- Billionaire tech titan Bill Gates said his father stuck to the “love and logic” parenting concept, one which worked so effectively he wanted to pass it on when parenting his own three children.
Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates knows he wasn’t an easy child to raise—in fact, he remembers telling a therapist: “I’m at war with my parents.”
And yet the tech titan never recalls his father, Bill Gates Sr., losing his temper.
Instead, the senior Gates used the “love and logic” parenting technique, which proved so effective that his billionaire son used it with his own three children.
The “love and logic” concept means parents set boundaries for their children without the use of threats or repeated warnings.
It also entails approaching a child—even if they are misbehaving—with empathy before addressing their bad behavior, and allowing the child to fix their own problems instead of handling it for them.
It was a concept Gates Sr. “very much believed in,” his now 69-year-old billionaire son told CNBC Make It in an interview released Monday.
“It was clear [to me] the world was a place that he had under control,” Gates said. “He was never panicked. He never had to show emotion or use emotion against me, even when I was being incredibly obstreperous.”
As a result, Gates Sr.’s parenting was always “calm and predictable”—even when Bill was battling his mom, Mary Maxwell Gates.
Gates’ mother tended to get more “worked up,” the entrepreneur added, often prompted by him misbehaving or not performing well at school.
Her frustration, in fact, spurred Gates forward—to the point of founding a tech startup with his childhood friend, Paul Allen.
“It’s something about my relationship with my mom that I really wanted to succeed so much that there wouldn’t even be a question [of her being] disappointed,” Gates added.
Microsoft—now worth more than $3 trillion—is partly the behemoth it is because Gates’ parents supported their son’s “natural predilection…and really pushed it forward,” Gates added.
Indeed, the parenting Gates received he wanted to pass forward to his own children—Phoebe, Rory, and Jennifer—he added.
Previously, the man worth $164 billion said a book called Parenting With Love and Logic was among his favorite books.
Explaining the choice in the New York Times, Gates wrote: “It has been an invaluable guide for both [his ex-wife Melinda French Gates and I], especially when it comes to de-escalating those inevitable conflicts between parents and kids.”
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Growing up a Gates
While Gates grew up in Seattle with a father who launched a law firm and a teacher mother, his own children have had very different childhoods.
As children of the Microsoft cofounder, Gates’s two daughters and son have always been in the limelight.
That scrutiny—combined with the easy spread of information and misinformation—is a burden Gates is aware he’s left to future generations, including his own children.
Gates’s youngest daughter, Phoebe, has spoken to her father about being harassed online, he told CNBC in September last year.
“Hearing my daughter talk about how she’d been harassed online, and how her friends experienced that quite a bit, brought that into focus in a way that I hadn’t thought about before,” Gates said.
He added he had been naive to assume “when we made information available, that people would want correct information.”
