“Hi, my name is Reuven, and I am a recovering addict”.
I am not an alcoholic and I am not a drug addict, but I do believe that all of us humans have addictive tendencies. I am a recovering Workaholic, Codependent and People pleaser. I have had some challenges with Alcohol, Marijuana and Gambling over the years.
I have two kids aged 7 and 11 and have watched them grow up surrounded by screens. I grew up in a house with a television like most of you and always loved binging on Saturday morning cartoons. When computers and gaming started becoming a thing with the advent of the Atari the Commodor 64, and the desktop PC etc.. I got hooked. I found video games to be so much fun, and the fact that I could play without spending all my pocket money at the local video arcade was magic to me. I started conquering game after game and soon started to build a sense of self worth the was tied in with my success at video games.
My dad worked on computers since I was born and that was in 1972 so he was definitely one of the first. You could say he was a workaholic and would spend almost every one of his free moments in front of a screen. Intuitively he knew that these screens were addictive as he always tried to set firm boundaries on our screen time. It never really worked as we would always find ways around the limits. I remember one summer when I was around 12 we lived in Noe valley in San Francisco and father agreed that we purchase a Commodor 64, this was the heaven. I loved that device. But as he saw us using it more he tried to limit our use. So when he would leave the house in the morning to work he would physically lock the Commodors plug in wooden box he made. We I can tell you that within 10 minutes of him leaving the house I had that box opened and that computer revved up with the latest and greatest.
I went to school at Stanford University after serving 3 years in the Israeli army working on computers. At Stanford I majored in computer science and biology and when I graduated in 1996 I joined the dot com revolution and started my own internet company. 16 house a day in front of the screen were so normal to me at that point in my life, its what I saw at home and its what all those around me were doing. On top of that I was living the American dream, starting my own business, raising money and changing the world.
Now its time for me to give back and I would love to contribute something to this world and leave it a better place than how I found it. Tech Proof Kids is my attempt to help children and parents learn how to cope with the quickly evolving world of technology.
I don’t have all the answers, as a matter of fact I have very few, but I believe that its going to take a collective effort of many parents, open discussions, research, interviews with global experts, personal experimentation, and regulation to discover better ways forward.
So lets dive in…