I work at Google helping organizations implement and adopt AI solutions, yet I have spent the last eight years raising my daughter with nearly no access to tech beyond weekend family movie nights.
What began as an intentional decision, one I knew would test my limits as a parent, especially during the endless “I’m bored” tantrums, eventually became the easy route. I would bring “mommy’s bag of tricks,” which included glitter, games, and glue, to every restaurant and keep my phone strictly off limits.
But the glitter-and-glue phase didn’t last forever. As she gets older, I increasingly find myself watching her peer group immerse themselves in technology and worry that I am setting her up to fall behind in the classroom. While my daughter has briefly used PowerPoint, her school projects are still on poster boards. Meanwhile, her friends are creating Canva presentations, videos, and using Pinterest for inspiration.
What I am coming to terms with is that just saying no to tech has made it easy for me to avoid addressing the reality of the times we live in head-on. And now, I need to create a conscious plan for introducing technology that aligns with our family values and what I think is important.
She told me to ask ChatGPT
But as I sat on my high horse of self-realization, I got hit with another dose of reality. We were on a car ride to school, catching up on homework, when she came across a word she didn’t know. I couldn’t explain what the word meant, so I grabbed my phone and asked ChatGPT to explain it to an 8-year-old.
We got the answer and breezed through her exercise of writing a sentence with the word. This is normal behavior for me these days. Have a question, get the answer immediately. No big deal, right?
A few days later, we were at the park doing homework and ran into the same situation. This time, we had the time to think things through. We weren’t in our usual rush, and I wanted us to figure this out together. So instead of hitting the easy button, I pushed her.
“What do you think the word means?”
“I don’t know,” she responded.
“Does it sound like a positive or negative word?” I pressed on.
“I don’t know. Mom, ugh, can you just ask ChatGPT?”
And those words were a sucker punch. Because for all the years I had been “shielding” her from technology, I failed to recognize that she had been watching me all along. Watching me text, scroll, and lately converse with AI. With her frustration mounting and her eye roll directed at me, she was mirroring my own behavior to outsource my thinking in a pinch. But I kept pushing, her memory flickered, and she found the answer herself.
I have her pause and reflect first
This moment made me realize that I have had the luxury of building up my own critical thinking skills. I have had the chance to struggle through problems and spend endless hours figuring them out. She has not.
When I tell my daughter it is OK to fail, but then hand her the AI easy button to the world’s information, I am taking away not only the chance to fail but also the chance to struggle and learn from it.
So now we have been testing out some rules, or at least I do, and she has to live by them. The reality is that we need to learn to coexist with technology and create a home environment that supports our kids’ growth in and out of the classroom.
Before incorporating AI into the mix, we do a couple of things.
Pause and reflect — we have to pause and give ourselves time to imagine what an answer could be. We have to take the time to wonder or solve an issue ourselves. We play and come up with impossible answers.
Fact-checking game — we will look up a video or article, trying to find the opposite answer. I point out that asking questions in different ways yields different results.
Ask a human — I encourage her to ask a friend or family member what they think, and to get curious about other people’s perspectives.
And after my own soul-searching into my values, I have come to believe that parenting in the age of AI is not about teaching your little one how to use the tool to make something great or be efficient; they will get that eventually. It’s about teaching your little one to still think for themselves and be creative with their thoughts, within a system that makes it so easy not to. It’s about preserving the small inconveniences that have been stripped away by same day delivery and instant answers. It is about creating space for intentional delayed gratification, for agitation, sighs, and eye rolls.
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