Bill Gates and Steve Jobs raised their kids with limited tech — and it should have been a red flag about our own smartphone use

In 2007, Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft, implemented a cap on screen time when his daughter started developing an unhealthy attachment to a video game. He also didn't let his kids get cell phones until they turned 14. 

Spiegel and his wife Miranda Kerr impose an hour and a half of screen time per week on their kids, he told the Financial Times. Young people use Snapchat more often than any other social media platform, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey.

Plus, current Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have spoken out against tech overuse among children.

Jobs, who was the CEO of Apple until his death in 2012, revealed in a 2011 New York Times interview that he prohibited his kids from using the newly-released iPad. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home," Jobs told reporter Nick Bilton.

In an recent interview on Cheddar, iPod co-creator Tony Fadell speculated that if Steve Jobs were alive today, he'd want to address growing societal concerns about tech addiction. "He'd say, 'Hey we need to do something about it,'" Fadell said.

Pichai told the New York Times in a 2018 interview that his then-11-year-old son did not have a cell phone, and that he limits the time his children spend watching television. 

That's at the average school at least, according to the coauthors. A number of specialty Silicon Valley schools, such as the Waldorf School in Mountain View, are noticeably low-tech. They use chalkboards and No. 2 pencils. Instead of learning how to code, kids are taught the soft skills of cooperation and respect.

At Brightworks School in San Francisco, kids learn creativity by building things and attending classes in treehouses.

Some low-income schools, meanwhile, have increased their tech usage to help solve for teacher shortage problems. Parents said a Mark Zuckerberg-funded web-based teaching platform caused physical and mental ailments, The New York Times reported.

Read more: Parents say a learning app backed by Mark Zuckerberg is giving kids anxiety and headaches, raising concerns about the amount of time students spend staring at screens
 

If there is any concession Gates has made on technology, it's in the benefits it offers students in certain educational settings. In the years since Gates implemented his household policy, the billionaire philanthropist has taken a keen interest in personalized education, an approach that uses electronic devices to help tailor lesson plans for each student.

In a recent blog post, Gates celebrated Summit Sierra, a Seattle-based school that takes students' personal goals — like getting into a specific college — and devises a path to get there. Teachers in personalized learning settings take on more of a coaching role, helping to nudge students back on track when they get stuck or distracted.

Technology in these cases is being used as specifically as possible — and in ways Gates recognizes as useful for a student's development, not as entertainment.

"Personalized learning won't be a cure-all," he wrote. But Gates said he's "hopeful that this approach could help many more young people make the most of their talents."

In "Screen Schooled," Clement and Miles make the case that wealthy Silicon Valley parents seem to grasp the addictive powers of smartphones, tablets, and computers more than the general public does — despite the fact that these parents often make a living by creating and investing in that technology.

"It's interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads," the authors wrote, "Steve Jobs's kids would be some of the only kids opted out."

Jobs' children have finished school, so it's impossible to know how the late Apple cofounder would have responded to education technology, or "edtech." But Clement and Miles suggest that if Jobs' kids had attended the average US school today, they'd have used tech in the classroom far more than they did at home while growing up.

Chris Weller contributed to a previous version of this article.