board members are professionally focused on artificial intelligence, but at the school machine learning is minimized in favor of “human learning.” The goal is to train the future elite to think clearly.
“While machines optimize tasks and automate decisions, our graduates develop the uniquely human capacities that will define leadership in 2030 and beyond,” the school says.
Snap’s chief executive, Evan Spiegel, has credited a low-tech home environment for his success in running a high-tech firm. Growing up in the 1990s, Mr. Spiegel wasn’t allowed to watch television until he was “almost a teenager.” He eventually realized that was a good thing. “I spent a lot of time just building stuff and reading,” he said.
Mr. Spiegel aimed to carry on that tradition: only 90 minutes of screen time a week for his 7-year-old, he said in a 2018 interview. He now has four children with his wife, Miranda Kerr.
“For the 2-year-old, it’s like zero screen time,” he said on a podcast in April. “We really just want to essentially read with him and play, explore outside, and those sorts of things.” The 6- and 7-year-olds are “infrequent movie watchers, but other than that again, we don’t give them phones or anything like that.” The 15-year-old, however, is “all-in on technology.”
Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube who sold the video company to Google in 2006, told students at Stanford last year that he was worried that his children would end up unable to watch anything longer than 15 minutes.
“The modern digital environment trains kids to expect everything to be summarized into a 280-character tweet or a short-form video clip,” Mr. Chen said in a message. His goal was to make sure his children “know how to do things the slow, hard way.”
With A.I., Silicon Valley’s latest product, tech is less a passive broadcast device than a direct substitute for human interaction. It doesn’t come between the parent and child. It replaces the parent.
Consider a new app that Meta is testing, StoryKit. Your child is demanding you make up a story at bedtime? No problem. The app will take the child’s name and a few details and quickly spin a personalized tale. “No more guilt about screen time,” the app promises.
Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in an essay that “my 8 year old daughter can already code her ideas and produce videos.” When they bake together, he said, A.I. “orders the ingredients, and then offers suggestions.”
Others are as cautious with A.I. as they were with social media. “I asked my 16-year-old son what I should say to you,” YouTube’s Mr. Chen wrote. “He responded, ‘Please tell them that I read books and watch movies and that I dislike A.I.’”
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has his own “cool use case” for A.I. and kids. He recently suggested on X connecting family calendars to ChatGPT. On the drive to school, ChatGPT could “make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.,” he posted.
Using A.I. to talk to your family is something for others to embrace, though. As a new father, Mr. Altman finds his own attitude toward technology becoming more resistant.
“A thing that has changed hugely is how I feel about algorithmic feeds and iPads in small children’s hands,” he said in April on the podcast “Mostly Human With Laurie Segall.” As for A.I. and his son, “I don’t know when I would let him talk to A.I., but I’d rather be on the late end of what’s reasonable there, not the early end.”
Like other tech executives, Mr. Altman said he was often bored as a child, which at the time he hated. His new view is that boredom was “super valuable in all of these strange ways.” He said he looked forward to sending his child outside to play in the dirt.
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