AI Can Know About Your Child. It Cannot Know Your Child.
There is a real temptation in parenting to want the answer before our child asks the question. I understand that. When your first baby arrives, you suddenly realize there are now three people in the house, and one of them cannot explain anything. The baby cries, and you start running through the list. Hungry? Wet? Tired? Too hot? Too cold? With enough information, maybe I can solve this. Artificial intelligence now offers parents an extraordinary amount of that information almost instantly, and the technology is impressive. But parenting has never been simply an information problem.
AI can be genuinely helpful when it serves relationships. If your granddaughter loves soccer and you do not understand offsides, ask it to learn the rules. Then go sit beside your granddaughter and say, “Teach me what I am watching.” Technology can help us become more curious about the people we love. The problem begins when we confuse gathering information about someone with actually knowing them. A search can teach me soccer. My niece teaches me why soccer matters to her.
That distinction becomes especially clear with children. AI can give a parent a list of reasons a baby may be crying, but it does not know that this particular child settles when held one way and becomes furious when held another. It can describe developmental patterns, but it does not have the accumulated history of thousands of ordinary moments with your son or daughter. Parents know the tired face, the nervous laugh, the silence that means something is wrong, and the tone of voice that sounds normal to everyone else but not to us. The deepest parental knowledge is not stored in facts. It is formed through presence.
Information Should Help Us Move Toward Our Kids
There is nothing wrong with learning before entering a conversation. In fact, humility may require it. Sometimes adults avoid children’s interests because feeling ignorant is uncomfortable. It is easier to dismiss the game, hobby, music, or technology than admit, “I do not understand this.” AI can remove some of that barrier. Use it. Learn enough to ask better questions. But then put the device down. Children need to hear our curiosity in our own voice. “Tell me why you love this.” “What should I watch for?” There is something powerful about a child realizing that an adult did not fake expertise but cared enough to learn.
Dr. Kathy called knowing students a teacher’s superpower, and I think the same is true for parents. AI may know an enormous amount of data about a child. It may know what shoes they search for, what videos they replay, which subjects hold their attention, and what time they usually open an app. But information gathered from behavior is not the same as love. Human relationships carry mind to mind, soul to soul. It includes correction, delight, disappointment, forgiveness, shared history, laughter, sacrifice, and the ability to say something difficult because we care where this person is going.
That kind of knowing can be remarkably quiet. One of my children once wrote something for Father’s Day that essentially said I was a good dad because I know my kids. With eight children, that landed pretty deeply. Kids do not usually announce this in dramatic ways. They do not hop out of the car at school and yell, “Goodbye, Dad! Thank you for maintaining an accurate relational understanding of my individual temperament!” We usually see the evidence more subtly. They tell us something they did not have to. They ask for help. They let us see disappointment. They come into the room and stay.
AI Is Loud About Knowing Us
Technology tends to announce its knowledge in different ways. It changes the feed. Recommends the shoes. Serves the next video. Predicts what we want to hear. The system continually communicates, “I know you.” And because the personalization is immediate and impressive, human knowing can feel comparatively small. A parent may repeat an old story. AI has something new. A grandparent may need the rules explained again. The algorithm already knows the interest. That is why children need discernment. Personalized does not necessarily mean personal.
Parents should help kids understand that tools are designed to keep their attention and influence behavior. That does not require teaching children to fear AI. It requires teaching them to evaluate it. Who made this? What is it trying to get me to do? Why did it suggest this? Does this recommendation serve me, or am I serving the system? Is the information true? Does this technology know something about my preferences, or does it actually understand me? Those are increasingly important questions for growing children.
Do Not Outsource the Relational Work
The danger is not merely that AI will provide bad information. It is that families may begin outsourcing experiences that were once naturally relational. The drive to school becomes a personalized audio experience. The wait in the parking lot becomes another feed. Dinner questions get generated. Advice gets automated. Every unscheduled moment becomes a gap to optimize. Yet some of our best conversations happen precisely because no one planned them.
The twelve minute drive to school is a good example. It can feel like empty time. Nothing productive is happening. We could fill it with news, educational content, vocabulary, or a personalized briefing on the soccer game later that afternoon. None of those things is necessarily wrong. But what disappears when every quiet space gets filled? Maybe a child finally says, “Dad, can I ask you something?” Maybe we say something unscripted because the moment makes room for it. Relationships need unused space.
God Does Not Always Compete With the Noise
First Kings 19 gives us a striking picture of Elijah after Mount Carmel. Elijah had seen fire fall from heaven. Then came wind, earthquake, and fire again, but the text says the Lord was not in those dramatic displays. Afterward came what Scripture describes as a gentle whisper, traditionally rendered a “still small voice.” It is a strange description, something quiet enough that it requires attention rather than demanding it.
Elijah’s experience reminds us that what matters most is not always the loudest thing in the room. Some things can only be heard after the noise stops. That applies spiritually, and I think it applies relationally too. Children often reveal themselves in the margin. At bedtime. In the car. While washing dishes. During an unnecessary trip to the store. The conversation we were trying to schedule at 7:00 never happened, but something real emerged while we were doing something ordinary.
Leave Some Space Unoptimized
Parents do not need to reject technological tools. AI can help us learn. Organize. Understand a subject. Generate questions. Compare options. It may even help us become more prepared for a conversation. But preparation should move us toward the child, not replace the need to engage the child. The goal is not to have a machine generate the perfect podcast about your daughter’s interests. The goal is to understand her well enough that she wants to tell you why those interests matter.
This is also why children need relationship skills as AI becomes more capable. They need to know how to have a conversation, disagree without ending a relationship, ask questions, and decide when an influence is unhealthy. Those same discernment muscles will matter online. If children never learn to evaluate human relationships, they will struggle to evaluate technological ones. We want them to recognize the difference between someone who flatters them and someone who loves them enough to tell the truth.
So use AI when it makes you better at loving people well. Learn soccer. Find the answer. Research the topic. Get help understanding something unfamiliar. Then close it and look at your child. Ask the question yourself. Let your tone communicate interest. Listen long enough for the answer to surprise you. The future may be filled with systems that know more and more about our children. That makes it even more important for them to have people who truly know them.
Engaging AI Through the 8 Great Smarts
Word Smart: Use AI to generate background information or vocabulary, then ask your child to explain the topic in their own words and have the actual conversation together.
Logic Smart: Invite children to question how an AI system reached a recommendation. What data might it be using? What might it be missing? What assumptions are built into the answer?
Picture Smart: Let AI or digital tools help visualize an idea, then have children sketch, map, design, or create their own interpretation rather than only consuming the generated one.
Music Smart: Use technology to introduce styles, instruments, or songs, then listen together and talk about what your child hears and why it matters to them.
Body Smart: If AI helps teach a skill, move quickly into physical practice. Let the tool explain the soccer drill, then go outside and actually do it together.
Nature Smart: Use AI to answer questions about creation, but let the answer send you outside to observe, compare, collect, hike, or explore something real.
People Smart: Make relationships the goal. Use AI to help you understand someone’s interest so you can ask better questions, not so you can avoid the conversation.
Self Smart: Teach children to notice how AI affects them internally. Do they feel more curious, more dependent, more confident, more anxious, or less willing to wrestle with a question themselves?
Remember: However your child is smart, remember that AI can help you know more about them. It cannot do the relational work of actually knowing them. That remains a human gift, and a parental calling.