How Silicon Valley gurus make billions from the internet... but won’t let their own kids near it!

TO parents across the country, tearing children away from screens to do their homework, eat a meal or just talk to their family is an exhausting daily battle.

The sheer number of smartphones and tablet computers now in circulation means that most households have several – and for children, just as for adults, they are proving horribly addictive.

But not every mother and father faces this emotional struggle to limit the time their children spend online.

In a well-heeled corner of California’s Silicon Valley – spiritual home of America’s technology industry – school pupils are given pencils, paper and books rather than laptops and iPads.

In a shameless act of hypocrisy, the kings and queens of tech queue up to send their offspring to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos.

The $30,000-a-year school – where around three-quarters of the parents are senior figures in tech, from firms such as Google and Apple – is famous for its fierce resistance to digital technology. It bans computers, iPads and smartphones, and even discourages them from being used at home on the grounds they inhibit creativity, human interaction and concentration.

The school’s website says exposing children to technology before they reach their teens ‘can hamper their ability to fully develop strong bodies, healthy habits of discipline and self-control, fluency with creative and artistic expression, and flexible and agile minds’.

Ethos

Embracing an education system founded nearly a century ago by the Austrian thinker Rudolf Steiner, ‘slow-tech’ Waldorf children read books and work from blackboards rather than the electronic whiteboards common in most other schools.

Such is the all-pervading ethos, that children at the school complain about their parents constantly being distracted by their phones. No doubt the leaders of the Waldorf school would find much to admire in the shocking report published in Britain yesterday about the effects on children of growing up in a digital world.

‘The internet,’ it says simply, ‘is not fit for children.’

The Digital Childhood report says that children under five should be banned from using phones or tablets on their own. It also recommends that the most vulnerable group, from ages ten to 12, should not be allowed to sign up to social media sites. There were further warnings over the damage to self-esteem many children feel after spending time online.

And indeed, many of the Silicon Valley elite who made their fortunes from these devices have done their utmost to keep their children away from their own products.

Steve Jobs, the genius who was the co-founder of Apple, casually admitted in 2010 that his children didn’t have Apple’s iPad computer tablets. ‘They haven’t used [them]. We limit how much technology our kids use at home,’ he said.

As to what they did instead, Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson – who spent considerable time in the Jobs household – revealed that every evening Jobs made a point of having a family dinner at a long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history. ‘No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices,’ said Isaacson.

Jobs was hardly alone. One of the other giants of tech, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, admitted: ‘We don’t have cellphones at the table when we are having a meal, we didn’t give our kids cellphones until they were 14 and they complained other kids got them earlier.’ He’s revealed how, concerned by their ten-yearold daughter’s fixation with a computer game, he and his wife, Melinda, set a limit of 45 minutes a day of screen time for games, and an hour a day at weekends.

Eric Schmidt, the Google executive, admitted nearly a decade ago that our ability to think properly was being damaged by the internet’s ‘overwhelming’ onslaught of often ‘stressful’ information.

He added: ‘I still believe reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry we’re losing that.’

Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired magazine (a cheerleader for Silicon Valley) and CEO of a drone technology firm, described himself and his wife as ‘fascists’ when it came to limits they impose on their children’s use of technology (such as a complete ban on screens in bedrooms).

‘We have seen the dangers of technology first-hand. I don’t want to see that happen to my children,’ he explains.

Addictive

Dozens more parents in important Silicon Valley jobs have also admitted to being ‘fascists’ when it comes to keeping their children off the internet. Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter, allowed his two teenage children to use electronic gadgets – but only in the family’s living room.

This suggests he was worried about what they might get up to out of sight, yet he grew rich thanks to a website whose addictive nature means users can’t stop logging on to it night and day.

The contradictions between what Silicon Valley preaches and what it practises go on and on. Former British prime minister David Cameron’s exchief strategist Steve Hilton has written passionately about how smartphones have turned us into technology-obsessed zombies and should be banned for children under 16. ‘My family is living proof of it,’ he wrote in the Mail last year. ‘Our sons do not have phones or tablets, they only use a computer at school, and at home have a half-hour or so of screen time three or four days a week.’

Yet that’s a philosophy you probably won’t hear from his wife Rachel Whetstone in her job as a PR chief for Facebook, which has just launched Messenger Kids, its controversial new app which aims to encourage children as young as six to send pictures and video chat.

It can, of course, be accessed through a smartphone.

Other leading technology industry figures have effectively admitted they helped create a social media monster.

Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker last month owned up that social media such as Facebook exploits a ‘vulnerability in human psychology’ by encouraging users to become addicted, adding: ‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.’

It’s no longer disputed that social media sites are not only deeply addictive, but have been made that way intentionally. Employing tricks used by casinos, armies of software engineers spend their lives finding new ways of ensuring people spend as much of their time and conscious attention as possible on their product.

Social media ‘likes’ – or positive comments – provide users with little surges of dopamine, a chemical compound released by the brain that is linked with addictive behaviour.

Over our lifetime, it’s estimated we will spend 11 years looking at a phone screen, and a 2011 study estimated that four in ten people suffer from some sort of internet-related addiction.

That has soared since then. Inevitably, children are particularly vulnerable because they lack the self-control of most adults.

But surely the most contemptible revelation of all is that the people who have been inflicting all this on the world are making damned sure they and their little darlings aren’t afflicted.

Cynical and utterly hypocritical, it seems Silicon Valley follows the first rule of drugdealing – never get high on your own supply.