Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division Makan Delrahim spends much of his professional life investigating and regulating Big Tech companies. Still, he says he has to do plenty of technology regulating in his personal life as well with his children.
“I try to limit their exposure to their cell phone and iPads and all of that. As much as possible,” Delrahim said in an interview with the Washington Examiner at his office within the Robert Kennedy Department of Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
“God, I wish I could monitor them a lot more. Maybe some of those [tech] companies [already] do that,” he joked.
Delrahim, 50, has three young children, all of whom are 10 years old or younger.
He said that one of his sons loves to use TikTok, the popular social media video app and that his children spend a good bit of time watching music videos on YouTube as well.
The antitrust lawyer said the redemptive part of technology for children is that it “allows them to create things” and express themselves creatively.
While in private practice, he was an attorney for several major technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Qualcomm. He has also been a media and television entrepreneur in between his government stints.
Parenting in the digital age has created a new and unique set of challenges, and Delrahim has experienced them in his own family.
“I just want to know where they go [online] because when you’re not watching them, just like you would in the physical world, you want to know, who are they talking to? Are they talking to a stranger?” said Delrahim.
“Are they going across the street in the physical world, you worry about what they do. And in the online world, you also worry about that,” Delrahim said.
It has been reported that a majority of parents with teenagers spy on their children’s online activity, with almost half looking through their child’s phone call records or text messages.
And youth are spending much of their days looking at screens. The National Institutes of Health reported in November that nearly 90% of youth aged 18 months to 5 years old were exposed to screens for much longer than pediatricians recommend. Pediatric researchers have found that by the age of 12 months, the average child was spending about 53 minutes looking at TV, computer, or mobile phone screens, and by age 3, youths experienced about two-and-a-half hours of screen time a day.
Rising use of the internet by children hasn’t escaped those in the tech industry. Many well-known tech moguls, such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, have been known to raise their children with many technology restrictions.
Gates and his wife Melinda did not allow their children to have cellphones until the age of 14. Jobs ensured that there were no iPads or iPhones in sight during dinnertime in his household so that the family could focus on face-to-face conversations. Investor and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban has gone so far as to have placed special routers in his home that allow him to monitor his children’s internet use and shut down all activities if they go over their set screen-time limits. The CEOs of Google and Snapchat also reportedly have strict limits on their children’s screen time.
As for his own free time, Delrahim’s interests lie in activities that help sharpen his thinking and his fitness.
“I love to play poker. I think poker is a great metaphor for life. You have to constantly be aware of the odds and the effect of every action,” he said.
“It’s very much like chess,” he said. “That is, everything I do will affect what you do, and everything you do will affect what I do.”
As for exercise, he’s engaged in yoga in recent years. “I’m a huge fan of the effects that yoga can have,” Delrahim said.
“And I love my Peloton,” he said, referring to the stationary indoor bicycle machine.
