By Don Sweeney / The Sacramento Bee
In an Instagram post, Mark Zuckerberg shared a problem in his household that many parents — even those who didn’t help create Facebook — might find familiar: Getting a good night’s rest.
“Being a mom is hard, and since we’ve had kids Priscilla has had a hard time sleeping through the night,” Zuckerberg wrote, referring to his wife, Priscilla Chan. “She’ll wake up and check the time on her phone to see if the kids might wake up soon, but then knowing the time stresses her out and she can’t fall back asleep.”
Zuckerberg and Chan, a pediatrician and philanthropist, have two young daughters.
So Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, built what he calls a “sleep box” for Chan’s bedside, he wrote Sunday on Instagram (also owned by Facebook).
The wooden box emits a faint light between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. each morning, allowing Chan to simply check for a light if she wakes up during the night to know whether or not it’s time for the kids to get up, Zuckerberg wrote.
“And since it doesn’t show the time, if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she knows to just go back to sleep without having to worry about what time it is,” he wrote.
“As an engineer, building a device to help my partner sleep better is one of the best ways I can think of to express my love and gratitude,” Zuckerberg continued.
Zuckerberg says the device has been helping Chan sleep through the night and says friends have told him they’d also be interested in a “sleep box” — closing with a challenge to budding entrepreneurs.
“So I’m putting this out there in case another entrepreneur wants to run with this and build sleep boxes for more people!” Zuckerberg wrote.
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