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  • Silicon Valley parents can see firsthand, either through living or working in the Bay Area, that technology is potentially harmful to kids.
  • Many parents are now restricting, or outright banning, screen time for their children.
  • The trend follows a long-standing practice among high-level tech executives who have set limits for their own children for years.
  • This is an installment of Business Insider's "Your Brain on Apps" series that investigates how addictive apps can influence behavior.

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    It's 9 a.m. in Sunnyvale, California and Minni Shahi is on her way to work at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Her husband, a former Googler named Vijay Koduri, is meeting his business partner at a local Starbucks to discuss their startup, a YouTube clip-making business called HashCut.

    Shahi and Koduri's two kids, 10-year-old Saurav and 12-year-old Roshni, have already been dropped off at school, likely immersed in one of the Google Chromebooks they were issued at the start of the year.

    The Koduris' life is that of the quintessential Silicon Valley family, except for one thing. The technology developed by Koduri and Shahi's employers is all but banned at the family's home.

    There are no video game systems inside the Koduri household, and neither child has their own cell phone yet. Saurav and Roshni can play games on their parents' phones, but only for 10 minutes per week. (There are no limits to using the family's vast library of board games.) Awhile back the family bought an iPad 2, but for the last five years it's lived on the highest shelf in a linen closet.

    "We know at some point they will need to get their own phones," Koduri, 44, told Business Insider. "But we are prolonging it as long as possible."

    'The difference is, they don't think of themselves as dangerous'

    Koduri and Shahi represent a new kind of Silicon Valley parent. Instead of tricking out their homes with all the latest technology, many of today's parents working or living in the tech world are limiting — and sometimes outright banning — how much screen time their kids get.

    The approach stems from parents seeing firsthand, either through their job, or simply by living in the Bay Area — a region home to the most valuable tech...

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