What Happened When I Decided To Stop Using AI For My Kids’ School And Homework
The crumpled science project outline landed on my kitchen counter at 8:47 on a Tuesday, next to a sticky apple juice box and the stack of field trip permission slips I still hadn’t signed. My 12-year-old Jax leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and said, “Can you just ask it what to do? This is stupid and I’m tired.” I reached for my phone, thumb already moving toward the app I’d relied on for six months, when I froze. I’d been asking that same question for everything lately, and I suddenly realized I was tired of it too.
I went back to part-time remote work six months ago, after eight years of staying home with my two kids. Between my deadlines, my 8-year-old’s weekly Brownies meetings, Jax’s soccer practice, and the volunteer newsletter I write for the elementary school, I was drowning in small tasks that ate into my evening. A friend suggested the tool would cut my work in half, and at first, she was right. I used it to check Jax’s algebra homework (I haven’t done systems of equations since 2004, I wasn’t about to relearn it at 10pm), draft newsletter blurbs about class field trips, and brainstorm quick snack ideas for the fall party. It saved me hours every week, and for a while, I thought it was the best parenting hack I’d ever found.
That Tuesday, Jax was supposed to design a small community garden for his 7th grade science project. He’d been staring at a blank page for 20 minutes, and his first move wasn’t to list what he liked to grow, or what would grow in our zone, or even to complain that the assignment was dumb—it was to ask me to pull it up. When I asked him what he wanted to put in the garden, he just shrugged and said “Whatever it says is good.” That’s when it clicked. The tool wasn’t just saving me time anymore. It was doing the messy, small, important thinking for both of us. Jax wasn’t learning how to work through being stuck; he was learning how to get a perfect answer without doing any of the work. I wasn’t writing a newsletter that felt like our class’s newsletter; I was publishing generic paragraphs that didn’t mention that Mia’s goat ate her popcorn on the pumpkin trip, or that Leo won the three-legged race even after he dropped his partner. All the small, human stuff got sanded down to something neat and meaningless.
That night, after Jax went to bed, I decided I wanted to stop. I didn’t want to delete my account entirely— I’m not a purist, and sometimes I still need a quick draft when a work deadline hits last minute— but I wanted to stop reaching for it first. I made a few small, concrete changes that first week. I moved the app from my home screen to a random folder on the last page of my phone, so it takes three extra taps to get to it. That small change makes me pause before I open it, more often than not. For homework, I made a new rule: if Jax is stuck on any assignment, he has to write down at least three of his own ideas before we talk about looking up any outside help. For the newsletter, I blocked 10 extra minutes every Friday afternoon to jot down the silly, specific things the kids tell me about their week, instead of drafting the whole thing in 2 minutes. For Jax’s algebra homework, I emailed his teacher and explained I can’t always catch the mistakes I don’t remember how to solve, and asked if Jax could check his own work against the odd answers in the back of the book and bring any questions to class the next day. She wrote back saying that’s actually what she encourages anyway.
The first two weeks were messy. Jax complained constantly that homework took twice as long. I missed a 10 minute work deadline once because I spent 20 minutes brainstorming class party snacks instead of pulling a pre-written list. Jax’s first essay after the new rule had three typos and an off-topic paragraph about his dog, but when he turned it in, his teacher commented on how much his own voice came through. For the community garden project, he ended up ditching the perfect soil mix and layout a generated answer would have given him, and decided to plant pumpkins for the elementary school’s fall festival and sunflowers to feed the bees, after he remembered my younger daughter’s bee unit from the year before. He brought the project board to her class to show it off, and spent 15 minutes answering questions from the first graders. That’s something he never would have done with a pre-made project.
I’m not anti-technology, and I don’t think the tool is some big evil that’s going to ruin childhood. I still pull it up sometimes when I’m really overwhelmed and out of time. Last week, I caught Jax trying to pull it up on his tablet to finish a book report before bed when we’d forgotten about the deadline. We sat down, pushed the tablet away, and he wrote it himself, even if it meant staying up 15 minutes late. It wasn’t perfect, but he talked about that book at dinner for 20 minutes the next night, something he’s never done with any of his other school assignments.
It’s still a work in progress. Some nights I’m exhausted and I still think about how much easier it would be to just let it handle it. But so far, the extra 10 or 15 minutes a day, the messy typos, the bad first ideas, and the silly specific stories in the newsletter are worth it. It’s not neat, it’s not perfect, but it’s ours.
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