“My parents are addicted to AI”: what I see in my classroom
During indoor recess, I heard it for the first time, straight from the mouth of a seven-year-old.
“Everyone’s parents are addicted to AI,” Maya announced, lining up her colored pencils by length. The other kids at the table nodded—not in fevered agreement, but more like recognition. It was the way you’d nod if someone pointed out the weather you’d all been living under but hadn’t thought to name.
I’ve taught third grade for about a decade, and I have a quiet rule about listening in on kid talk. I wasn’t trying to spy; I was grading papers, and they’d forgotten I existed. I kept my head down.
“If you ask your dad a question, he just talks to the weird voice on his phone,” Maya said. “He doesn’t even look up anymore.”
“Yeah, it’s called ‘GPT’ or something,” said another boy, looking at his shoes.
“Whatever it’s called, it’s boring,” Maya said. “I asked my mom how she met my dad last week. She said she couldn’t remember, but she’d look it up when she got home. She never looked it up.”
That last line got under my skin more than the rest. A kid asking about her parents’ love story—the one history that exists only inside their two minds—and the response is to reach for a search bar. Even if a computer could find an answer, it wouldn’t be the version she wanted. She wanted her mom’s voice, a wrong detail, a laugh about the shirt her dad wore.
I didn’t have a spiritual moment at that desk, by the way. I still had papers. But I did think about how the word “addiction” changes when it’s applied to grown-ups. We talk a lot about screen time for kids. We hand out articles about limits, chores, sleep. But nobody hands out a pamphlet for the house where the adult is the one who can’t set the device down—except it doesn’t look like indulgence. It looks responsible. It’s the parent standing at the edge of the birthday-party bounce house, quietly composing a prompt. It’s the mother who asks the AI to generate a “fun fact” about her own child so she can sound interested at dinner.
The next afternoon I got a second look, at parent pick-up. A grandmother was waiting by the gate; her daughter (the actual parent) came up ten minutes late, a phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder. Her son Jonah had drawn a picture on a small scrap of folded paper and was pressing it into her hand.
“I made this for you,” he said.
“Hold on,” she said, not unkindly. “Just one second, I need to finish this.”
Jonah stood there while she finished. When she finally looked down, the phone still in her palm, the drawing had dropped to the sidewalk.
The AI part isn’t just a screen-time issue. It’s not the same as a parent watching television or scrolling Instagram in the same room. TV doesn’t talk back. A feed doesn’t wait for your question and then answer. But when a parent outsources their curiosity to a chatbot, there’s a new social cost. Kids learn what matters by watching what their grown-ups are interested in. If your child says, “Why is the sky blue?” and you say, “Good question—let’s look at it,” that models something. If you instead reach for the phone and wait for a paragraph, you model something else: questions are not to be sat with, they’re to be delegated.
That doesn’t make every use of AI bad. I have an account. I’ve used it to draft a more graceful response to a difficult family email. I’d be a hypocrite to say otherwise. But I’m also clear-eyed about what it can’t do. It can’t remember Maya’s mother meeting her father. It can’t hold Jonah’s drawing.
So what should a family actually do? here’s what I’ve landed on, from watching it happen.
Make a “no robots at the table” for at least one meal or one car ride a day. It doesn’t need to be a family-wide tech ban. Just a pocket of time where the only participants are humans. If a question comes up, you can say, “That’s a great one. I want to hold it for a bit—no cloud answers tonight.” It’s fine not to know. Modeling “I don’t know yet, let’s keep thinking” is one of the most powerful things you can do with a child.
For personal questions especially, let the child’s guess come first. Don’t type. Say, “What do you think? What’s your idea of how I met your dad?” You’ll be surprised what they remember and invent. It’s not just play; it puts you back in the position of the holder of family memory, not a user querying a database.
Third, when you genuinely don’t remember, say so—warmly. “I actually don’t remember,” followed by “but let’s sit together and I’ll tell you the version I imagine” beats a chatbot’s accurate paragraph every time. A child isn’t demanding perfect recall. They’re demanding presence. And we can always offer that.
I didn’t pick up Jonah’s drawing that day. The wind carried it under a car, and I let it go. I keep thinking about bringing it up at the next parent-teacher conference, but I haven’t decided yet. Maybe it’s enough that the kids at that table were able to name it out loud, surrounded by crayons. I’m not sure what the grown-up version of that conversation looks like. But I’m thinking about it. That’s where I am right now.
Because the kids I teach are already quieter around their parents’ devices. They wait. And I’m still figuring out what that waiting means, and what it will ask of the rest of us.
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