When Should You Worry About Your Child or Teen’s AI Use – and What Can You Do About It?

Here’s a pro tip from NPR: If you hear your kids talking about a chatbot as if it were a real friend, and/or see them spending too much time alone chatting with it, your parental alarm bells should be going off.

NPR reporter Lee V. Gaines talked with teen Nicholas Mukhbaatar of Sacramento, Calif., who heard – and listened to – his own internal alarm about ChatGPT.  He said that when he was 14 he was using the bot “for almost everything, like math problems.” He was amazed at first, but eventually realized there was a catch: “I realized it was just giving me an answer without helping me go through the actual process of learning.” 

Mukhbaatar’s journey is reason enough to read the whole article, but the story also provides excellent advice.

Suggestions include starting the conversation about AI early on (think elementary school), letting kids know AI can make mistakes, co-writing AI rules with your kids, and best yet, making time for real life, including playing sports and spending time with family and friends. With some teens falling in love with their ChatGPT to their great peril, it’s important to discuss safe and ethical AI use with your child as soon as possible.

Our kids might not always seem receptive, but, as parents, we often have a lot more influence than we realize. Said Marc Watkins, a University of Mississippi lecturer researching AI’s impact on education: “They’re not going to remember an ad from an AI chatbot. They’re going to remember a conversation you had with them. And that gives you a lot of agency, a lot of power in this.”

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