Part 3 of 5: Raising Children in the Age of Artificial Intelligence - Questions Every Parent Should Ask About AI
Five questions you can ask at dinner tonight, and why the point is the asking and not the answers.
The first two essays in this series were about what to teach. This one is about how to begin, and the method will feel backward because it asks you to stop teaching for a while and start asking. The parent who walks into this conversation holding a list of rules has already lost the room. The parent who walks in genuinely curious and willing to be taught gets everything. Children can tell the difference between interrogation and genuine interest, and they respond accordingly.
So, the most useful opening is not a warning but a request. Ask your child to show you their favorite tool and the best thing they have ever made with it. This does almost everything you need at once. It hands them the role of expert, which they will happily take, and it puts you in the unfamiliar and very productive position of student. Watch what they choose to show you, and watch what they are proud of, because that is where their real relationship with technology lives. A child showing off a project they care about will tell you more in five minutes than an hour of careful questioning ever could.
Once you are in, the question that opens the most ground is whether the machine has ever been wrong, and how they figured it out. The answer tells you something you badly need to know, which is whether it has ever occurred to them to doubt it. A child who can describe catching the machine in a mistake has already built the instinct that the previous essay was about. A child who looks puzzled by the question, who has never once considered that the confident answer might be false, has just shown you exactly where the next conversation needs to go.
From there, it is worth probing the edges of their trust, and the cleanest way is to ask what they would and would not rely on the machine for. Would they trust it with medical advice? Would they trust it with a secret? These sound like simple questions, and they are not, because the second one quietly reveals whether the tool has become something more than a tool. A child who would tell the machine a secret is telling you that it has crossed over from something they use into something they confide in, and that is a thread worth following gently rather than pouncing on.
Closely related, and less threatening to ask, is what they would never tell it. Most children have an instinct here, even if they have never put it into words, and asking the question is how the instinct becomes conscious. The point is not to extract a list of forbidden topics. It is to let the child discover that they already have a sense of audience, and to strengthen it by saying it out loud.
The last question is the one that matters most for school and for everything after it, and it works because it does not moralize. Ask when the machine has helped them learn something, and when it just did the work for them. Children know the difference. They feel it in their bodies, the hollow feeling of handing in something they do not understand against the solid feeling of having genuinely figured something out. Naming both, in their own words, does more than any lecture about honesty, because it locates the standard inside the child rather than the rule they are trying to outsmart.
What these questions have in common is that none of them has a correct answer that you are waiting to hear. That is the point, and it is easy to get wrong. The moment a child senses that you are fishing for a specific response, the conversation becomes a test, and they start telling you what you want instead of what is true. The value of these questions is not in the answers. It is a fact that asking them keeps you in the room, keeps the subject open between you, and tells you, week to week, where your child stands with a technology that is changing faster than either of you can keep up with.
You can use all this tonight. None of them requires preparation or expertise, only the willingness to sit down, ask, and listen longer than is comfortable. The conversation you start over dinner is not a single event. It is the channel you will need to open later, when something goes wrong, and your child must decide, in a hurry, whether you are someone they can tell.
You don’t need the answers. You need to be in the room when the questions come up.
Marty Crean
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