Stephen Hawking — "I tell my kids: Don't spend all your time at the computer. But then I realize, I…"
I tell my kids: Don't spend all your time at the computer. But then I realize, I do that myself all day.
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More from Stephen Hawking
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About Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
British theoretical physicist whose Hawking radiation work and A Brief History of Time (1988) brought black-hole physics to a mass audience while he lived with ALS for 55 years. Closely associated with Roger Penrose (his collaborator on singularity theorems) and Carl Sagan (fellow popularizer who wrote Brief History's foreword). For an intellectual contrast, see William Lane Craig, American philosopher of religion — Craig's Kalam cosmological argument depends on the Big Bang requiring a divine first cause; Hawking's no-boundary proposal was specifically designed to remove the moment that would require one — the cleanest cosmology-vs-natural-theology contrast in modern thought.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
A parent catches themselves being a hypocrite — warning their children to limit screen time while spending their own day glued to a computer. The quote captures the universal tension between the advice adults give and the habits they actually model. It is honest, self-aware, and quietly comic: rules we set for others rarely survive contact with our own behavior.
Relevance to Stephen Hawking
For Hawking, this irony cuts far deeper than ordinary hypocrisy. ALS had stripped him of speech and motor control by his early thirties; a custom computer with cheek-sensor input was literally his voice, his typewriter, and his scientific instrument simultaneously. Telling his children to step away from screens while he had no biological choice but to live entirely through one reveals rare, disarming humor about his own extraordinary constraints.
The era
By the 1990s and 2000s, personal computers moved from offices into living rooms and parents worldwide began worrying about children losing themselves to screens. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued screen-time guidelines; governments debated childhood digital addiction. Hawking worked precisely at this cultural inflection point, when society was negotiating healthy relationships with technology, making his wry admission resonant as both a globally recognized scientist and an ordinary father facing the same anxieties.
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