Children and AI: What Every Parent Needs to Know Right Now
A few weeks ago, my son asked our home assistant what the fastest animal on land was. It answered instantly. He nodded, satisfied, and moved on. My daughter, meanwhile, was upstairs using an app that had quietly adjusted its reading difficulty to match her pace — without her noticing, without me noticing, without anyone making a decision about it. Neither of them typed a search term. Neither of them opened a browser. And neither of them thought of it as using artificial intelligence. But that is exactly what it was. If you have children at home, this is almost certainly already happening in your house too. According to a May 2026 survey of over 1,000 US parents conducted by Lurie Children’s Hospital, 34% say their children are already using AI tools — with an average starting age of ten. But that number almost certainly undercounts reality, because it does not include the AI that children encounter without anyone realising it is there. This post is not about whether to let y...