Is AI Making Kids Worse At Sitting With Confusion? A Teacher’s Observation And Practical Tips
The hum of after-school hallway lockers was still loud last Wednesday when Javi slouched into my extra help math block, goldfish crumbs sticking to the sleeve of his hoodie. We pulled up the multi-step equations homework he’d left half-blank that afternoon, and within 45 seconds of staring at the first unsolved problem, he reached for his phone in his pocket.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked, not mad, just curious.
“Asking ChatGPT what I did wrong,” he said, thumb already hovering over the app icon. “This is confusing, and I’ve got soccer practice in 20 minutes. Why waste time?”
I held my hand out for the phone, and he handed it over with a dramatic sigh. That moment wasn’t new, not anymore. Over the past two years, I’ve watched more and more of my 7th grade students reach for an AI tool the second a problem doesn’t click immediately. It got me thinking about the question I’ve seen floating around teacher groups lately: is AI making kids worse at sitting with confusion?
I’ve seen it play out at my own kitchen table too, with my 10-year-old daughter, Lila, working on her elementary writing assignments. Last month, she was supposed to write a short paragraph about a time she overcame fear. She stared at a blank Google Doc for 90 seconds, twisting her hair around her finger, before she turned to me and asked if she could get AI to give her topic ideas. When I was her age, I’d spend 10 full minutes twisting my pencil into my notebook eraser, crossing out terrible ideas one after another, before landing on something that felt mine. That uncomfortable fumbling in the dark? It never occurred to me to skip it. Now, it never occurs to most kids that they have to sit through it.
A lot of the conversation around AI and kids focuses on cheating or bad grades, but this is a quieter, bigger problem. Sitting with confusion isn’t just about being “good at school.” That uncomfortable, antsy feeling of not knowing the answer is how your brain stretches. When you fumble through a bad first try, when you stare at a problem long enough to sort through what you do know vs what you don’t, you’re building the stamina to solve hard problems that don’t have clear answers later—problems at work, problems in relationships, all kinds of things. If you outsource that sorting to AI the second it gets confusing, you never get to build that muscle.
That doesn’t mean I’m calling for a full ban on AI, by the way. It’s a useful tool. I use it myself to make lesson plan rubrics. But what I’ve noticed, both in my classroom and at home, is that the instant access to answers rewires the impulse to run from discomfort. Kids get used to not having to feel that confusion, so it feels intolerable faster and faster.
I’ve tested a few small, low-friction changes that have worked better than I expected, no big technology overhauls required. The first one is the 10-minute rule. No matter what, no AI for the first 10 minutes of being stuck. That’s it. It’s not a ban forever, just a delay. When those 10 minutes are up, they can use AI to check their work or get a hint, but they have to put in the 10 minutes of sitting with the confusion first.
I also tell kids to do one small, specific thing during that 10 minutes: if you’re stuck on a problem, write down every single thing you know about it, even if it seems obvious. If you’re stuck on a writing or project topic, write down three bad ideas, even ideas that are totally silly or off-topic. It gives you something to do besides just sit there feeling frustrated, and more often than not, sorting through what you know leads you to the missing piece.
I gave Javi that rule the other day, and he grumbled, but he did it. Halfway through writing down what he knew about the equation, he stopped, tapped his pencil on the paper, and said, “Wait, I flipped the sign wrong, didn’t I?” He solved it two minutes later, and the grin he gave me was way bigger than any grin I’ve seen when he gets an answer from AI.
Another specific thing I share with parents and use at home with Lila is to name the discomfort out loud with a simple, specific line, instead of just telling kids to keep trying. Instead of saying “you can do this,” I say, “That weird stuck feeling right now is just your brain stretching. Let’s sit with it for two more minutes.” It’s small, but it turns confusion from a sign you should quit into a sign you’re actually doing it right.
For homework time at home, the easiest environmental adjustment I’ve found is to just keep phones in a basket on the counter for the first 20 minutes of work. You don’t have to ban phones all night, just that first stretch when kids are most likely to hit confusion and reach for the quick out without thinking. It removes the impulse before it becomes a habit.
It doesn’t work every time. Some days Javi still grumbles so much I let him check his AI answer five minutes in. Some days Lila hides her phone in her sweatshirt pocket and asks for ideas before the 10 minutes are up. I don’t think we’ll ever go back to a time when AI isn’t a tap away for kids, and that’s fine. But I also don’t think we have to let it take that messy, important part of learning away. Confusion isn’t a problem to fix as fast as possible. It’s the part where learning actually happens. Right now, that’s the lesson I’m prioritizing, one 10-minute block of stuckness at a time.
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