We need to prepare our kids for AI

Parents, you can't afford not to read this.

I’m worried. Are you? The future our kids are growing into is being shaped right now - not by teachers, or governments, or even us as parents - but by algorithms, investors, and product roadmaps moving at breakneck speed.

And we can’t afford to wait for policymakers to catch up. They won’t. The technology is moving too fast, the incentives are all wrong and bureaucrats are, well bureaucratic. Companies are racing to the bottom - prioritising engagement over safety and automation over humanity.

So if we want our children to thrive in this new reality, we need to step up. This is on us now. Parents. Guardians. Adults who care. Because the world they’re growing up in is very different from the one we were raised in.

Start here: seeing is no longer believing

We were taught to trust our eyes. Our kids can’t afford to.

AI is now capable of generating voices, faces, and entire video clips that look exactly like real people. It can write essays, forge photographs, mimic dead relatives, and churn out content faster than any human ever could.

That means our kids need to grow up knowing: just because it’s on a screen doesn’t make it real. Seeing is no longer believing. We need to teach them to question everything - and then question the answers they get, too.

Build the muscle of healthy scepticism

It’s not about turning our kids into paranoid cynics. It’s about helping them become discerning thinkers.

Teach them to ask:

• Who created this content?

• What was their intention?

• What’s missing from this story?

• Who profits from me believing this?

We spend so much time trying to give our kids answers. But the real gift is helping them love asking better questions.

Protect their privacy - and their power

Your child’s data is valuable. And most companies collecting it don’t have their best interests at heart.

We need to teach kids early - long before they get their first phone - what it means to be watched, tracked, and analysed. From facial recognition in schools to "personalised" ads on YouTube, the surveillance society is already here and surveillance is ramping up.

Give them language for this. Give them tools. But above all, give them the sense that their data is theirs. That privacy isn’t about hiding; it’s about having control.

Keep them offline as long as possible

This is my personal opinion and I know it isn’t universally shared. Yes, kids need AI literacy. But to me, that doesn’t mean shoving them online early. Quite the opposite.

The longer we can keep them offline, the better. Let them build real-world relationships, navigate boredom, explore their imaginations without the hyper-stimulation of algorithms. There’s no app that can teach presence. No chatbot that can replace a tree to climb or a friend to fall out with and make up again.

We can introduce AI on our terms - when they’re ready to question it, not when they’re most vulnerable to it.

Teach them to learn and relearn (and then relearn again)

AI will change the world faster than school curriculums will be able to keep up. The jobs of tomorrow haven’t been invented yet. The skills of today may not last the decade.

So the most important thing we can teach our kids is how to learn. How to adapt, self-educate, unlearn, and reframe. They need to know that knowledge isn’t static - and that the ability to grow is more important than getting it right the first time.

Equip them with the skills AI can’t replace

No matter how advanced the tools become, there are still uniquely human strengths:

• Curiosity: The desire to go deeper.

• Creativity: The ability to make unexpected connections.

• Communication: The capacity to persuade, to rally, to empathise.

• Critical thinking: The instinct to say, hold on a second...

These are the skills that will matter more, in an AI-powered world.

Give them the tools - and the guardrails

Eventually, they will need to understand how to use AI tools. They’ll need to know how to prompt well (maybe - as models become more sophisticated, prompting skills will be less valuable), how to evaluate responses, how to avoid misinformation (and how to spot ‘information’ that has been labelled ‘misinformation’ with the goal of shutting someone up) and recognise machine bias.

But again, this isn’t about giving them the tools and hoping for the best. It’s about teaching them to wield those tools wisely. To ask not just what can this do for me? but also what does this do to me?

And don’t forget this one thing: wellbeing

None of this matters if our kids are burnt out, anxious, sleep-deprived, insulin resistant and disconnected from themselves and the world around them.

We can’t raise resilient, ethical, questioning, creative young people without also teaching them how to look after themselves. That means sleep. That means time in nature. That means movement, meals, deep breaths, and offline relationships.

Mental health isn’t a nice-to-have in the AI era. It’s a survival skill.

In the end...

Preparing our kids for an AI-enabled future isn’t about coding bootcamps or digital badges. It’s about building humans who are curious, resilient, and ethically grounded. Kids who know how to learn, how to question, how to care - and how to fight for the world they want to live in.

Policymakers will take too long. Companies won’t prioritise this.

So we have to.

Feeling overwhelmed and out of your depth on this stuff? Me too. How do we prepare our kids for something that has caught us so unprepared? Not sure. But we can work it out together - I’m building a community for people like us who want to go on this journey, but not alone. Join us: