The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Our Kids’ Futures
Key Takeaway
- AI tools in education offer personalized learning and efficiency benefits, but risk reducing critical thinking when students rely on instant answers.
- Over-reliance on AI may hinder creativity, problem-solving skills, and independent thinking as students become consumers rather than creators of ideas.
- Future success requires four skill categories: cognitive, interpersonal, self-leadership, and digital literacy.
- Parents can prepare kids by nurturing curiosity, practicing metacognition, and creating open-ended projects that encourage experimentation and iteration.
- Human skills like emotional awareness, ethical reasoning, and collaborative problem-solving become more valuable as AI handles routine tasks.
- The best preparation for future success focuses on low-tech approaches: following children’s interests, having conversations, and trusting their intrinsic learning abilities.
We’re living in what many are calling the age of AI, and it’s moving faster than most of us expected. Just as our parents couldn’t imagine social media when they were young, we’re watching our world transform in ways we never anticipated.
Companies are already using AI to screen job applications and help call center employees respond to customers. Students are using it for research and homework, and parents even use it to get answers to parenting questions. (Just be careful to check its answers against your own values – I’ve found it pretty hard to ‘break’ it of the habit of recommending rewards and punishments!)
If you have kids under 10, they’re going to need a different set of skills to thrive in a world where technology is becoming ever more embedded in our daily lives. Even if the basic idea of working for pay doesn’t change completely by the time they’re adults, the landscape they’ll be working in certainly will.
So how do we prepare our children for this AI-integrated future while making sure they don’t lose the uniquely human skills that will matter even more in the years ahead?
How Is AI Affecting Our World and Our Kids
The speed of AI’s expansion caught many of us off guard. While tech companies have been working on artificial intelligence for decades, the public release of ChatGPT-3 in November 2022 marked a turning point.
Suddenly, everyday people could interact with AI using natural language. They could ask it to refine answers and get responses that pulled information from multiple sources rather than just providing a list of websites to visit.
For our children, this integration is happening in ways that are totally different from what we experienced. Voice helpers like Alexa and Siri answer toddlers’ questions about dinosaurs or play their favorite songs. YouTube’s computer brain learns what gets a three-year-old excited and shows them more videos just like it.
Smart toys can understand what kids say and change how they respond based on how old the child is. Now AI companions offer something even more appealing: relationships without the messiness, unpredictability, and occasional hurt feelings that help children develop social skills.
These early experiences with AI aren’t big or obvious. A four-year-old asking Alexa to play “Baby Shark” for the hundredth time isn’t thinking about computers being smart. They’re just talking to something that always responds when they speak. But these simple talks are teaching kids that technology can understand them, talk back to them, and even guess what they want.
This creates a fundamental shift in how children relate to technology. While we had to learn to work around technology as it became available, our children are growing up right alongside AI systems that are learning to work around them. They’re developing expectations that technology will be intuitive, responsive, and personalized.
For parents, this creates a unique challenge. We’re trying to prepare our children for a world that’s changing so rapidly that we can’t fully predict what it will look like by the time they’re adults. The skills that served us well in our careers may not be the ones our children need most.
When the world our children are growing up in is fundamentally different from the one we knew as kids, our parenting approaches must also evolve accordingly.
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Education
Artificial intelligence is changing how students learn, how teachers teach, and how schools work. As AI tools that adapt to each student’s learning pace and identify struggling students early come into classrooms, teachers’ roles are evolving from information delivery to individualized coaching.
How is AI being integrated into schools?
AI is already part of many areas of education. There are learning programs that change to fit each student’s needs. Computer tools grade papers so teachers don’t have to spend hours doing it. In colleges, AI helps make class schedules, chatbots answer student questions, and computer programs can spot students who might need extra help before they fall behind.
Schools are beginning to experiment with tools like:
- AI-powered tutoring assistants (e.g., chatbots available 24/7)
- Automatic essay grading platforms
- Speech-to-text and translation tools for neurodivergent learners
These systems can help streamline administrative work and allow teachers to focus more on human connection, mentorship, and guidance.
What are the benefits of AI in education?
AI offers several advantages across teaching and learning:
- Personalized learning: AI tailors content to each student’s pace, strengths, and needs. This is difficult to do in large classrooms with lots of kids.
- Accessibility and equity: Students with disabilities or language barriers can access learning in more flexible ways (although AI tools can also exacerbate inequality in other ways, discussed below)
- Real-time feedback: Students can find out right away how they’re doing, while teachers can step in earlier to help.
- Efficient workflows: Teachers and administrators can automate grading, attendance, and lesson planning. This frees up time for relationship-building and classroom innovation.
Does AI have a positive impact on education?
When used thoughtfully, AI has the potential to improve educational outcomes. It can foster deeper engagement, close learning gaps, and offer support that would be difficult to achieve with human resources at current funding levels.
But, experts in both K–12 and higher education say that people need to monitor how AI is used. AI should be used as a tool, not to replace teachers. It should make teachers’ jobs stronger, not get rid of them.
Negative Effects of Artificial Intelligence in Education
While AI in education sounds great, there are some downsides too. Using more computer tools makes people worry about keeping student information safe. There’s also concern that kids might lose important skills like critical thinking and emotional intelligence. As schools use more AI systems, we need to ask not just what AI can do, but what it might accidentally take away from learning.
How does AI negatively affect critical thinking skills?
AI affects critical thinking when these tools can do the mental work that builds strong thinking abilities. When students can ask AI for answers instead of working through problems themselves, they miss important chances to learn logical reasoning and how to solve problems step by step.
Think about what happens when a child gets stuck on a math problem. Usually, they might try different ways to solve it, make mistakes, and slowly figure out the answer. This process builds strength and teaches them to break big problems into smaller pieces they can handle. But when AI can give the answer right away, why work through that learning process?
Research from McKinsey Global Institute shows that logical reasoning is one of the most important skills for future success. This means being able to make logical conclusions based on facts and find the strong and weak parts of arguments. But if students get used to having AI put information together for them, they may never learn how to think critically about sources, spot unfairness, or build their own well-thought-out arguments.
What are the disadvantages of AI in academic performance?
The negative effects of artificial intelligence in education extend beyond individual assignments. When students rely on AI for writing, research, and problem-solving, they’re basically letting it do the cognitive work that builds academic competence.
There are students who can make great essays with AI help but have trouble sharing their own ideas clearly when talking. They’ve learned how to ask AI the right questions, but they haven’t built their own voice or learned to think through big ideas by themselves. This can give them the idea that they’re more skilled than they really are, and it doesn’t help them in real life when they need to think quickly.
What is the negative impact of artificial intelligence on learning?
Perhaps most concerning is how AI may hinder the development of creativity and original thinking. When students can generate ideas, essays, and even art with AI prompts, they may never learn to sit with uncertainty, explore multiple possibilities, or develop their own creative voice.
Real creativity often emerges from constraints and challenges. When my daughter Carys spent days at Tynkertopia iterating on her bottle cap tree design, she was developing creative problem-solving skills that can’t be replicated by asking AI for craft ideas.
She had to work within the limitations of available materials, experiment with different approaches, and learn from failures. This kind of hands-on, trial-and-error learning builds both creativity and resilience.
AI’s ability to provide instant solutions can short-circuit this essential learning process. Students may become consumers of AI-generated content rather than creators of their own ideas.
The business-centric dangers of AI in education
When we look at how some companies think about AI and human growth, we see worrying patterns. McKinsey’s research, while big and detailed, shows a business-focused view that we need to fight against in education. When they say adaptability means being able to “easily adapt to new situations or ways of working, even when new skills are required,” they’re basically saying people should be able to change however companies want them to.
This reminds me of a member in our community whose boss was shocked when she said people shouldn’t have to work during painful menstrual periods. He saw her body as “a resource to be used for work” instead of seeing her as a human being. In the same way, AI-driven education risks treating children as future workers to be made better rather than whole human beings to be cared for.
When educational AI systems prioritize efficiency and measurable outcomes over deep learning and personal growth, we risk creating a generation that’s skilled at following AI prompts but struggles with independent thought, emotional intelligence, and creative problem-solving.
Inequality and access issues
AI in education also threatens to widen existing inequalities. Students who can use AI tools and learn digital skills will have big advantages over those who can’t. This creates a new kind of school inequality where doing well depends not just on normal resources but on having AI access and skills.
This gap is already causing brain drains, with top students leaving countries with limited computing power for places like the United States or Europe where they can access better AI resources.
There’s also a very real concern about data privacy. Educational AI systems collect lots of data about how children learn, what they have trouble with, and even how they feel. As people talking about safe AI have said, this information can be misused.
Over-reliance and lost skills
Perhaps most troubling is the risk of over-reliance on AI tools. When students become dependent on artificial intelligence for basic cognitive tasks, they may lose essential human capabilities that no amount of technological sophistication can replace.
We need to remember that the goal of education isn’t to produce efficient AI prompt writers, but to develop thoughtful, creative, empathetic human beings who can think for themselves and contribute meaningfully to society. If we let AI handle too much of the learning process, we risk raising kids who are good with technology but need help thinking on their own.
Given these concerns about how AI might impact learning, we need to think carefully about what skills our children will actually need to thrive in an AI-integrated world.
While there’s no crystal ball for predicting the future, recent research offers some guidance. McKinsey’s comprehensive study of future workforce skills identifies 56 specific capabilities that will become increasingly important as AI handles more routine tasks.
These aren’t just technical skills. They span everything from digital literacy to entrepreneurship. Understanding this framework can help us make more intentional choices about what to prioritize in our children’s development, even as we remain mindful that our goal isn’t to optimize our kids for workplace efficiency, but to nurture their full humanity.
What Skills Are Needed in the AI Era
McKinsey’s research identifies four main categories of skills that will be crucial for the future workforce. They call these 56 individual skills “DELTAs”. They’re a combination of distinct elements like talents, attitudes, and skills. The four categories are:
- Cognitive – thinking and processing skills
- Interpersonal – working with others
- Self-leadership – managing yourself and your goals
- Digital – navigating technology
Before diving in, it’s important to remember that not every child needs every single one of these 56 skills. Neurodivergent children especially might excel in some areas while struggling in others. Instead of focusing on weaknesses to bring them up to some minimum standard, we’re often better served helping children develop their natural strengths.
Skills needed in the AI era #1: Cognitive skills
Communication
Communication skills include active listening. This means being present and remembering what people say. It also means understanding why people do things. If we think about why people do things as needed, this connects to the work many of us do. We try to understand our own needs and find ways that meet everyone’s needs.
Other communication skills include asking good questions, telling stories, public speaking, and putting together lots of information. AI tools are getting better at putting information together. But people still do better at understanding context and small details.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking starts with logical reasoning. This means making conclusions based on facts. It also means finding the strong and weak parts of arguments. It includes understanding our own biases. The report says we should make sure biases don’t hurt our thinking, but I think understanding we have biases is more realistic and important. We need to make sure our inevitable biases match our values.
Structured problem-solving rounds out this category. This means breaking down complex problems like climate change into simpler parts. But having knowledge isn’t enough by itself. We also need communication skills, entrepreneurship abilities, and understanding of how organizations work.
One thing I notice about this list is how it focuses on logical, rational thinking. This is a very traditionally masculine way of seeing the world. Energy and passion show up later in business skills. But there’s little room for gut feelings, caring for others, or understanding right and wrong. Not every plan we come up with through logical reasoning is one we should use.
Mental flexibility
This category includes straightforward skills like learning ability, adaptability, and creativity. But I want to highlight the willingness to learn, not just the ability. Having the skill to learn something new doesn’t matter if the motivation is missing.
The adaptability skill description concerns me a bit. It talks about easily adapting “even when new skills are required”. This sounds like a business telling employees their skills are no longer needed, and they must learn new ones to stay valuable. This removes the idea of humanity from work relationships.
One skill that’s really important is moving knowledge from one place to another. I saw this recently when my daughter Carys moved knowledge from one video game to another. She remembered that fishing generated lots of points in the game Stardew Valley. When she started playing Sneaky Sasquatch, she used fishing to quickly get more points and buy a scuba diving kit. This transfer of learning helps children face new challenges without starting from scratch each time.
Planning and ways of working
Agile thinking means working iteratively and testing ideas to create solutions. This is hard to do in school because there’s usually one right answer that the teacher already knows. But we can value experimentation outside school.
I saw this in action when we visited Tynkertopia in Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s a converted house where each room has different creative supplies and tools. Carys spent time in the craft room making tree structures out of bottle caps and sticks. Over several visits, she iterated on her design. First she made a simple version, then a stronger one with plastic leaves, then focused on detailed bird’s nests. She was following her own creative ideas and learning to improve through trial and error.
Time management and work planning are other skills in this category. At Tynkertopia, I usually set a two-hour limit for our visits. So Carys had to plan her time and choose what she wanted to make first. For big projects that took multiple sessions, she learned to identify what needed to be done first and what could wait.
People with ADHD might struggle with some of these planning skills. We should support them in developing the skills they need for their own goals (rather than goals we choose for them). We also need to learn from the ADHD community about non-traditional ways of succeeding. For example, instead of making lists, some people with ADHD create schedules of repeated tasks. They use sensory, emotional, and spatial cues to remember next steps rather than looking at the next item on a list.
Skills needed in the AI era #2: Interpersonal skills
Mobilizing systems
This category starts with crafting inspiring visions. This means bringing to life an idealized future that inspires others. I see Carys doing this on a small scale at her not-school program. She regularly has eight kids following her around the farm pretending to be turkeys.
But not every child wants to be a leader. The world needs supporters and behind-the-scenes people too.
Organizational awareness means understanding both formal and informal procedures and politics. This was always challenging for me in consulting. I could handle the formal rules but struggled with the back-channel communications. We can help children notice not just official rules but informal ones. For example, how long to wait after texting about a playdate before calling to follow up.
Win-win negotiation appears in this category. We can reframe this as finding strategies that meet everyone’s needs. McKinsey actually phrases this well in another section. They say we should “consider the needs of other human beings to be as important as our own,” which is the foundation of all of my work.
Developing relationships
Empathy, humility, and sociability make up this group. I want to connect empathy with digital ethics from the digital category because I think we have work to do here. Empathy means understanding others’ feelings. Digital ethics involves understanding that digital interactions have ethical impacts like privacy concerns and algorithm bias.
McKinsey found that digital ethics had the lowest correlation with education. People with many years of school have about the same level of digital ethics as people with no education.
Middle schoolers in Pennsylvania impersonated their teachers on TikTok by posting disparaging and offensive videos. When caught, they posted an “apology”. They claimed it was just a joke and that teachers blew things out of proportion. These students showed no understanding of how their actions affected others. They actually made themselves the victims. The biggest failure here is in the children’s ability to see others’ needs as important as their own.
And middle schoolers are hardly alone; high school students have shared racist harassments, and and college students at the University of Georgia created and shared a video mocking slavery and using racial slurs, showing several people laughing as they repeated offensive phrases.
What McKinsey calls a ‘sociability’ skill bothers me because it assumes a neurotypical disposition. It assumes people should mask their neurodivergence to appear “friendly and sociable”. I’d rather focus on accepting people as they are, whether or not they fit traditional definitions of sociable behavior.
Teamwork effectiveness
This includes empowering others (which seems like delegation), motivating different personalities, resolving conflict, and fostering inclusiveness. I don’t think we need a separate skill for motivating different personalities if we already understand people’s needs. Needs are what motivate action.
The conflict resolution skill is valuable because it recognizes that disagreement is normal. We get into trouble when we assume disagreement means something’s wrong. We think it must be fixed immediately. Many of us didn’t learn healthy disagreement in our families. So, learning to see the different needs underneath conflict becomes crucial.
The inclusiveness skill definition seems to stop at giving everyone a voice. It doesn’t center historically marginalized perspectives. It’s like the difference between giving everyone the same box to stand on versus giving people the support they actually need to succeed.
Skills needed in the AI era #3: Self-leadership skills
Self-awareness and self-management
This category includes integrity, self-confidence, self-control, self-motivation, understanding emotions, and knowing your strengths. I find it slightly ironic that McKinsey emphasizes integrity given some of their past ethical challenges. But the pairing of integrity with self-confidence is important. Confidence without integrity leads to ethical failures.
The self-control skill defines ideal performance as never letting emotions interfere with work performance. This continues the theme of preferring rational approaches over emotional ones. But sometimes an emotional response is wholly appropriate. Imagine a manager discovering their company is engaging in corrupt behavior. An emotional response might be exactly what’s needed.
Even in normal situations, there should be some space for us to exist as emotional beings at work. We should be able to acknowledge when we’re having a hard day or feeling frustrated. We just need to own those feelings and work toward understanding everyone’s needs.
Understanding your own strengths is really important. Schools often focus on weaknesses rather than developing unique talents. At home, you’re not constrained by curriculum or what other children are learning.
Goals achievement
This category includes achievement orientation, coping with uncertainty, grit, ownership, and self-development.
When someone works on a self-chosen goal, they automatically feel ownership. When they’ve practiced making decisions about pursuing their goals, they develop confidence in their decision-making abilities. This is why children learn so much more about topics that interest them (and why they learn skills like planning, follow-through, and confidence much more easily when they do it through their own business, rather than when we try to teach them!)
Self-development means reflecting on performance and seeking feedback to improve continuously. When a child gets an assignment back two weeks later with a grade and brief comment, they learn little about what they did well or could improve because they can barely remember what they submitted.
The grit skill gives me pause. It’s often used to justify not addressing structural conditions that make life harder for some children. If we tell struggling students that grit and growth mindset are the answer, we’re making their challenges their responsibility to overcome. But really, it should be our responsibility to create a world that they don’t need as much grit to live in.
Entrepreneurship
This category includes breaking orthodoxies, courage, risk-taking, driving change, and having energy and passion. Neurodivergent people, especially those with ADHD, often have these skills in abundance! A 2021 study found that 29% of entrepreneurs had ADHD symptoms in childhood. This is compared to a general population rate of 2.5-6.7%.
The traits that make neurodivergent people successful entrepreneurs aren’t usually valued in childhood. Things like breaking orthodoxies and taking risks often get kids in trouble. Parents might try to redirect these qualities by saying things like “you’ll be a lawyer because you love arguing.” We often try to get children to stop moving their bodies so much. We miss chances to meet their need for physical movement while showing them they’re loved for who they truly are.
Skills needed in the AI era #4: Digital skills
Digital fluency & citizenship
This category includes digital learning and research literacy, evaluating online sources, and digital collaboration. Digital literacy goes far beyond simply being able to navigate the internet. The real skill lies in developing valid knowledge from the vast sea of digital information available to us.
Many parents rush to answer their child’s questions by cueing up YouTube playlists or doing quick Google searches. But this approach misses the most important part of digital learning. The facts your child learns about salamanders or fire trucks or how the universe was created matters much less than how they learn to find and evaluate that information.
Let’s say you’re trying to identify a salamander with your child. This becomes a perfect opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. What words should you put into a search engine? If you just type “brown salamander,” do you get anything useful? If all your results come from the East Coast and you’re in California, perhaps you should specify your location too.
Once you get some results, how can you trust them? Can you tell whether a site is trying to sell you something? Do you trust sites with a .edu domain more than a .com site? If you find a video, does it make a difference if the thumbnail shows a cartoon or a person in a suit?
All of these conversations are more important than the actual answer to their question. They form a habit of how we approach learning that will stick with our child far longer than any specific facts. As AI models get more sophisticated, the ability to critically evaluate sources will become even more essential. These are the kinds of issues we support you in understanding and navigating in the You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher workshop.
Understanding digital systems
This category includes cybersecurity literacy, data literacy, and smart systems. Cybersecurity literacy is critically important even for our youngest kids. If they’re playing online, they are probably our family’s weakest cybersecurity link. If anyone’s going to give out their name, address, and birthday, it will probably be our child.
Smart systems involve using smart devices to improve daily efficiency. But, I would add understanding the privacy trade-offs involved. Maybe having every entry to our home recorded is an acceptable price for a security system. But, having every conversation recorded might not be acceptable just to order groceries by speaking.
Software use & development
This category includes algorithmic thinking and programming literacy. We might think that because there’s a skill called Programming Literacy, we should sign our child up for coding camp immediately. But software developer Joe Morgan wrote a beautiful piece called “I’m a developer, I won’t teach my kids to code and neither should you.”
He observed that coding books for kids present coding as problems with correct solutions. But that’s not how programming works. Programming is messy. Programming is a mix of creativity and determination. Most children won’t actually go on to code in their careers (and most of the ones who do will probably use AI to do it!). Even if they do decide to be programmers, they can learn the syntax pretty easily if it’s a self-chosen goal.
But an understanding of quality and creativity are much more important skills than knowing how to code. Joe Morgan noticed this as his son observed their family making sugar cookies. His son watched the texture and color of the mixture after each ingredient, whether it was mixed evenly, and how to roll the dough thinly. They weren’t just executing steps. They were teaching the child about quality, which can only be passed on through physical experience.
In school, everything worth learning is learned by your brain through your eyes or ears. In the real world, children learn with their bodies. Joe Morgan’s son learned by closely observing the cookie dough using multiple senses. It’s through looking, listening to different sounds as ingredients mix, smelling the vanilla, touching the dough, and tasting the end product. Baking cookies is a whole body experience.
5 Ways to Build Skills AI Can’t Replace
With AI capabilities increasing rapidly, our kids need a different set of skills than what traditional education typically provides. But here’s what many parents don’t realize: you don’t need to sign your child up for coding camps or buy expensive gadgets to teach them specific skills. The most important preparation happens through everyday interactions at home.
Click here to download the 5 Ways to Build Skills AI Can’t Replace
How to build skills AI can’t replace #1: Start with mindsets, not modules
The most important thing you can do for your child’s future is to nurture their inherent curiosity. By doing this, you’ll also support them in learning how to learn, and in maintaining the motivation to do it.
Emphasize interest-led learning
Children don’t need more test prep. They need thinking tools, not just content. Following a child’s curiosity leads to deeper, more durable learning than any curriculum ever could. The willingness to learn matters more than the ability to learn. That willingness grows when children feel ownership over their discoveries.
Practice metacognition daily
Metacognition means thinking about thinking. It’s one of the most powerful learning tools your child can develop. This isn’t just about making a plan before starting an activity (although that’s part of it). Help your child analyze tasks, develop expectations for outcomes, determine their interest level, and estimate how effective they’ll be. Teach them to decide which projects deserve 100% of their focus and which can get by with less effort. This is actually a smart way to use energy.
Master the art of scaffolding
Pay close attention as your child works on tasks. When they give their sign that they’re working hard (e.g. pursed lips), sit forward but don’t say anything. Look out for their next sign that they don’t think they can do it (maybe they look up at you and seem tired or overwhelmed), offer a few words or guide their hands briefly.
As soon as they’ve got it, back off so they maintain ownership of the project. The key is to provide just enough support to help them without taking over the project.
How to build skills AI can’t replace #2: Create real-world learning opportunities
The future will need people who can adapt, iterate, and transfer learning across contexts. You can build these skills through everyday activities that feel like play.
Embrace open-ended projects
Set up spaces in your home where children can create, experiment, and iterate. This might be a craft corner, or a container to hold things they’re taking apart and putting back together. We’re giving children time and materials to follow their own creative ideas. Letting children lead their own learning is also helpful when they complain of boredom.
Practice project planning together
When your child wants to build a fort, bake cookies, or organize their room, use it as a chance to practice planning skills. What should happen first? What materials do we need? What will happen if we run out of something – do we have a backup plan? Do we have time to do this today? How will we know when we’re done? This kind of thinking can’t be taught through worksheets. It has to be practiced in meaningful contexts.
Highlight the learning process
Point out when they try something new, adapt their approach, or solve a problem creatively. “I noticed you tried three different ways to balance those blocks. That’s exactly what engineers do!”
How to build skills AI can’t replace #3: Build connection-centered tech skills
Technology should support relationships and curiosity, not replace them. We’re trying to help children develop a healthy relationship with technology that serves their learning and growth.
Model intentional tech use
Instead of reflexively reaching for your phone to answer every question, pause and think together first. “I wonder what kind of animal that is. What do you notice about it that might help us search?” They quickly learn through trial and error that typing “salamander” into a search engine isn’t going to help them identify the one in front of them. Typing “California orange salamander” gets you to a likely identification.
This approach teaches children to observe, hypothesize, and then use technology as a tool for confirmation. It’s not a replacement for thinking.
Practice privacy protection as a family value
Have age-appropriate conversations about what information is safe to share online and why. Help them recognize sites that might be trying to steal information and assess whether downloads can be trusted. Make sure they know not to share information about how they’re feeling with AI tools. We want to help kids develop good judgment around these decisions.
How to build skills AI can’t replace #4: Focus on human skills that AI can’t match
While AI gets better at processing information, humans excel at understanding context, building relationships, and making ethical decisions.
Encourage collaborative problem-solving
Instead of solving problems for your child, ask them to think through solutions with you. “The playdate got canceled and you’re feeling disappointed. I’m also feeling frustrated because I rearranged my schedule for this. What are some things we could do that might help both of us feel better and make good use of our afternoon together?”
Make ethics conversations normal
When you see examples of people being kind or unkind online, in the news, or in your community, talk about them. “What do you think about how those kids treated their teacher? How do you think the teacher felt?” These conversations build moral reasoning that will guide your child’s choices throughout their life.
Practice emotional awareness together
Help your child understand that emotions give valuable information about unmet needs. They’re not something to control or push down. Practice naming emotions when they come up. Explore what needs might be underneath them. Teaching children emotional awareness means helping them understand what they’re feeling, why, and what to do with it.
How to build skills AI can’t replace #5: Reframe “failure” as learning
The ability to adapt, iterate, and learn from mistakes will be more valuable than any specific skill or knowledge base.
Celebrate experiments that don’t work
When your child’s tower falls down, their recipe doesn’t taste right, or their plan doesn’t work out, focus on what they learned rather than what went wrong. Instead of saying “Good job trying!” or “That’s okay, you’ll do better next time”, try supportive questions like “What do you think would happen if we tried it this way?”
This approach helps children develop problem-solving skills while feeling genuinely supported.
Share your own learning process
Let your child see you struggling with new technology. Try different ways to solve problems together. “I’m having trouble with this app. Want to figure it out together?”
Value questions over answers
When your child asks “Why do birds fly south?” or “How do computers work?” resist the urge to immediately provide the answer. Instead, wonder together: “What do you think might be the reason? How could we find out?”
The future doesn’t need more children who can code. It needs more children who can think critically, adapt to change, work collaboratively, and maintain their humanity in an increasingly digital world. And the beautiful thing is, you can start building these skills today. You just need your curiosity, your attention, and your willingness to learn alongside your child.
Want to go deeper? Join the Learning Membership
Preparing your kids for the future of AI is about developing the skills that will truly matter: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creative innovation, and confidence.
The Learning Membership helps you nurture these essential skills by following your child’s natural curiosity. Instead of fighting to drag them through lessons they don’t care about, you’ll learn to identify what truly interests them and use that as a springboard for deep learning.
In the membership, you’ll discover how to:
- Find your child’s true interests (not just the random ones they announce when you ask)
- Identify the theories your child is building about how the world works and use these to guide their learning
- Become a facilitator who connects your child with the resources they need to answer their own questions
- Document your child’s learning so you can see their growth over time
- Help your child ask deeper questions that expand their understanding
- Support your child in solving problems that have real meaning to real people
Here’s what Parent Iris shared about being part of the Learning Membership:
“Being an immigrant in the country I live now, I don’t have the wide network of support that I did in my home country – and I know I can’t do this on my own. Through the membership, I’ve slowly let go of my own agenda, follow my child’s interest and give her the space and time for her own learning discovery. I feel confident that she will learn in her own time, in her own pace.”
When you follow your child’s interests, you don’t have to drag them through learning. They will want to learn.
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Final Thoughts
The future we’re preparing our children for isn’t some distant, unknowable thing. It’s shaped the choices we make today:
- how we respond to their questions
- what we prioritize in our homes
- whether we trust them to be active participants in their own learning.
The research tells us that success in the AI era won’t come from mastering the latest app or memorizing coding syntax. It will come from the very human skills that emerge when children feel seen, valued, and trusted to explore their world.
The beautiful irony is that preparing our children for a high-tech future requires us to focus on the most low-tech approaches: paying attention, having conversations, creating time and space for real experiences, and trusting that children are naturally wired to learn.
You don’t need to become an AI expert. You don’t need to overhaul your entire family life. You just need to start where you are, with what you have, following your child’s lead.
The future they’re heading into will be different from the world we knew. But, the path forward is the same one humans have always taken: staying curious, supporting each other, and never losing sight of what makes us human.
The question isn’t whether our children will be ready for the future. It’s whether we’ll be brave enough to let them help create it.
Frequently Asked Questions About Artificial Intelligence
1. How is AI affecting our world and kids?
AI is transforming daily life faster than expected. Children today interact with voice assistants, AI-powered videos, and smart toys that respond to their age and interests. This creates a fundamental shift where kids expect technology to understand and adapt to them, unlike previous generations who had to learn to work around technology.
2.How is AI used in early childhood?
Young children interact with AI through voice assistants answering questions, YouTube algorithms selecting videos based on preferences, and smart toys that adapt responses to the child’s age. These early experiences shape expectations that technology should be intuitive, responsive, and personalized to their needs.
3. What is the impact of artificial intelligence on education?
AI offers personalized learning, real-time feedback, and efficient grading systems that help teachers focus on relationships and mentorship. However, it also risks reducing critical thinking skills when students rely on instant answers instead of working through problems themselves, potentially creating superficial learning without deep understanding.
4. How does AI negatively affect critical thinking skills?
When students can ask AI for immediate answers, they miss opportunities to develop logical reasoning and problem-solving abilities. Instead of working through challenges step-by-step, making mistakes, and building mental strength, children may become dependent on AI to do the cognitive work that develops critical thinking skills.
5. What are the disadvantages of AI in academic performance?
Students may develop false confidence in abilities they haven’t truly mastered, like creating essays with AI help while struggling to express their own ideas clearly. This creates a gap between perceived competence and actual skills, leaving students unprepared for real-world situations requiring independent thinking.
6. What skills are needed in the AI era?
Four key categories emerge: cognitive skills (critical thinking, communication, mental flexibility), interpersonal skills (empathy, collaboration, conflict resolution), self-leadership (self-awareness, goal achievement, entrepreneurship), and digital skills (digital literacy, cybersecurity awareness, understanding smart systems). These complement rather than replace AI capabilities.
7. How to prepare your kids for AI?
Focus on nurturing curiosity and metacognition rather than teaching specific tech skills. Create open-ended projects, practice planning together, and emphasize the learning process over outcomes. Model intentional technology use and help children develop critical evaluation skills when researching information online.
8. What skills are needed that AI can’t replace?
Human skills like emotional awareness, ethical reasoning, collaborative problem-solving, and creative innovation remain uniquely valuable. Children need to understand that emotions provide information about needs, practice moral reasoning through real-world examples, and learn to adapt and iterate when facing challenges.
9. Why are people’s skills still important in the age of AI?
While AI excels at processing information, humans excel at understanding context, building relationships, making ethical decisions, and creative problem-solving. The ability to transfer learning across contexts, work collaboratively, and maintain emotional intelligence becomes more valuable as AI handles routine tasks.
10. How to prepare for a future with AI?
Start with everyday interactions at home rather than expensive tech programs. Follow your child’s interests, practice thinking about thinking together, create real-world learning opportunities, and focus on building human connections. The most important preparation happens through curiosity, attention, and trusting children’s natural learning abilities.
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About the author, Jen
Jen Lumanlan (M.S., M.Ed.) hosts the Your Parenting Mojo podcast (www.YourParentingMojo.com), which examines scientific research related to child development through the lens of respectful parenting.