How the Tech Insiders Parent Differently
iPads for elementary students is the new Whiskey for Breakfast, how mainstream norms are different than the norms of our most successful, and a look at some insane norms from the not so distant past.
Hello, good people! Today, on average, each American drinks less than one gallon per year of liquor. But in the early 19th century, the average American man drank half a pint of corn whiskey every day, equating to more than five gallons each year. Alcoholic consumption peaked in America in 1830 when the average person drank 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol (not including the other ingredients in their alcoholic beverages). Whiskey was served at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and rather than a coffee break, employers had a mid-morning whiskey break they called “the elevenses.”
A recurring theme in my writing is that people tend to do what is normal, but what is normal can be a bit crazy. For example:
It is easy to identify insane cultural norms when looking outside your own culture and era. It’s much harder to notice those insane norms when they are considered normal in your own time and place.
We Know Better, Right?
We tend to develop new norms in response to new technologies and the products they make available.
When I first began teaching, the deification of technology was reaching new heights. A simplistic dogma reigned which held that since technology was “the future” the most important thing schools could do was to put new technology at the center of everything. Any lesson that utilized technology was presumed to be superior to any lesson that did not. Use of technology was all that mattered.
Something similar happened in most American homes. Parents embraced the new wave of life changing technologies, assured that this was normal. It was the wave of the future. Hop on or get left behind.
Suddenly, it was normal for pre-schoolers to play on iPads and middle schoolers to have their own smartphones. A six-year-old might bring his tablet to dinner, play on it all day at home, and then use it for “learning games” at school.
This has become relatively normal in America. EXCEPT among the people who built these new technologies…
How Tech Insiders Parent Differently
Steve Jobs famously banned the iPad in his own home.
Current Apple CEO, Tim Cook, restricts his nephew’s use of social media.
Bill Gates restricted computer games and did not let his kids get a smartphone until they were in high school.
This is all fairly normal among tech insiders. The CEO of Common Sense Media, James Steyer, and former Wired Magazine editor, Chris Anderson have both been vocal about why they don’t let their kids get smartphones until high school. As Anderson put it:
“On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine… We thought we could control it. And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.”
Similarly, Chamath Palihapitya, a former executive director at Facebook famously said of social media:
“I can control my decisions which is ‘I don’t use this shit.’ I can control my kids’ decision which is ‘they’re not allowed to use this shit….’ That’s what I can do, but everybody else has to soul-search a little bit more about what you’re willing to do, because your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed.”
This is the recurring theme among all tech insiders: most of us feel like we are in control, but we are being controlled and changed. As the aphorism goes, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”
Not only are tech insiders less likely to allow their children early access to smart devices, they also tend to opt for low-tech schools such as the Waldorf School in Silicon Valley. At this school, they still use chalkboards and pencils. The reasons are obvious enough. As Taewoo Kim, the chief artificial intelligence officer at One Smart Lab, put it:
“You can’t put your face in a device and expect to develop a long-term attention span.”
The Haves and the Have Nots
Those who best understand what is going on send their children to expensive tech-free private schools, while the rest of us are left to the public schools, which have made technology their sacred cow. This does not bode well for society at large.
Last month, I talked about the drastic lengths China has gone to to prevent tech addiction in its people. Today, I pointed to the drastic difference in the norms and limits set by tech insiders compared with most Americans. These are red flags that our current norms are off.
If we want to understand how we should parent and educate given modern technology, we need look no further than to those who have built it. The evidence is overwhelming. Less screen time is better. The skills that your kids actually need for success are almost exclusively those that are impeded by screen time. Sure, any device connected to the internet offers the potential for learning, but if you give your kids free access to a smart device, they are much more likely to obsessively check social media, sneak porn, and game their days away.
What Hath Social Proof Wrought
To some degree or another, most of us were lured into adopting new addictive norms. When more and more people began to question whether our new tech norms were healthy, it was easy to presume that they couldn’t be that bad. But, just like whiskey for breakfast, we all know better now.
Smartphones, tablets, and social media aren’t going away. And, like good whiskey, they aren’t all bad. It’s just time we governed their immense power with some common sense norms and limits.
Thank you for reading today! Please share with any kindred spirits who you think would find this valuable.
Also, if interested on the effect of screens on dopamine and what you can do to offset the modern environment, this is a great video from psychologist Anna Lembke. And if interested in the fascinating research on how powerful social proof is, start with the Asch Conformity Experiment. I’ll be building on this idea more next week.
Have a great week! And remember, life is too short to be normal.
Shane