How the editor of Wired thinks about technology and kids

Business Dad is an excellent podcast by Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit and founder at Initialized Capital and Seven Seven Six. Perhaps most importantly, he is also Serena Williams's husband and Olympia's dad. His conversation with Nicholas Thompson, CEO at The Atlantic and previously Editor in Chief for Wired, is full of parenting gems. While it’s well worth a listen, I’ve summarised my favourite learnings from Nicholas here.

(Note that the quotes are edited a bit from the podcast to be readable, and the podcast was published in 2020.)

On the motivation out children create

Qustion: How do you have it all? How do you balance between a career you care about and a family that is just as important, if not more important?

That’s a key question. I actually think that having children, my sons are 11, 9 and 5, has made me better at my career in part because it makes you so aware of whether you're adding value to the world and whether you're doing a good job because you know your children will be watching you and evaluating you. I feel like, in many ways, I'm trying to do a good job because I want them to think I did a good job.

On trade-offs

I keep a very structured schedule where I take them to school, go to work, and leave work almost every day at 6:00 to go home, put them to bed, and tell them stories. Then they go to sleep, and I go back to work (at my computer). So that's a good way to put in enough hours that you need to put in as Editor at Wired, and a good way to spend time with your children. What you lose is all the other things you would do between, right? You lose a lot of social engagement. You make a lot of trade-offs because there's only a certain amount of time, and I try to spend all my time with my kids. I try to spend every minute of the weekends with them, try to figure out what they’re most interested in, do it with them, and engage with them on their level.

On personal screen time

Qs: How do you not stare at your phone all the time?

I put it in the kitchen

On the food pyramid of technology

The way I think about technology for kids is that there is a food pyramid of stuff. There is stuff at the top that’s just awful—you should never let them use the device right before bed or have them look at the screen during dinner time. Then there is stuff one level down, which is mostly bad but okay if supervised, like watching YouTube. You should never let them watch YouTube unsupervised. I would put violent video games in that same category. There's a certain amount where they are going to play with their friends at a birthday party, for example, that’s ok. Then there are lower levels—I love it when my 11-year-old emails his Grandma. I think that's amazing. We do Spanish learning apps together. So there is a pyramid of stuff we allow and stuff we don’t allow…Our job as parents is helping to explain how to use it (technology) appropriately.

On the best moments of parenting

The best moments are when you’re engaging with them in a way that they love, and you're learning yourself.

On how to choose the right job as a parent

There was a moment in 2016 when I was offered a crazy job at a big tech company and Editor-in-Chief at Wired on the same day, and I had to make a decision over the weekend. I remember making up all these lists of ‘what matters most, where is the most opportunity for growth, what’s the upside, the downside etc.

Finally, I had a conversation with my wife, and we asked, if you could come up with one question that should decide this, what would that be? The question we came up with was: Which job will make you a better dad for your children?

It's still complicated even when you choose that as the deciding question. This job will make you more money, which could be good for your children, or this one will have more impact on the world. Ultimately, we decided the Wired job would make me a better dad as it would introduce me to all this new technology that I could show them and allow me to meet all these new people that would connect them to different worlds. I think that was the right question to ask, and my wife and I made the right decision on the job.