If it can explain the maths problem, help with an essay or find in seconds something that would otherwise take half an hour, of course they will use it. And they need to understand it. AI will be part of their education and almost certainly their working lives.
The more useful question for parents is:
Getting stuck is actually essential.
Dr Dana Suskind, a paediatric surgeon and child-development researcher, has a good analogy. If your child goes to the gym and somebody else lifts the weights, the weights still get lifted. Your child doesn’t get stronger.
The same applies to learning.
A teenager staring at an essay they cannot start may look as though they are achieving very little. But having to think, try something and eventually find a way through teaches them what to do when they don’t immediately know the answer.
AI can remove that experience in seconds.
Yes, the homework gets done, but your child may have missed the useful bit.
This does not mean AI has no place in learning. It does. Using it to explain something or challenge work your child has already done can be genuinely helpful. The concern is when it becomes the automatic response to challenge and difficulty.
Suskind makes this distinction between understanding AI and relying on it. Learning to use these tools is relatively easy. Developing the human capabilities they can replace takes years.
So watch what your child stops doing because of AI.
Suskind’s bigger concern is what happens when AI stops being a tool and becomes something a child relates to.
Real relationships involve other people who do not always understand us or respond as we would like. Things go wrong. We learn how to repair them. Suskind describes these “missteps, ruptures, repairs” as part of how strong relationships develop.
A chatbot offers something much easier. It is always available, can mimic empathy and asks very little in return.
For a teenager who is lonely or already finds relationships difficult, the appeal is easy to see. That’s precisely when parents should be paying attention.
Suskind’s concern is that children may become accustomed to something that feels like human connection without having to learn how to manage another human being.
Talk to your teenager about how they use AI. Not how much. How.
Find out what it is doing for them and notice where it may be taking over something they used to do themselves.
At Synapse we see regularly. Young people build confidence by experiencing themselves managing difficulty. If someone, or something, continually removes the difficult bit, they lose opportunities to discover what they can handle.
Its enviable that AI will become better at helping our children which makes the parent’s judgement more important.
What is AI doing for my child that they still need to learn to do for themselves?
