There are things AI should never be allowed to do for your children.

Last week, I presented an optimistic view of AI - how it works and the many ways it can support your child’s education. If you missed it, you can find it HERE.

There is no doubt that AI will make learning faster and improve education in many ways. But entrusting a non-living entity to educate your children is not without risks.

Indeed there are already growing danger signs - serious danger signs.

I didn’t want to write this article. But I see no one else talking about how to balance the power of AI with its inherent risks. There are companies promising that AI will not just change but save education. On the flipside, there are those penalizing and restricting children’s use of AI.

I don’t live in either of these camps. I’m not scared of AI - nor do I think it’ll save education. I do, however, understand it; I use it everyday, and my children use it nearly everyday.

But that doesn’t mean I trust it - far from it.

Used incorrectly, AI will be dangerous to your children.

Note I didn’t say could be - I said it WILL be.

Today, we’re going to critique the use of AI in education. I will rely heavily on my 2 decades in education and neuroscience and my husband’s similar pedigree in AI.

We’ll cover👇

What AI can’t—and should never—do in education
A Guide on how to introduce AI to your kids responsibly

Ready? Let’s go.

✨What AI Can’t - and Should Never - Do in Education

AI should never replace the hard work of thinking
Your brain only develops things it uses. Children who use passive screens have smaller and less connected brains (yes really). Children (like me) who have lazy eyes go blind without intervention. For more read The Ticking Clock of Children's Brains: Use It or Lose It Forever.

If your child always outsources thinking to AI, they will not learn to think. It’s that simple.

It will be tempting, very tempting, to skip the foundational knowledge. Why bother learning math, science, and historical facts if AI can deliver it to you in a moment? But you can’t THINK without this foundational knowledge. Can you speak a language without a basic understanding of what the words mean? No you can’t.

Real thinking requires wrestling with ideas, forming judgments, and reasoning through complexity. This muscle only develops through struggle, conversation, and reflection. AI can summarize, predict, and repackage other people’s thoughts, but it cannot think. If you want your child to think, you must teach them how—through conversation, writing, debating, and living.

Your child’s brain must be challenged to memorize math facts and poetry, work complex math problems, read sophisticated literature, and write persuasive essays so that they can THINK independently as an adult.

You can use AI to build the foundational elements of a child’s education (as I outlined last week), but never use it as a tool to replace the process of thinking. We’ll go deeper on how to do this in the parent guide.

AI can’t tell the truth and must never be trusted as a resource
AI will lie to you. AI companies call this “hallucination” but it’s a bit more nefarious than that. Most bots can’t say “I don’t know,” so if you ask a question it doesn’t have data for - it will MAKE UP AN ANSWER. AI experts are working day and night trying to fix it, but there are many that think it’s an unsolvable problem.

Here’s some insider knowledge for you: Most large companies are looking into hybrid solutions because they no longer think AI can function on it’s own. In all likelihood, AI is going to become an add-on to more traditional code that doesn’t lie.

You need to understand this nuance as you use AI to teach your children! Use AI for what it’s good at and not for what it can’t do.

Everyone is using AI like Google - but that’s dangerous too. Al will hallucinate websites, ideas, connections that don’t exist. Moreover, if you tell it it’s wrong, it will agree with you and change its ideas to match yours. It’s designed to be this way.

You must teach your children how to find real resources - granted an increasingly tricky task these days - but they must know how to tell if something is valid or not. YOU must teach them this.

Most importantly, you need to teach your children to be skeptical. Never trust a computer to tell you the truth.

AI has no morals, no values. It’s not trust-worthy and shouldn’t be treated as such.

PS. If you are feeling bad about the AI right now, you need to check yourself. It’s not alive. We don’t let our children call Alexa by it’s name. It is an “IT” not a “her.”

AI can’t change how the brain develops
Before puberty, the brain is exploding with new connections. Kids need exposure to a wide range of sensory and intellectual experiences—building, drawing, reading aloud, playing outside—so those connections can take root. Much like screens reduce brain size and connectedness, over-reliance on AI in the early years risks thinning cortical development, leaving fewer pathways for creativity and originality later on.

After puberty, the brain begins pruning—cutting away unused connections. That means what your teenager does or doesn’t practice really matters. If they only practice outsourcing their thinking to AI, they’ll wire their brains for dependence instead of originality.

Children’s brains are special - really special. But it doesn’t last. YOU deciding to integrate AI into your life to make work easier is VERY different from your child doing so. Unless you are younger than 25, your brain is already fully developed. Children’s brains aren’t as resilient as everyone says. Abuse, neglect, and sensory deprivation (like that occurs with screen usage) lasts a lifetime. We’ll talk about best practices and when to introduce AI and how in the guide.

AI only works when there is a clear right answer.
Why is it that the vast majority of AI bots and programs are in math? Math isn’t ambiguous. There are clear right and wrong answers. AI excels at drilling skills like this—math facts, spelling, vocabulary, grammar rules, historical dates, and science facts.

These are important—critical, even—but they are the foundation, not the end goal of education. Real education is what comes after: building ideas, innovating, searching for meaning. AI can’t teach that.

AI should never tell children what matters, or why they exist.
Education is about so much more than facts and figures. It’s about raising future leaders who are brave, kind, and virtuous. A child’s spiritual and emotional life should remain human work.

It takes a parent, a mentor, a teacher, a community to awaken a sense of wonder, to cultivate courage, to help a child wrestle with life’s big questions. Giving this over to AI will lead to disaster.

AI should never become our children’s confidant, mentor, friend, or moral compass.
You may think this is hyperbole, but there are ALREADY reports of people treating AI as friends leading to disastrous life-threatening results including ChatGPT suggesting suicide to teenagers (reference). Kids already face loneliness and isolation; giving them a machine as a substitute for community will only make it worse. Children need real friends, real mentors, real community. They need breathing humans to model how to live, love, and thrive.

If you remember ONE thing from this article, let it be this👇

🔥AI is powerful, but it is not a guide, a friend, or a source of meaning. Your child’s brain still learns the same way it always has—through effort, relationships, memory, logic, and reflection.

AI can lighten your load, spark ideas, and provide resources—but the work of forming a child’s mind, heart, and soul? That remains YOUR work - never let it go.

Below is a guide to help you use AI wisely including how and when to introduce your children to AI based on neuroscience and how the brain learns.

AI is here to stay. Used wisely, it can be an incredible tool in your child’s education. Used poorly though, AI can create shortcuts that rob kids of de learning, critical thinking, and the ability to derive meaning in this crazy world.

Below is a guide to help you navigate this strange new world.

We’ll cover

How to Use AI Programs Like a PRO (Spoiler: you can’t use just one)
When & How To Introduce AI Based on Brain Development

How to Balance Out AI’s Shortcomings

OK, Let’s go!

✨A Parent’s Guide to Using AI in your Kids’ Education

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✨What AI Should NEVER Do For Your Kids (Part…

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