It’s probably California’s most famous school: Since the early 2010s, hundreds of articles and investigative reports have been devoted to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula. “Why the Silicon Valley titans who got our kids addicted to screens are sending their own children to tech‑free Waldorf schools,” headlined The Times, for example, in 2018. France’s BFM-TV, the same year, called it “the favorite school of all Silicon Valley executives.”
The small establishment – known for its ban on screens, tuition fees of €20,000 a year, and a teaching method based on the controversial Waldorf education – is often cited as evidence that major digital companies are aware of the danger screens represent for younger age groups. Similar evidence is brandished with examples of executives of large tech companies reported to “forbid screens to their children,” as headlined by Franceinfo in 2017.
However, this simple, eye-catching story is mostly untrue, as several articles have pointed out since the late 2010s. The Waldorf School of the Peninsula is indeed a screen-free school catering to the children of tech workers. But with its 300 students, it represents only a tiny minority of the hundreds of thousands of Silicon Valley offspring. The vast majority of tech executives choose the region’s well-funded public high schools, where screens are very much authorized.
As for the tech bosses who supposedly ban their children from using screens, a careful reading of their statements reveals a far more nuanced reality. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda did ban phones, but only at the dinner table. The children of Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief designer, are not allowed to use an iPad – when unsupervised. Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, did limit her children’s screen time on smartphones, but allowed them to have one from age 11. As for Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, the CEOs of Meta and Google, they laid down rules on the use of screens, but by no means banned them.
In short, with a few exceptions, like Steve Jobs (the former CEO of Apple who was far from a model father), Silicon Valley’s billionaires set rules very similar to those established all over the world by hundreds of millions of parents faced with the same screen time dilemmas.
The battle for time
Could it be that tech parents are just like any other parents on this issue? “I have colleagues who are quite anti-screen, others less so, but what’s for sure is that there’s always some form of control [over screen time],” said Romain Zert, a software architect, or high-level developer, at Microsoft and father of 6-year-old twins. He considers himself “rather permissive”: “At least, more so than my wife,” he joked.
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