Silicon Valley has perfected a certain kind of hypocrisy into a kind of art. The same engineers and executives who have dedicated their careers to creating products that are specifically made to draw and hold people’s attention—to make the swipe feel good, the notification irresistible, the autoplay seamless—have been discreetly and for years keeping those same products away from their own kids. Steve Jobs forbade his children from using iPads. Up until his kids were teenagers, Bill Gates answered the phone. Tim Cook forbids his nephew from using social media. No one knows what these devices actually do better than the people who built them.
The World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP), which has been involved in this field for more than 70 years, has been presenting the same argument from a different angle: that tech companies creating products for young children are doing so with virtually no understanding of how early childhood development actually occurs. Not necessarily malicious ignorance. Just the typical kind that comes from hiring rooms full of engineers, product managers, and behavioral psychologists—people who know how to get people to interact with a screen—while never once bringing in someone who specializes in what happens to a three-year-old’s brain, attachment development, or imaginative play when you give them a device that is optimized for addiction.
For years, the research community has been constructing a case. According to a 2017 Silicon Valley Community Foundation survey, there were significant worries about how technology might affect kids’ social and psychological growth, even among parents who work in the tech industry. One senior AI engineer talked about taking his young nieces and nephews on yearly tech-free retreats at Buddhist temples in an attempt to teach them how to meditate. A San Francisco family therapist described what she called a “malaise of scrolling” that she had observed over the course of fifteen years simply by observing people on the bus outside her window. They’re not anti-tech nerds. These individuals, who have firsthand knowledge of what the industry produces and why, are genuinely concerned about the direction it is taking.
OMEP offers a perspective on the true purpose of childhood, which Silicon Valley often lacks. Early childhood, which spans from birth to age eight, is when children learn the fundamentals of language, emotional control, empathy, sustained attention, and interacting with the social and physical world. Unstructured play, in-person interactions, boredom, and navigating actual physical environments are all necessary for this development. By design, products that are based on time-on-platform and engagement metrics are pulling in the opposite direction. Screens aren’t intrinsically harmful. The reason for this is that the designers are optimizing for completely incorrect results without consulting anyone who might have more knowledge.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that industry insiders have frequently provided the most candid opinions in this discussion. Former Wired editor Chris Anderson described the early optimism of the tech revolution as naive, comparing screens to crack cocaine in their effects on the developing brain. “We thought we could control it,” he stated. “And this is beyond our power to control.” John Lilly, a venture capitalist, recounted seeing his teenage son react completely indifferently to explanations of algorithmic manipulation, much more interested in spending twenty dollars on virtual game items than in figuring out why he wanted to. They’re not metaphors. These are descriptions of products that function precisely as intended on brains that weren’t made to withstand them.
OMEP’s stance is clear: early childhood expertise should be incorporated into the process prior to a product reaching a child, rather than being added as an afterthought once the harm has become apparent. It’s a modest request. It seems to be a challenging one as well. When regulators start calling, the industry asks questions, builds first, and moves quickly. Children, on the other hand, grow according to their own schedule, which doesn’t stop for product cycles. Before the next generation of parents begins to conceal the gadgets on the top shelf, it’s still unclear if Silicon Valley will take that seriously.
