Mark Zuckerberg Opens Up About How He Manages Screen Time for His Young Daughters
Mark Zuckerberg is leveraging the use of screen-based technology for the sake of family communication in his young daughters’ lives.
The Facebook founder and CEO, 35, sat down for a recent interview with Fox News’ Dana Perino where he opened up about how he and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, manage screen time for August, 2, and Maxima (a.k.a. “Max”), who turns 4 next month.
“Facebook makes this product, Portal — it’s this great video-chat product — and I let my kids use that to communicate with my parents so they can stay in touch with their grandparents easily, their aunts who live across the country,” Zuckerberg told Perino.
“And I think that’s great,” he added. “If our daughters want to video chat with their cousins or their grandparents, I think that’s wonderful and I think all the research would generally support that.”
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However, “I don’t generally just want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or a computer for a long period of time.”
“They’re also very young,” quipped the tech mogul. “I think I’ll have more challenges on this as they get older, but our oldest isn’t even 4 years old. She’ll get there!”
In an interview on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt that aired on Monday, Zuckerberg also opened up about how he hopes his daughters are proud of him.
“I want to know that when my girls grow up, that they’re going to be able to say that their dad made the world better and stood up for what he believed in,” he told Holt.
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In the meantime, Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan, 34, are focusing on early childhood education not only for their daughters but for the sake of children everywhere.
Last month, the pediatrician and mother of two starred in a promotional video to share that the couple’s philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is working in conjunction with The Primary School and Sesame Workshop to help fund a “new curriculum” that aims to “integrate social emotional learning into early childhood literacy lessons,” according to a press release.
“The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is proud to support a collaboration between The Primary School and Sesame Workshop,” Dr. Chan said in the video before getting a visit from every kid’s favorite friendly red monster: Elmo. “We’re teaming up to develop an early-literacy curriculum.”
The press release stated that Sesame Workshop and The Primary School “have been developing and piloting the new curriculum over the past two years at The Primary School’s flagship site in East Palo Alto, California,” and that “the curriculum will be digitized and made available online for use in additional qualifying early learning classrooms across the country” by late next year.
