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Peter Thiel said he only allows his children 1.5 hours of screen time per week.
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US authorities are under pressure to regulate children’s use of social media.
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Other tech CEOs, including Evan Spiegel and Sundar Pichai, also limit their kids’ screen time.
“Social media is for you, but it’s not for me, and it’s not for my kids,” says Peter Thiel.
In conversation with a journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Facebook’s first outside investor, made it clear at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Thursday that he doesn’t want kids to spend too much time in front of screens during the week.
Sorkin asked Thiel about U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent announcement that his office will push for social media platforms to require labels warning about the health risks to children. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is also facing lawsuits from 33 states that allege Facebook and Instagram harm the mental health of young people.
Thiel said it was “too easy” to scapegoat big tech companies for “all our problems,” but added that the fact that many social media executives limit children’s screen time “makes for an interesting critique.”
Thiel said he allows his children only an hour and a half of screen time per week, a limit that seems reasonable given that his children are young, ages 3 and 5. But kids are increasingly using the internet at younger ages, raising concerns about creating a generation of “iPad kids.”
Thiel isn’t the first tech leader to admit to strict limits on screen time for kids: Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel also said he limits his 8-year-old’s screen time to an hour and a half per week.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has previously said that his middle school-aged son doesn’t have a cell phone and that all the televisions in their home are locked with “activation energy” to prevent people from easily watching TV.
Read the original article on Business Insider
