What Happened When I Decided To Stop Using AI For My Kid’s School And Daily Planning
The kitchen table smelled like burnt garlic bread last Tuesday night, crumbs of cheddar Goldfish stuck to the vinyl, and my 12-year-old Jax pushed his half-done social studies project outline toward me. “I can’t think of anything to write for the local activist section,” he said, and my hand was already reaching for my phone before I stopped. For six months, I’d used AI for everything: weeknight meal plans, PTA email drafts, brainstorming Jax’s essay topics, even writing thank you notes for his birthday gifts. It was my extra pair of hands, the thing that kept me from drowning when work picked up and my mom’s doctor appointments piled up. But that night, I closed the app, flipped my phone over, and said, “Okay. We’re not doing that tonight. Let’s figure this out on our own.”
Two weeks before that, Jax had turned in a personal narrative about his first camping trip that we’d brainstormed and outlined with AI. He got an A, but when his teacher asked him to expand on the part where he got lost and found his way back, he just blinked at her. Later, he told me he couldn’t even remember which part that was—AI had come up with it, it hadn’t actually happened to him. I’d brushed it off then, said it was just a bad assignment, but the moment stuck with me. I started noticing how often I reached for AI before I even tried to think. When I couldn’t remember how to fix a wobbly chair leg, I asked AI instead of looking it up in the old home repair book my dad left me. When I needed to plan a potluck for the PTA, I had AI sort the food sign-up list instead of doing it myself, and it put three people down for bringing dessert and no one for main dishes. It wasn’t saving me time, it was making me lazy about the small, unglamorous work of daily life. So I decided I wanted to stop. Not cold turkey forever, maybe, but long enough to remember how to do things ourselves.
Jax groaned when I said no AI that night. He said it would take too long, he’d never get it done before bedtime. But I remembered Mr. Lee, the retired high school teacher who lived three blocks over, who’d told me once he marched in sit-ins here in our town in 1963. I pulled out the paper phone book we keep by the landline (a leftover from when my mom lived with us) and found his number. Jax complained that calling a stranger was awkward, but I made him dial. Mr. Lee invited him over right then, even though it was almost 7 pm. Jax walked over, came back two hours later with ink-stained notebook paper, a sticky chocolate chip cookie in his pocket, and a dozen stories I’d never even heard about our town. He wrote his whole project around Mr. Lee’s experience, and when he presented it, he didn’t stutter once when kids asked him questions. He knew every part of it, because he’d collected it himself.
It hasn’t been all big, satisfying moments, of course. I made three small changes that have made it easier, that any parent can try without overhauling their whole life. First, I moved my phone out of the kitchen and into a junk drawer during homework and dinner time. Out of sight, out of mind—when it’s not sitting right next to my elbow, I don’t reach for it without thinking. Second, when we get stuck on something, we do a 10-minute pen and paper brain dump first, before we even talk about looking anything up. Jax writes down every bad idea, from “ask the mayor” to “look it up in the school library” and by the end, usually one of them makes sense. Third, I started a note in my actual paper notebook (not my phone) of local people and places we can go to for help: the librarian who knows everything about local history, the dad down the street who fixes bikes, my old art teacher who lives 10 minutes away. It’s easier to call a real person than I remembered, and most people are happy to talk to a kid who’s curious.
Last week, I almost caved. I had a work report due at 9 am, I stayed up until 10 pm finishing the data, and my eyes were burning. I opened my laptop, my finger hovered over the AI icon, and I almost let it write the opening paragraph for me. I ended up writing it myself, but I went to bed an hour late and spilled coffee all over my blouse the next morning. Jax forgot about a vocabulary quiz last month, and instead of AI generating a quick practice sheet for him, he had to write out 20 vocabulary words and make his own sentences. He got a B minus, and he was grumpy about it for an hour after school. Some weeks, we still run late, we still forget things, it’s still messy.
I don’t think I’ll never use AI again. If I need a list of kid-friendly hikes for a rainy Saturday, I’ll probably still search online, and maybe I’ll use AI to sort the list if I’m in a hurry. But what I’ve noticed is that the small moments of struggling through something on your own are the ones that stick. Jax still stops by Mr. Lee’s house once a week to walk his dog. I fixed that wobbly chair leg myself, using my dad’s old book, and it’s still standing three months later. We’re still figuring it out. Some days it’s slower, some days it’s more work, but it’s ours.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Happened When I Decided To Stop Using AI For My Kid’s School And Daily Planning