Take a moment to imagine the childhood lives of Bill Gates' three kids. You're picturing joyful children leaping and ?? ???lounging upon heaps of all the coolest and newest tech, right? Shockingly, you're wrong.
Bill Gates, technology giant and co-founder of Microsoft, had pretty surprising technology restrictions for his kids. Gates and his wife Melinda banned their three children from owning cell phones until they were age 14 - even though they argued all their friendshad them. (Classic.)
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Bill Gates smiling during a panel on Neglected Tropical Diseases. Credit: DI NOLFI/EPA/REX/Shutterstock According to 2016 research by Influence Central, the average age for a child to get their first cell phone is 10 years old, down from 12 in 2012. So in the scheme of things, the Gates kids were really on the lateside for tech. Who would have thought!?
Once the children finally got their phones, their parents strictly regulated their usage - notably banning all phones from the dinner table.
"We often set a time after which there is no screen time and in their case that helps them get to sleep at a reasonable hour," Gates told The Mirror.
Surprisingly, Gates isn't the only tech mastermind to limit his children's technology usage. In a 2014 article titled "Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent," the Apple founder told a New York Times reporter that his children had not yet used the iPad, and that, "We limit how much technology our kids use at home."
Kids, hide your cell phones.
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