August 19

TOTS ON
TECH: THE
NEW CLASS
DIVIDE
The rich ban technology
for their children, while
most of America
embraces it.
BY BETTIJANE LEVINE
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates raised their kids substantially
tech-free. That should have told us something. If the guys
who invented the devices wouldn’t let their own kids use
them, there must have been good reason. Yet in more than a decade
since that news was revealed, America has increased its embrace of
technology for children, even for infants and toddlers for whom,
many parents believe, tablets and cellphones are the best babysitters
and pacifiers ever invented.
But not all of America is gung-ho for tech. It’s the middleand
lower-income families whose kids are increasingly immersed
in what many experts now say is too much brain- and psychedamaging
screen time. The superrich, it seems, have declared
war on digital devices. And that’s a total reversal.
In tech’s early days, having technology at home or carrying
it with you was a sign of wealth and status. Only the rich could
afford costly new computers for their children, and worries arose
that only privileged kids would develop essential skills, leaving
the rest to lag behind. Now that tech is commonplace in schools
and homes, its ill effects on children are emerging and a new
kind of digital divide concerns pediatricians and social scientists:
Children of the middle class and poor will be raised and taught
by screens, while children of the elite will have the luxury of
actual life experience with such things as books, toys and, most
important, human interaction.
“Life for anyone but the very rich...is increasingly mediated
by screens,” tech journalist Nellie Bowles recently wrote in The
New York Times. Screens are being foisted on the public as wondrous
innovations for education, but for the multiple millions of
children now exposed to screens from infancy onward, at home
and at school, she writes, “the texture of life, the tactile experience,
is becoming smooth glass.”
The tech titans in Silicon Valley and other top income areas
around the country are so afraid of screens for their kids, Bowles
writes, that many parents now require nannies to sign a pledge
that they will not allow any screen time for the children in
their care, and will not even use their cellphones while with the
children. These high-income parents are also opting for tech-free
private schools, like the Waldorf schools, where no classroom
technology is used until students are 12 or 13, and where parents
are advised against any screen time for children when at home.
(See sidebar.)
They’re backed by studies on screen time’s effects on little ones,
— just beginning to surface in medical journals — which are not
comforting. They indicate that young children exposed to screens
may lag behind in language development, thinking and communication
skills, impulse control, socialization and concentration.
–continued on page 12
10 | ARROYO | 08.19