As far back as 2010, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter his kids had never used an iPad and that “we limit how much technology our kids use at home.” 

Since then, excessive device use among children has grown more common, especially as busy parents turn to screens to find some temporary peace. The trend has accelerated so much that some young children accustomed to extensive screen time have been dubbed “iPad kids.” On average, children in the U.S. ages 8 to 18 spend 7.5 hours per day watching or using screens, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

At the same time, Silicon Valley billionaires and executives have increasingly sought to limit how their own families use technology and for how long, partly in response to the rise of time sucking social media and short-form video.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is among those taking a cautious approach. Mohan, who has three children, said he and his wife try to limit the time his children spend on platforms like YouTube.

“We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch,” he said in a December interview with Time.

YouTube cofounder Steve Chen also said at a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business last year he wouldn’t want his kids consuming only short-form content, noting it might be better to limit kids to videos longer than 15 minutes.

“Shorter-form content equates to shorter attention spans,” he said.

Different approaches

When it comes to how parents control their children’s screen time, some of the most important people in Silicon Valley have surprisingly different approaches.

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who has three children, said in an interview last year he controls his kids’ weekend screen and video game time by starting at a baseline of zero minutes.

His kids can earn earn up to 90-minutes of screen time or video game time on the weekend by during by completing three 30-minute homework sessions during the week, he said. Still, he said he avoids taking away screen time that his kids have earned, because he said that caused them to act out more.

There is one exception to the rule, he said: “When really all barriers go out the window is on planes.”

Much like Mosseri, early Facebook investor and billionaire Peter Thiel previously said he lets his two young children use screens for only an hour and a half per week, a revelation that prompted audible gasps from the audience at the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival.

Other tech leaders are a little more adaptable. That includes Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, who said he and his wife, Miranda Kerr, adapt their approach to screen time based on the child because their four boys, ages two, six, seven, and 15, vary so much in age.

Spiegel said the two-year-old gets almost zero screen time, unless he is getting a haircut, when his parents allow him to watch videos of Bobcat tractors, because “he really struggles with getting his haircut,” he told Lenny’s Podcast in June. Spiegel said the four and six-year-olds also don’t use screens often, and “we don’t give them phones or anything like that,” he added.

They do watch movies occasionally and play video games on ModRetro’s Chromatic handheld video game device, which he got them last Christmas, he said.

Meanwhile, Spiegel’s oldest son, Flynn, is “all in on on technology, whether he’s using it for school or whether he’s using it to talk with his friends or using Snapchat,” he said.

Much like Facebook investor and billionaire PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel has put said he lets his two young children use screens for only an hour and a half per week, a revelation that prompted audible gasps from the audience. 

Other tech founders, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have also spoken about limiting their children’s access to devices. Gates has said he did not give his children smartphones until age 14 and banned phones at the dinner table entirely. While Musk, who bought the social media company X, formerly Twitter, in 2022, said it “might’ve been a mistake” to not set any rules on social media for his children. 

Social media backlash is growing

Scientific research increasingly backs up tech leaders’ instinct to rein in screen time. A 2025 study of nearly 100,000 people found short-form video use was consistently associated with poorer cognition and a decline in many aspects of mental health across both younger and older social media users.

As young people increasingly spend most of their waking moments online, the backlash against social media, and especially minors’ use of social media, has reached a breaking point.

Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia have all banned adolescents under 16 from using social media over the past year. Several other countries, including Spain, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, are considering similar legislation.

To be sure, its unclear how effective such legislation has been. A study by a team that advised the Australian government on the rollout of its social media ban found in a July study that some test accounts for fake 16 year-olds weren’t prompted to verify their age.

Plus, several social media CEOs have publicly pushed back on claims their platforms are harmful. Mosseri testified earlier this year in a trial against its parent company, Meta, social media overuse does not constitute “clinical addiction.” Meta this week reached a $17 billion settlement in the suit brought against it by 47 states and the District of Columbia and agreed to change its platforms to limit how long teenagers can use them for and to ban certain features. The company did not admit to wrongdoing.

Far from being a new phenomenon, the idea social media use is harmful for young people has been around for years. Still, it’s the tech leaders who created the attention economy who have been the most attentive to this fact. 

A version of this story originally appeared on Fortune.com on Feb. 21, 2026.

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