How to raise AI-ready kids

If we want our children to be AI-ready, the very last thing we need to do is to let them use AI.

That sounds counterintuitive, I know. Especially given the modern trend for intensive parenting and optimising children. All around us, AI toys and Ed Tech make huge promises about their enhanced developmental benefits – we’re all scared our children will fall behind.

And with entry level jobs being decimated by AI, surely the best way to help kids get ahead is to teach them AI skills?

Well, if they are 16 or 17, then maybe yes. If they are 6 or 7? Absolutely not.

Because young children build their brains best through real-world sensory experiences. We want young children’s play to be as wide and varied as possible so they can interact with the world and build flexible and adaptive brains. Whereas generative AI is inherently probability based and predictive, it tends to homogenise and narrow children’s experiences.

I’ll give you an example. if your child loves dinosaurs, you can buy an AI teddy bear which will make up a personalised story about dinosaurs for them – and it will then tell it to them as they cuddle it. That sounds sweet, doesn’t it? But when we think deeper, it’s actually impoverishing.

Compare that teddy bear experience to the social learning, the relationship-building and the productive discomfort of sitting with a real loving adult reading a book together that isn’t about their favourite topic – a story about fish or aliens. That’s where learning lies.

In fact, the more time children spend with conversational AI, the higher their risk of de-skilling. When children talk to AI, the AI creates an illusion of intimacy by aligning its vocabulary, phraseology and grammar to reflect back what it receives. This builds a false template in children’s brains of how an interaction flows and how a relationship feels – it degrades their human interpersonal skills.

And it is those human skills that will be our children’s biggest asset in the future workplace.

AI-ready kids need more human interaction, not more tech skills. We need to talk with them. Connect with them. Challenge them. Ask awkward questions with no clear-cut answers. Solve problems together. Let them get bored and experience friction in a world that doesn’t wrap around them.

Because the real competitive advantage isn’t giving children AI skills – it’s giving them what AI doesn’t have: human skills. The children who will thrive in an AI world won’t be those who learned to use AI earliest – they’ll be those who turned off the tech and learned to be brilliantly human.

Want to hear more? Book me to speak. You can also watch a video version of this article here.