Hi Reader,

I think we’re getting the conversation about AI and parenting backwards.

The prevailing message to parents right now seems to be: be very, very careful. AI is dangerous for kids. Don’t let it replace human connection. Don’t outsource parenting to a machine.

Obviously, use common sense. But I increasingly think all this fear is obscuring what is, to me, a much bigger story: AI can be an incredible boost to parenting. It can help our kids become more curious, more creative, and better learners. It can help us make and do things with them that we simply couldn’t before. And I’m genuinely excited that my kids are going to grow up with it.

Which is why I’ve been so annoyed by a couple of AI-and-parenting stories making the rounds lately.

Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote about how his AI agent plans personalized recipes for him and his daughter to make together on weekends, orders the ingredients, and offers suggestions while they bake. This was held up as somehow bleak — another example of Silicon Valley inserting AI into a place where human connection should be.

But… they are baking together.

The AI hasn’t replaced the activity with his daughter. It has helped enable it. I’m not sure what precious parenting moment we think is being lost here. Would it be better if he spent 20 minutes scrolling Google for a recipe first?

Sam Altman got a similar reaction after sharing an AI use case he’d heard about: connect your family calendars, tell ChatGPT about your kids’ interests, and have it make a personalized podcast for the drive to school — maybe talking about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, another kid’s upcoming birthday, plus some news. People immediately responded with versions of, “What if you just talked to your children?”

Again, I find this interpretation bizarre.

If I did this with my kids someday, I wouldn’t imagine silently putting on their robot podcast so I could avoid speaking to them for the next 20 minutes. I imagine us listening to it together. Something about a soccer game prompts a conversation about the game. A news story leads to questions. Something one kid is interested in becomes something all of us learn about.

That sounds more engaging to me, not less. It’s certainly more personalized to our family than whatever generic podcast or music we might otherwise have put on.

I think people are so primed to hate AI that they see the machine and automatically assume it is replacing the human. But that’s not how I experience this technology at all. I experience it as an enabler — something that expands what I can learn, what I can make, and eventually what I’ll be able to explore with my kids.

Two values I care a lot about in our family are curiosity and creativity, and AI is an accelerant for both.

Take curiosity. For essentially any subject I become interested in now, I have a personalized tutor sitting right there. I can ask one question, then the follow-up, then the dumb question I would have been embarrassed to ask someone, then go five layers deeper because something in the answer sparked another thought. I don’t have to know what to Google or sift through a bunch of search results. I can just follow my curiosity wherever it goes.

I think that is an extraordinary thing for learning, and I’m so excited for my kids to have it.

Ayla is still too young for this now, but I can imagine her getting obsessed with something in a few years and being able to follow that interest as far as she wants. Kids are already naturally curious. The limiting factor is often us: we don’t know the answer, we don’t have the time to research it right then, or we give them our best two-minute explanation and move on.

What happens when the kid who keeps asking “why?” has access to something that will happily keep answering — and explaining it differently, and going deeper — for as long as she wants?

That seems like a boon for curiosity, not a threat to it.

Then there’s creativity, where I’m already seeing the effect constantly in my own life.

I’ve always thought of myself as creative, but I’m not particularly skilled at many of the things required to turn my ideas into actual artifacts. I’m not an illustrator. I’m not a graphic designer. I don’t compose music. There have always been plenty of things I could imagine but couldn’t actually make.

That barrier is disappearing.

I can make art prints for my kids’ rooms. I can create games and maps. The other day I wanted to invent a song for Louis, so I brainstormed it with AI and made something I never would have been able to make on my own. I can take some little idea that exists only in my head and turn it into a real thing for my family.

These aren’t things AI thought of instead of me. They are things I thought of and can now actually execute.

Before AI, making something like this would have meant spending money to delegate it to someone who had the skill, learning a new skill myself, or — most likely — just not doing it. The idea would have stayed an idea. Now I can actually make the thing.

And as my kids get older, I’m excited for them to have that same superpower. Want to invent your own game but don’t know how to code? Great. Make one. Want to design a map of an imaginary world? Let’s do it. Want to create a song, a story, an art print, a recipe that doesn’t exist yet? There is suddenly much less distance between the idea and the thing.

To me, that is incredibly empowering.

Of course I don’t think AI needs to mediate every experience my kids have. They should play outside. They should be bored. They should draw pictures without AI and make things that are terrible and struggle through learning skills and spend enormous amounts of time interacting with actual humans.

But “kids need experiences without AI” and “AI is dangerous for kids” are two very different claims, and I worry we are collapsing them into one.

The safety conversation in particular feels out of proportion to me.

People ask whether I’m worried about uploading a photo of my child to an AI, or letting an AI know things about my family, or eventually letting my kids use these tools themselves. And yes, there are reasonable precautions to take. There are things I wouldn’t share. There are products I wouldn’t trust. There are ways people can misuse this technology.

But from what I’ve seen so far, the level of fear bears little resemblance to the actual risk.

The truly bad cases I’ve encountered are both rare and, in many instances, versions of bad behavior that were possible before generative AI. People could manipulate photographs before AI. People could deceive children on the internet before AI. New technology can make certain harms easier, and that is worth taking seriously. But “a bad thing can happen” cannot be the end of our analysis as parents.

We don’t apply that standard anywhere else.

Driving a car with your child is genuinely dangerous. Kids die in car accidents. And yet we still drive our children places because the benefit of being able to participate in the world massively outweighs the risk. We mitigate it: car seats, seat belts, safe driving. We don’t decide that because cars can cause harm, responsible parents should avoid cars.

I don’t think AI is anywhere near as dangerous as driving. But I think the same risk-benefit framework makes sense.

For me, the benefits already dramatically outweigh the risks. AI makes me more curious and more creative. It gives me abilities I didn’t have before. It helps me make more personalized things for people I love. And I believe it has enormous potential as a learning tool for my kids.

In fact, I increasingly think there is a risk on the other side that we aren’t talking about enough.

AI is going to matter. Our kids are going to grow up in a world where knowing how to work with these systems — how to ask good questions, how to judge their answers, how to create with them, how to recognize when they’re wrong, and when not to use them — is an important form of literacy.

If we convince parents that good parenting means keeping AI at arm’s length, we may end up raising kids who are less prepared for the world they’re actually going to inhabit.

I would much rather raise my kids with this technology. Teach them where it is useful. Teach them where it isn’t. Teach them to retain their judgment. And, most of all, show them how it can expand what they are capable of learning and creating.

Maybe I’ll feel differently as they get older and I see problems I haven’t anticipated. That’s possible.

But from where I sit now, I don’t feel scared that my kids are going to grow up with AI.

I feel incredibly lucky that they will.

Mollie

P.S. When I’m back from maternity leave, I’m going to start an AI Arts & Crafts series. The first one is Wednesday, September 16 at 12:30 PM Pacific. Sign up here.

Mollie Amkraut Mueller

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