Even Tech Execs Fret About Their Kids' Smartphone Addictions

Like a lot of parents, Mike Herrick occasionally sees his 13-year-old daughter getting lost in her smartphone and wonders: Is technology messing with childrens brains, even as it enlightens and empowers them in ways that werent possible when his generation grew up?

What sets Herrick apart is his job. He is a product and engineering executive at Urban Airship, a company in Portland, Oregon, that makes online tools that send the kind of relentless notifications that can make people act like bears near a honeypot.

The tensions between the pride Herrick takes in his profession and his parental qualms about technology tug particularly hard when he sees his daughter, Lauren, and her friends texting each other instead of talking — when they’re sitting 5 feet apart. Or when he hears a friend jokingly describe him as a “mobile arms dealer.”

At times like those, Herrick worries that technology may be having a corrosive effect on society, even though he feels no regrets about his job because he unequivocally believes that Urban Airship’s tools are a net benefit to people.

“You can’t help but feel the juxtaposition,” says Herrick, 44. “The power of this age we live in is that it has given everyone access to all this information and the ability to stay connected to people, but how do we manage it better?”

It’s a question besetting other technology executives, too. Many say they’re trying to reconcile their fulfillment from working in a financially rewarding industry that they say has made life more efficient, enjoyable and affordable for people with their misgivings as parents about the addictiveness of devices and social media that now define much of daily life.

Technology “can be like opening your refrigerator door when you are hungry and just staring into the abyss,” says Keith Messick, chief marketing officer for Dialpad, a specialist in phone systems that incorporate voice controls and other artificial intelligence. “That’s when I recoil just a little bit.”