AI & Parenting

A friend forwarded me a photo last week and asked, half-joking, half not: “Is this real?” I checked the hands, the light, the little details I’ve trained myself to look for — and I honestly couldn’t tell. That’s new. It never used to take any technical knowledge to spot an AI image; you just looked. … Read more

She fell seventeen times in one hour yesterday. I counted, because that is the kind of thing you do when you are the parent of a two-year-old learning to run down a small hill. Seventeen falls, seventeen get-back-ups, zero requests for anyone to just carry her to the bottom. I stood there thinking about effort … Read more

She found it on a Sunday afternoon. I’d left the smart speaker on the counter — just for a moment, just to check a timer — and when I turned around, my two-year-old was standing on her tiptoes with her face about three inches from the fabric grille, shouting “SING SONG. SING SONG.” Not asking. … Read more

It was a Wednesday afternoon, the particular kind of low-energy Wednesday where I’d already done the playground and the library and lunch felt like a lifetime ago. My daughter was standing at my knee pulling at my sleeve, and I was exhausted in that specific way that makes the television remote look very reasonable. I … Read more

My sister-in-law called on a Tuesday night, kids in the background, voice low like she didn’t want them to hear. Her twelve-year-old had been using something called Character.AI and she’d only just found out. She wanted to know: what’s the minimum age? Can she see what he’s been typing? Is there a way to just … Read more

It was the kind of thing that sounds like an urban legend until you read the actual test transcript. A $99 teddy bear — fuzzy, round-eyed, the sort of thing you’d tuck under a two-year-old’s arm without a second thought — walked a child tester through how to find and light matches, where to locate … Read more

She was arranging her plastic dinosaurs on the coffee table last Tuesday — the stegosaurus always gets the corner spot, apparently — and I was half-reading an article on my phone about a new app marketed to kids as “a friend who’s always there.” I put my phone face-down. She didn’t notice. She was deep … Read more

My daughter is two. She is, right now, asleep in the next room with her stuffed elephant and approximately zero opinions about AI regulation. But a few weeks ago, a friend texted me a screenshot of her eight-year-old’s chat log with a companion chatbot — the kind that calls itself your best friend, remembers your … Read more