Jobs and Gates banned their kids from iPads and other devices they created

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hidden-side-steve-jobs-bill-165424007.html

by hhs • 3 years ago

108 88 3 years ago

finance.yahoo.com

smoldesu2• 3 years ago

You think the Sacklers take opiates?

goodbyesf• 3 years ago

Just like the executives of tabocco companies didn't smoke either. Why are 'people' downvoting you? Is there a small but dedicated Sackler family fan club on this forum?

fullshark• 3 years ago

Hmm that reminds me, my kids are up, watching some idiot scream on youtube about video games. Time to go enjoy my weekend.

trallnag• 3 years ago

Do your your kids watch Skibidi Toilet?

jimmytucson• 3 years ago

The part I struggle with is, how do I let my kids program and be creative on the computer without being online when daddy can’t program without an internet connection?

How will they develop “street smarts” about being on social media without a social media account?

How do I let them have the same positive experiences I had playing games without having the deeply negative ones too (I lost that breastplate that took weeks of grinding to get because the Bloodwood forest swallowed my corpse).

AdmiralAsshat• 3 years ago

Get them an Amiga? Or maybe load up a laptop with EndlessOS?

vb6sp6• 3 years ago

Two things:

1. Set the example and model positive behavior. - Stop using social media. If they see you doom scrolling they are going to doom scroll. - Stop playing mmo or games that require subscriptions or have egregious monetization. -I'm sure you have other skill you can teach them that don't require an internet connection, and if you don't, you can show them how to use the internet for educational purposes instead of watching idiots on social media.

2. Monitor and correct. Your kids are going want the same apps their friends have. Monitor their usage so you can help them get the street smarts. A lot of the apps have privacy settings so you will need to get familiar with them. iOS and android both have tools to limit the amount of time they can use the app for as well.

Unfortunately this takes a lot of time and effort on your part. Try your best and good luck.

prmoustache3• 3 years ago

Anyone can program without an internet connection. You just need the local documentation.

jejeyyy77• 3 years ago

not practical

throwawaykk4• 3 years ago

Local documentation does not exist anymore, in a practical form.

You need the official docs plus countless other resources from other people and for a relevant version of your software.

Gone are the days a few books and a computer was all you needed.

Your compiler is spilling out some weird message? Go scavenge the interwebs for someone who figured it out or spend your whole weekend in that.

gentleman11• 3 years ago

If you let your kids on social media, meta and YouTube is raising your kids, not you, using all the manipulative tricks they have to shape them into consumers and attention addicts, who think these online services are reality, letting them convince them of god knows what

soligern• 3 years ago

Do they really need to develop street smarts for social media? Most people I know don’t use it or are only consumers.

raincole• 3 years ago

How will they develop “street smarts” about being on social media without a social media account?

Is it actually a thing tho? I think it's just general critical thinking. No every older person who starts using social media at their 60s becomes a flat-earther.

How do I let them have the same positive experiences I had playing games without having the deeply negative ones too (I lost that breastplate that took weeks of grinding to get because the Bloodwood forest swallowed my corpse).

I don't think you can. You should definitely keep them from, for example, random pedos trying to find next victims via online games. But loss of in-game items? It's more or less the point of games, isn't it? Teach you to balance risk and reward?

how do I let my kids program and be creative on the computer without being online when daddy can’t program without an internet connection?

You can program without an internet connection if you try. If someone points a gun at your head and asks you to code a binary search without googling you'll probably find yourself suddenly so smart. (not saying we should do that, especially not to kids)

retrac• 3 years ago

Indeed it's probably good to practice coding without Copilot or Stack Exchange completing all your thoughts for you.

Actually, I would recommend, once in a while, trying to code the traditional way -- with pen and paper. That still has its place with high-level design and when toying around with algorithms. Sometimes it's helpful to strip away all the distractions, and instant-access documentation and compiler feedback are a kind of potential distraction, really. YMMV.

blackoil2• 3 years ago

Instead of a complete blockade create an allow list. So Stack Overflow and MDN are allowed but general Internet is not. You can also keep offline copies of books, courses and videos.

rightbyte• 3 years ago

Becoming "street smart" in no way out weights the risks of becoming it. I see it as a cope rationalization.

Like, roaming around Chicago as a 15yo. What do you learn the hard way that a 25yo does not understand by default.

iampims• 3 years ago

Life.

tptacek• 3 years ago

I don't know, but I roamed around Chicago as a 15 year old in the early 1990s. What was I supposed to have learned?

flskafdslaf7• 3 years ago

Let them be creative in ways that don't need a computer? It's not the be-all and end-all.

ghusto3• 3 years ago

The part I struggle with is, how do I let my kids program and be creative on the computer without being online when daddy can’t program without an internet connection?

Same way we did "back in my day"? Books are still a thing, and in my opinion, much better. When you have to work for something, you value it more, and in the case of information, are more likely to retain it (this is due to real-world connections being made).

How will they develop “street smarts” about being on social media without a social media account?

Why do you care? Being the odd one out in a wrong world isn't a bad thing. I was the odd one out in a similar way when I was a kid, and it did me wonders.

How do I let them have the same positive experiences I had playing games without having the deeply negative ones too

Presuming you mean negative generally, why would you want to? Ups and downs are what make games interesting, not just constant endorphin pushing ups.

jstarfish• 3 years ago

How will they develop “street smarts” about being on social media without a social media account?

"Don't trust strangers; they only want to humiliate, rape, or kill you" works well enough. Same as reality, the problem with social media is the people.

The "street smarts" kids have picked up from social media access is nothing to celebrate. /r/runaway is a very sordid place encouraging kids to hook up with total strangers. Rate of teen suicide has only increased since the invention of social media. Kids are exchanging scamming tactics and teaching each other how to maintain eating disorders covertly and fake illnesses convincingly enough to fool doctors.

Give them a book and a Python interpreter. Plenty of us got started that way, and some of us still have to work that way-- in SCIFs or other air-gapped environments with no internet access.

How do I let them have the same positive experiences I had playing games without having the deeply negative ones too (I lost that breastplate that took weeks of grinding to get because the Bloodwood forest swallowed my corpse).

What does this have to do with the internet?

Everyone has lost local saves due to bugs, power outage or corrupted media. "Save early and save often" was a lesson taught by a creepy middle-aged guy named Larry Laffer, using entirely-offline software bearing his name.

jcutrell• 3 years ago

I don’t think we should look at these people as the paragon of parenting. It’s easy to imagine that every decision they made is some blessed path, but that’s just a halo effect.

It’s easy to engage in some magical thinking about Jobs or Gates as if they know something distantly ominous about screens that told them to ban their kids from them, that they kept secret from the public in order to sell the screens. I don’t think so.

I think it’s pretty obvious that “too much screen time is bad” for kids, but it’s not that simple either.

As a parent, I struggle to find the right balance for my kids, but I also don’t think it’s some weird sinister plot to ruin humanity, and I’m just a sheep for letting my kids veg out on YouTube and Minecraft on the weekends.

barbariangrunge• 3 years ago

Paragons? You don’t need to be a paragon if you’re creating something you think is bad for kids and then hesitate to give it to your kids

spondylosaurus• 3 years ago

Jobs and Gates also are(/were) extremely wealthy, which has to be a factor here. If you can afford to pay someone for in-home childcare 30+ hours a week, it's a lot easier to avoid the temptation of parking your kid in front of a screen for a few hours to give you time to eat breakfast and do laundry and take a quick breather.

benreesman2• 3 years ago

I started working on social media in 2006. I did it for a big name for most of the 2010s.

It can be a good thing, it’s easier to make it a good thing. It’s expensive as hell to make a screen more destructive than narcotics, you need PhDs and server farms and shit for that.

The problem is that software companies aren’t “allowed to mature”. Sometimes you tap out the market, you aren’t doing 20% next year without pushing the envelope.

Until it’s ok to win in a market and that’s enough, you can’t trust any of this shit.

Buttons840• 3 years ago

How could we remove the temptation to squeeze every last dollar from a company, even if it crushes society in the process?

What if the market leader in an industry was taxed such that there was no incentive to make more money than the 2nd or 3rd place company in the market? This would encourage competition, and also remove many of the perverse incentives when a single company is dominant.

burroisolator• 3 years ago

What incentive would there be to take the risk of being the first in the market?

One idea I've been mulling is a progressive corporate tax. It would encourage companies to split up if there aren't massive synergies to justify the increased tax.

lostlogin2• 3 years ago

How would that work? Is the market a town, a city, a country or the world? What about companies that supply other companies with goods or materials? What about natural and logical monopolies (eg roads, railways, water supplies). It’s gets messy instantly.

mcny• 3 years ago

I have another idea.

What if we could hold the board and the CEO personally liable with prison time for crimes by all the agents, contractors, employees, and so on of a company (with exception when they explicitly went against company policy to commit said crimes)? You'd think that was already the law but given that the Wells Fargo CEO avoided any prison time when management misused blacklist on employees who didn't meet their illegal quota, I am not holding my breath.

jahewson• 3 years ago

I think this just incentivises cartels or elaborate corporate structures.

benreesman2• 3 years ago

Because not only do we have something close to functioning representative government here, even in places they don’t?

The United States military is the most terrifying embodiment of force in human history. It could dismantle any regime on earth in a day. And they got their asses kicked by a bunch of semiliterate extremists with a bunch of surplus Soviet small arms and RPGs hidden in basements.

The point of the digression is we make the rules, and no plausible oppression can stop that short of our consent, and for big parts of our history we made a lot of rules in the general public interest, and enforced them as we saw fit.

I abhor violence and a big reason why I post on the Internet is that I want to see people stop parroting arch-Randian narratives that don’t serve them before one of these tent camps drags Altman out of his Tesla and beats him to death with his own iPhone.

gardenhedge2• 3 years ago

Did either of these billionaire's do much actual parenting in the same way us non-billionaires do?

blackoil2• 3 years ago

You need not spend a lot of time, couple of high-quality hours a day suffice. Considering billionaires have to spend 0 hrs on chores and setup, it should be entirely possible.

gardenhedge2• 3 years ago

Is that a joke?

dubeye• 3 years ago

Easy enough when you have a manager for your nannies

karaterobot• 3 years ago

People have been raising kids without devices for a long time. They've even been telling kids they can't have what they want. Kids have even survived not having consumer device parity with their peers, if you can believe that. They did fine for quite a while, inventing things like every great work of art, the Pythagorean theorum, airplanes... heck, even the iPad! There's no real reason it couldn't be done today, it just isn't.

kredd• 3 years ago

Disclaimer: I don’t have children, but have nephews of different ages.

It’s way easier to say than actually do it, since completely banning your children from devices will just make them an outcast in most of the circles. When they’re hanging out in school, or after sports, they talk about about either games they’ve played or some stuff they saw online. This is one of the cases where all families should come together or some sort of weird regulation to ban children (reads: impossible to control).

I can’t even judge, growing up I had unrestricted internet access in a shared family PC. Spammed WoW and Runescape for hours every day, and that’s what I talked about with friends. Now we didn’t have social media, but we still were on MSN and its derivatives all the time. There should be some sort of ramp up from no internet access to social media-esque exposure to the entire world so the kids would know what they’re dealing with. How? I don’t know.

seydor• 3 years ago

So what? i dont know anything about the performance of the gates/jobs offspring

mdanger007• 3 years ago

It's reasonable to assume they knew or suspected what we know about kids and too much screen time

hluska2• 3 years ago

Wacky question but does anyone know if this is a paid placement? The last three paragraphs seem to be soliciting investors for some random company I haven’t heard of, but most media declares something is paid. It’s yahoo so nothing surprises me but between the obvious sales tone and the fact an article this low quality front paged has me feeling marketed to.

Stratoscope• 3 years ago

Yes, this is typical Benzinga.

throw_m239339• 3 years ago

Yes, that "article" is clearly some ad spam. And the advertised business is barely related to the rest of the article.

zod50• 3 years ago

Gates and his then-wife Melinda took a decisive step by limiting screen time to 45 minutes for games, with an additional hour allowed on weekends. This was in addition to the time required for homework.

Bit of a misleading title. Not really banned, limited use, which should the case with consumption of any of these technologies anyways.

mr_00ff00• 3 years ago

I’d also argue the implication of the title is also misleading.

“Look Gates and Jobs ban their kids from what they made!”

Yeah and if someone brews beer but doesn’t let their kids drink it, I guess that also makes them a hypocrite?

antran223• 3 years ago

IMHO, the key thing that we need to do is to teach our kids how to create "things" instead of just "consuming". This is important no matter which era you are in, but the average 15th century kid didn't have that many stuffs laying around for him to just consume. This problem is suddenly in our face now and we are scrambling around to try and keep our children away from the cacophony of information, but the better thing to do is to teach kids to see computers or phones as tools, and they are there for them to wield and command.

What you should actually do varies based on your kids' preferences, your experiences. You can teach them to code, to do graphic design, write stuffs. Hell, if my child feel inclined I will allow them to learn to create TikTok video, but they have to actually *create* a piece of original content, instead of regurgitating other people's ideas.

HPsquared• 3 years ago

It's the Internet's big class distinction: the "creators" (0.1% with decent audience, 1% with any audience, 10% commenters) and pure lurkers/consumers (the rest).

amelius• 3 years ago

IMHO, the key thing that we need to do is to teach our kids how to create "things" instead of just "consuming". This is important no matter which era you are in

You say it as if kids prefer reading books over building with LEGOs :)

antran223• 3 years ago

I mean, that's a very specific example of looking at it. But let me try and rationalize it:

- Books are not purely consumption. Rather, working through a good book is a very good creative exercise, because you are "creating" critical thinking for yourself. You still have to filter the intake of book for your kids, but imo there are very few books that have no value at all, because producing a book is costly to just put out junks on a massive scale.

- On the contrary, we have to agree that nowadays there are things that give your kids unbounded consumption. Very little critical thinking can be had after 2 hours of viewing mindless Youtube video. If you restrict your kids to only good content that provoke thinking, it's alright, but there is just too much crap on Youtube that lulls them to be mindless.

So, our kids are "consuming" at record high rate and "producing" at record low rate.

flskafdslaf7• 3 years ago

Tablets and smartphones are designed at every level to be devices for consuming (or being consumed by?) content. And if you do want to create things, they are terrible tools for that.

ndr_• 3 years ago

LumaFusion/LumaTouch is one counter-example, and I‘m certain there are others. At the surface, you may describe it as a „video editor“, but I totally agree that it‘s really about „Story Telling“. I use it on iPad, and I am mesmerised about how ideas click into place every time - there must be serious, long earned expertise at work at the makers of this app. „Designed for consuming“? LumaFusion is the most fun (for me as the creator and my tiny audience of family & friends) creator‘s tool on any device - be it programming on/for small or big iron, writing on Windows, photo editing… you name it. Your statement may be true for anything knock-off or underpowered, though. Your sentiment just not generalises to premium.

antran223• 3 years ago

Even if it is a terrible tool for my purpose, I'd still want my kids to try (under my supervision) and find out the correct way to use it. Then they will be able to judge for themselves the pitfall of those tools.

But yeah, my kid will not have a smartphone/tablet until they are at least 12. It's going to be pen and paper first, then a potato computer (gotta be Linux, they can try installing Wine to play games I guess)

I have a favorite comparison between learning how to use technical devices and learning how to use woodworking tools. You have to start out with the hammer, the chisel, the handsaw for small things first. And then learn to use the lathe, the drill, the bandsaw. Jumping straight to the big tool give you the big risk of losing a few fingers.

hluska2• 3 years ago

Great advice!

My seven year old went from doing animations with Scratch to drawing flip books. Now when she consumes media m, it’s usually about getting better at animation.

Needless to say, everyone who knows me in person sees clips of all her animations. And for some reason, it seems like they avoid me…:)

number62• 3 years ago

Are there clips online? There could be an even broader audience

gretch• 3 years ago

IMO clickbait title

Gates and his then-wife Melinda took a decisive step by limiting screen time to 45 minutes for games, with an additional hour allowed on weekends. This was in addition to the time required for homework.

"Banned" sounds like zero, but they actually got 2 hours (per day?) on weekends. That's a pretty good amount.

Since when are kids allowed to have unlimited access to whatever they want? whether it be entertainment or foods. Even if there was a kid who spent too many hours reading, you'd probably be like "hey you need to go outside once in a while"

drdec• 3 years ago

Even if there was a kid who spent too many hours reading, you'd probably be like "hey you need to go outside once in a while"

This was my mother. So I read outside.

mattlondon• 3 years ago

Banned their kids from iPads ... but probably had an entire 24/7 staff on hand to look after/feed/entertain/keep-quiet their kids for them. This removes probably 90% of the time people give their kids the iPad (the "I just need 15 mins" thing).

version_five• 3 years ago

I have a niece and nephew ~10yo that whenever I see them are just staring at their devices. I don't want that happening to my 1yo son, I don't want him to miss out on normal life stuff either. When do and how do people normally introduce devices to their kids? So far we haven't shown him any technology, other than seeing himself on the screen when we take a selfie.

flskafdslaf7• 3 years ago

My oldest is turning 5, and the answer is "not yet". But then neither my wife nor I carry a smartphone.

polishdude20• 3 years ago

I feel like it sneaks up on you. You want your kid to be quiet for a few minutes so you say "10 mins of ipad time won't hurt". It happens slowly in every moment of weakness. Every moment you're too exhausted to take the hard way out. That said, I have no advice other than to just restrict it as often as possible or just limit how many you have at home.

jjtheblunt• 3 years ago

Does Yahoo seem to heavily publish sensationalist, possibly unsubstantiated, and questionable nonsense?

torcete• 3 years ago

This is like the rule of thumb of drug dealers. Don't consume the merchandise you are selling.

julianeon• 3 years ago

The problem with this type of article is that Jobs and Gates have no real world limitations whatsoever. They can do anything with their kids and it won't matter. So that's not relatable to me as a person not in that position.

Example: pretend Gates & Jobs decided to remove their kids from school and teach them full time to be musicians. Completely impractical for me and would not set my kids up for success financially. But for them? Easily done, and their kids would still have hundreds of millions to fall back on at maturity.

Why does that matter here?

Because if their kids don't have screen time, and they get bored and complain, they could hire a dozen people to entertain their kids and look after them (and while the number is probably not that high, they do, actually, use that type of solution). Whereas for me giving kids device time is a practical solution, without those resources: it keeps them entertained, while I work to make money.

These kinds of articles are basically just fun trivia if the people in them have no constraints on their resources.

ghusto3• 3 years ago

I don't have unlimited resources. I work to keep my family afloat. I don't let my kids be on the iPad so I can get on with work.

It's not a practical solution, it's an _easy_ solution. I'm sorry the article makes you feel like a bad parent, but don't go into denial mode to make yourself feel better about what you're doing.

deely3• 3 years ago

You have absolutely no idea about family situation or financial situation or where parent commenter live (and in which circumstances), yet you indirectly call she/him bad parent and accuse she/him of denial.

And yet looks like you 100% sure that you solution of blocking access to iPads is the best solution for kids.

By the way, by blocking access to iPad, in your opinion, what exactly you achieved?

flskafdslaf7• 3 years ago

Because if their kids don't have screen time, and they get bored and complain

What is fundamentally different about the world today, compared to 10 years ago (when widespread child usage of phones and tablets was vanishingly rare), that it's impossible to parent without them?

I have friends who say they cannot get their child to brush their teeth without holding a tablet in front of their face. This statement would have been considered a sign of something horribly wrong in the parent-child relationship only a few years ago.

thrixton• 3 years ago

It’s not that it’s impossible to parent without them, it’s just the easier path.

Parents, just like other people, will often take the easier path for a million different reasons.

10 (more like 20) years ago, the easier path did not exist, or was something different.

pengaru• 3 years ago

Have fewer/no kids if you can't afford to raise them.

nextaccountic• 3 years ago

Oh yes, that solves society's problems: only rich people should have kids.

barbazoo• 3 years ago

Because if their kids don't have screen time, and they get bored and complain, they could hire a dozen people to entertain their kids and look after them (and while the number is probably not that high, they do, actually, use that type of solution). Whereas for me giving kids device time is a practical solution, without those resources: it keeps them entertained, while I work to make money.

That's one of the problems with the way we life our lives imo. The fact that we need those devices to manage having our children around should tell us something is wrong.

(I'm not saying I'm in any way not affected or better or anything)

dzhiurgis• 3 years ago

The boredom itself that is solution. They moan for 5 minutes then find something useful to do.

Same like you going on a walk without a phone. It opens your mind.

badrabbit• 3 years ago

Discipline is the most valuable and precious thing a parent can give their child. They did good but ideally, the ban would not be a mere removal of ipads and electronics but developing trust with them and teaching them to resist the temptation and possible peer-pressure and FOMO.

orwin• 3 years ago

My computers launch without XSession. And I have all the documentation about how to launch a basic X server on root. My SO found how to use my computer by 'spying' on me (it was more of a game tbh), and hopefully my future kid will too.

number62• 3 years ago

Nice. Greeters are overrated

Guvante• 3 years ago

They both had more money than God.

Everyone would do different things with their children if money was literally not a problem.

tizzy• 3 years ago

The only trouble I have with all of this is that I became who I am by being obsessed with my computer. I’m fairly confident many people on this site would not have become software engineers if not for playing hours of counter strike for mouse skills, mmos for touch typing and editing files and installing scripts.

The computer (and the internet) is different now, but the new things are additions. We definitely can nurture the same wanderlust we had growing up. I’m getting more and more convinced the solution is to ban all short form content.

xctr94• 3 years ago

I empathize with the sentiment, but we grew up in a different ecosystem. (I’ve assumed your age bracket a bit judging from the comment.)

The lack of online ‘low effort’ content to consume was part of why the tool itself was fascinating. “Okay, what is this terminal thing for?” is something that happens _in boredom_. Your curiosity has space to come up if you’re not constantly overloaded with content to consume.

Jobs and Gates banned their kids from iPads and other devices they created

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