AI Is Teaching Our Kids. What Are WE Teaching Them?

Our children are growing up as AI natives. Most of us are still figuring out what this means.

We’re no strangers to technological advances that quickly change how we live. But AI feels different. It arrived almost overnight, and suddenly it seems to be everywhere. It’s no wonder so many parents are wondering whether they should be excited, worried, or both.

This is why I wanted to talk with two people who spend their days studying how AI is changing childhood: Isabelle Hau, Executive Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, and Victor Lee, faculty lead for the Stanford Accelerator for Learning's initiative on AI and Education and a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Our conversation covered everything from AI literacy to algorithms, and it ultimately came down to this: parents don’t need to become AI experts, but we do need to become informed guides. And here’s how.

From Anxiety to Action

Victor began our conversation with a simple idea: AI is just a tool.

Like any tool, it does some things remarkably well and does other things pretty poorly. AI literacy isn’t about learning how to code or becoming a tech expert. It’s about understanding enough to help our children use these tools thoughtfully and responsibly.

This perspective helpfully shifts the conversation away from whether AI is good or bad and toward a much more useful question, given that it is everywhere: How do we work with it?

Victor suggested several practical places for parents to begin. Teach your children to verify AI-produced information before believing or sharing it, and model that habit yourself. When his own children tell him something they saw online, his first question is simple: “Where did you see that, and did you verify it?” Those everyday conversations teach children that asking questions is just as important as finding answers.

He also encouraged parents to become involved in conversations about AI at school, where many districts are still developing formal policies. Those decisions will shape how our children learn with AI for years to come, and parents deserve a voice in them.

Isabelle offered some of the most practical advice of all: stay curious. Many teenagers already know more than we do about using AI. If our first response is judgment, they’re less likely to tell us what they’re actually doing. Curiosity keeps the conversation going, and that conversation may be one of the most important parenting tools we have.

Learning how AI works is important. Understanding how AI is changing childhood may matter even more.

AI Is the Fast Food of Friendship

One of the most fascinating parts of our conversation involved how AI impacts social interaction.

Isabelle shared this statistic from Common Sense Media : More than half of teenagers have already used AI as a companion, and nearly one-third say those conversations may be more satisfying than talking with human friends. This is surprising, and frankly, a bit disturbing. If AI can feel like a friend, what role should it actually play in our children's lives?

Victor offered a helpful way for parents to think about this: AI companionship is the fast food of friendship. It’s quick, easy, and can be instantly satisfying. But like fast food, it fills you up without truly nourishing you.

AI companions are always available. They never interrupt, argue, or have a bad day. They tell you what you want to hear. For a child who feels lonely or socially anxious, that’s incredibly appealing.

But we all know that real friendships require patience, compromise, empathy, forgiveness, and repair. Those experiences help children develop the social and emotional muscles they’ll rely on for the rest of their lives.

Isabelle believes relational intelligence, our ability to build meaningful human connections, may become one of the defining skills of the AI era. Her latest book, Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education , provides a roadmap for building and developing those connections. As she pointed out in our conversation, children’s growing isolation didn’t begin with artificial intelligence. Families are smaller, schedules are busier, and children have fewer opportunities for unstructured time together. AI didn’t create that loneliness. It stepped into a space that already existed.

Both Isabelle and Victor noted that AI companions aren’t all bad; they could be a low-stakes place for children to practice conversations or build confidence before engaging with people in real life. But they should never become a substitute for real relationships.

So, rather than spinning out over chatbots, we should be making sure our children are getting enough practice building real relationships.

We work hard to nourish our children’s bodies. We should be just as intentional about nourishing their friendships by making time for face-to-face connection, physical activity, and experiences that stretch them socially, even when they’re a little uncomfortable. Those are the experiences that no chatbot can replace.

At the end of the day, our goal shouldn’t be to learn every new AI tool. It should be to stay engaged, ask better questions, and make sure technology expands our children’s world instead of replacing it. And this episode gives us a well-lit pathway to reach this goal.

Listen to Raising AI Natives: From Anxiety to Action with Isabelle Hau and Victor Lee wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on our YouTube channel. You’ll come away with practical ideas for talking with your children about AI, a clearer understanding of how this technology is shaping childhood, and greater confidence about your role as a parent in an AI world.

Thank you, as always, for being part of the Ground Control Parenting community. Thanks as well to Paramount for sponsoring this season of Ground Control Parenting, and to the Seneca Women Podcast Network for helping us bring these conversations to parents everywhere, and to DonorsChoose, our philanthropic partners for Season 8.

I’d love to hear from you: What conversations about AI have you had with your children? Have any of their answers surprised you?

Enjoy,