The people who built social media give their own kids 90 minutes a week
Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Evan Spiegel, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg all ration screens at home. Your kid’s average? 7.5 hours a day.
🤯 WOW! Peter Thiel lets his two young kids have an hour and a half of screen time. Not per day. Per week. American kids ages 8 to 18 average 7.5 hours a day.
Why it matters: The chefs are not eating their own cooking, and they’ve been telling us for 16 years.
📖 Read time: 3 minutes
ChatGPT/Kim Komando
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I watched a family of five vanish last week. They were sitting 3 feet away from me at a restaurant, all together, and every single one of them was somewhere else.
Mom and Dad, heads down, thumbs moving. The teenage daughter’s phone fused to her nose. The middle boy hunched over a Nintendo Switch. And the little one, couldn’t have been more than 4, parked in the high chair with an iPad glowing up at her face. Five people, one table, zero words.
I sat there thinking, This isn’t a family dinner. And it reminded me of a story about the man who sold us half those screens.
Back in 2010, a New York Times reporter asked Steve Jobs how his kids liked the iPad. They hadn’t used it. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” he said. Sixteen years later, that’s not a quirky anecdote. It’s a pattern.
😮 The number that made a room gasp
Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook, astounded attendees at a tech conference when he said his two young children get an hour and a half of screen time. Not per day. Per week. He is not alone in the club:
- Snap CEO Evan Spiegel put his kid on the same 90-minutes-a-week diet.
- Bill Gates didn’t hand over a smartphone until his children reached age 14.
- Elon Musk, who owns X, said it “might’ve been a mistake” to set no social media rules for his kids.
- YouTube cofounder Steve Chen has a 15-minute limit of Shorts.
On average, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, kids 8 to 18 spend about 7.5 hours a day on screens. That’s roughly 52 hours a week. Thiel’s kids get 1.5 hours. Read that twice.
🧠 They aren’t being paranoid
Psychological Bulletin found heavier short-form video use was linked to weaker attention, weaker impulse control, more stress and more anxiety, in teens and adults alike. Researchers were careful to say linked, not caused.
You don’t need billionaire money to steal tech billionaire rules. Delay the smartphone. Delete the feed apps and keep the messaging ones. Phones charge in the kitchen overnight, yours included. And make the family rule the boring one nobody argues with, no screens at the table.
The tech chefs won’t eat their own cooking. That’s the whole review.
🎯 Send this to someone who hands the toddler a tablet at every restaurant and feels a little guilty about it.