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  • 2018-08-30 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Other Tech Billionaire Parents Advocate Limiting Children's Technology Use? (en)
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  • In August 2018, a number of social media users came across an image offering a purported newspaper clipping of an article entitled Tech Billionaire Parenting and wondered if the article, as well as the information contained within it, was genuine: This image presents a slightly paraphrased version of an article written by Alice Thomson entitled Help Kids to Kick Social Media Addiction which was published in The Times of London in March 2018, the original text of which read as follows: The general theme of this article, that several prominent tech billionaires advocated limiting their children's use of technology, is accurate and supported by various interviews and articles. Our only quibble is with the claim that Bill and Melinda Gates' children don't currently have smartphones. As far as we can tell, the Microsoft moguls didn't allow their children to possess smartphones of their own until they reached the age of 14, but as of this writing Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe Gates are all now over the age of 14. In a June 2018 interview with The Mirror, Bill Gates explained some of his parental rules when it came to technology use by his children: Melinda Gates also penned an op-ed for the Washington Post in August 2017 in which she warned about putting a computer in a child's pocket at too early of an age. Gates seemed to acknowledge that her children had cellphones at the time but said that she probably would have waited longer if she had the chance to do it again: As for the remainder of the text at the head of this page, it appears wholly accurate. A number of Silicon Valley parents truly do send their children to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, where an emphasis is placed on pen and paper rather than digital screens. News outlets such as the New York Times and the Guardian have reported on that school's technology policy in relation to the student body's connection to Silicon Valley: The web site for the Waldorf School of the Peninsula also includes a page in which they describe their Media & Technology Philosophy: The claim that Steve Jobs’s children had strict limits on how much technology they used at home is supported by a 2014 New York Times article which labeled the Apple founder a low-tech parent: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's reported desire to have his daughter read Dr. Seuss and play outside comes from an open letter he wrote after the birth of his second daughter in August 2017: (en)
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