Mark Zuckerberg emphasizes critical thinking in raising children

Tech founders and CEOs are known more for their success in running their companies. However, they also face everyday parenting questions, such as whether to limit screen time and how to divide household chores.

Sam Altman

In June 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he continuously used ChatGPT to ask about newborn behavior in the first few weeks of his son’s birth. “I mean, clearly people have been able to care for newborns for long periods of time without ChatGPT,” he said in The OpenAI Podcast. “But I don’t know how I’m going to do that.”

Altman said he “extremely likes children” and always learns everything about children using ChatGPT. He also uses chatbots to search for general information about each stage of child development.

However, the OpenAI CEO also emphasized human limitations. “My children will never be smarter than AI,” Altman said. “They will grow up with abilities far superior to ours, able to do things we cannot imagine, and they will also be very good at using artificial intelligence.”

Sam Altman and software engineer Oliver Mulherin welcomed their first child in February 2025. The two got married last year and live in San Francisco. According to him, technology is having a profound impact on children and is an irreversible trend, especially when there is AI. “Newborn children will now face a world where AI is always present, extremely intelligent AI,” he added.

Mark Zuckerberg

In 2024, when receiving questions from Bloombergabout what children today should learn, Zuckerberg said the most important thing is to learn how to think critically and learn values ​​from an early age. “If a person demonstrates the ability to go deep into a problem and do something well, they have probably gained experience, learned and improved their skills to an excellent level,” CEO Meta said.

Zuckerberg said that when he took his 7-year-old daughter to see Taylor Swift’s concert, he told her that becoming someone like that superstar was “impossible”. According to a psychotherapist in California, encouraging girls to “be themselves” like Zuckerberg is the right approach.

In a 2019 interview on the show CBS This Morning and his wife Priscilla Chan, both said they “don’t give their children everything”. “They have chores, they have responsibilities,” Chan said. “We also bring them to work to see what we do and how we contribute.”

Also in 2019, Zuckerberg told Fox News that he generally doesn’t want his children sitting in front of the TV or computer for long periods of time. He allows his children to video call relatives, but is strict about other forms of screen use.

Satya Nadella

According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, his parents created an environment that allowed him and his brothers to set their own pace and pursue what they wanted. That influenced the way he raised his children.

“It’s important to focus on what our children need to develop well,” Nadella shared above Good Housekeeping last year.

The Microsoft CEO said that he and his wife limit the number of movies, types of video games and websites that their children are allowed to watch. One of his children has cerebral palsy, and he credits raising his children with teaching him the importance of empathy, even at work.

In addition, Nadella also encourages families to let their children be companions with pets, especially dogs. “It brings a different sense of companionship and responsibility, an emotional feeling that there is a being waiting for your return,” he said.

Sundar Pichai

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he still uses technology to support parenting. “I use Google Lens to help my child with homework,” Pichai told Bloomberg early last year. “I didn’t want to get him in trouble, but the class allowed it. And sometimes, I accepted requests for help with math. I was lazy and pretended to be thinking, but actually I was using Google Lens to find the answer.”

In 2018, Google CEO told New York Times that his son, then 11 years old, was not allowed to use a phone and had limited TV time.

Bill Gates

The Microsoft co-founder said he raised his children using a model developed in the 1970s called the “Love and Reason” method. This philosophy focuses on controlling emotions, for example parents need to reduce reactions such as yelling or scolding. Gates once shared that his father also believed in this philosophy with a “never worried” mindset.

The American billionaire also forbade his children from using phones during meals and did not let them use them until they were 14 years old. In the podcast episode Raj Shamani’s Figuring it Out Last year, Gates reiterated that he only left his children less than 1% of his total assets because he wanted to give them “the opportunity to earn their own income and achieve success.”

Jeff Bezos

The founder of Amazon once shared that he raised his four children with a “quite unusual” method. In 2017, in an interview with YouTube channel Summit, he revealed that he allowed his children to use sharp knives from the age of 4 and hand-held power tools from the age of 7-8. According to him, “it is better to have a child with nine fingers than a child with no assets” and added that this is a “great attitude to life”.

Evan Spiegel

The co-founder and CEO of Snap, the company behind the Snapchat app, said he and his wife, supermodel Miranda Kerr, set a rule to limit their son’s screen time to one and a half hours a week. At the same time, parents should set an example and try to limit their own screen time.