AI Can Give Answers Without Teaching Kids How to Relate
Much of the conversation about artificial intelligence and children focuses on obvious dangers. We worry about inappropriate content, misinformation, manipulative conversations, privacy, or a chatbot saying something harmful to a vulnerable child. Those concerns matter, but Sherry Turkle's new book, Artificial Intimacy, pushed me toward a different question. What if the greater danger begins before the chatbot says anything obviously wrong? Turkle describes what she calls relational deskilling: as people increasingly turn to machines for companionship, they may lose, or in the case of children, fail to develop, the ability to handle the friction, reciprocity, awkwardness, unpredictability, and genuine complexity that belong to human relationships. That changes the question from “Did the AI hurt my child?” to “What relational muscles did my child never have to use because the AI made companionship easier?”
That distinction matters because an artificial companion can offer many of the pleasures of relationship without asking much in return. It can answer immediately, stay interested, respond to whatever topic the child chooses, never get tired, and never need to leave for soccer practice or go to bed. A human friend cannot promise any of that. Real friends interrupt, misunderstand, bring their own interests into the conversation, become frustrated, need encouragement, and occasionally make the whole relationship inconvenient. Turkle warns that children may start preferring the first kind of interaction and gradually become less prepared for the second. The easier relationship can feel safer in the short term while quietly shrinking the child's capacity for the kind of relationship they will need for the rest of life.
Real Relationships Tell Kids Who They Are
When I asked Dr. Kathy what children lose as their relationships become more comfortable and less reciprocal, she answered first with identity. That makes sense when we remember that we discover a great deal about ourselves through interaction with other people. Eye contact, facial expressions, disagreement, shared laughter, correction, affection, silence, and the simple experience of being with another embodied person all give us feedback. We learn whether our joke landed, whether we dominated the conversation, whether our question was thoughtful, whether somebody trusted us enough to tell the truth, and whether our behavior needs to change. Another person becomes a mirror, but not a mirror programmed to flatter us.
That is part of why relationships touch all Five Core Needs. We learn security as we discover who is trustworthy and who is not. Identity strengthens as people who know us call out our gifts, patterns, strengths, and weaknesses. Belonging becomes real through give and take rather than mere access. Purpose develops because relationships give us people to love, serve, protect, teach, encourage, and influence. Competence grows because we practice difficult relational things and eventually discover we can repair a misunderstanding, apologize, ask a hard question, or stay in a conversation that goes the way we hoped. Artificial interaction may imitate parts of those experiences, but it doesn't carry the same relational stakes because the machine isn’t another image bearer with its own life standing across from us.
Knowing Is Different From Receiving Answers
One story from Turkle's book captured this for me. She describes a father who loves astronomy and hoped his son would share that interest. The father encouraged the boy to use Alexa to explore astronomy questions, thinking technology could help him learn faster and perhaps deepen his interest. Later, he realized something disappointing: his son hadn't really learned to love astronomy; he had learned what questions Alexa could answer about it. The child acquired information, but the father's hope had been bigger than information. He wanted shared wonder, and perhaps someday, the two of them standing together in the backyard, looking through a telescope.
That story points to something parents can easily surrender without realizing it. We sometimes assume that if the child can get better information elsewhere, we have no reason to be involved. Go ask the AI, look it up, read a book, or watch a video. Those can all be useful tools, but knowledge passed through relationship carries something else: affection, memory, values, enthusiasm, and a sense that what matters to Mom or Dad might be worth caring about too. Dr. Kathy described this as part of what makes a family a family. Shared experiences connect us, but shared interests and shared learning do too. A child doesn't just learn about music from a parent who loves music; they learn how someone they love delights in it. That difference is formative.
Children Learn What to Value by Watching What We Value
Dr. Kathy made a wonderfully simple point: children value what adults teach them to value. Little kids learn the alphabet because we sing it, repeat it, point out letters, and celebrate when they recognize one. They do not naturally wake up convinced that phonics deserves several years of careful attention. Adults communicate value through enthusiasm and presence. The same is true with relationships.
If children repeatedly see us choose efficiency over people, they learn something. If we would rather text than have dinner, scroll than invite someone over, outsource a conversation to AI instead of teaching something ourselves, or treat relationships as interruptions to productivity, kids notice. We may insist out loud that family and friendship matter while our habits signal that people are expensive and technology is efficient. Children are always watching where adults spend their attention. That does not mean parents need to reject technology. Our conversation was not about building a technology free bunker and pretending the digital world will disappear. The question is about weight. Do relationships carry more weight in our family than the tools? When technology and relationship compete, does the child repeatedly experience that Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, siblings, and friends remain the heavier reality?
A Family Needs Shared Life, Not Just Shared WiFi
One of Dr. Kathy's most practical recommendations was almost embarrassingly simple: ask about the day. Sit around the dinner table or in the living room, and let everyone answer questions like, “What was the highlight?” “What was the low point?” “What made you curious?” “When did you feel loved?” or “Who did you notice that needed encouragement?” The important part is that adults answer too.
Dad had a low point. Mom was frustrated. Grandma learned something. A sibling experienced joy. Now the child isn't simply reporting information to an adult collecting data. The family is participating in shared life. Children hear one another's stories, develop empathy, remember details, discover interests, and learn that everyone at the table has an interior world worth knowing. That may seem small next to the sophistication of artificial intelligence, but relational formation is built largely on small repetitions. A hundred dinner conversations teach more about reciprocity than a lecture on friendship. A walk where Mom stays quiet long enough for the teenager to initiate can teach that presence does not require performance. Long car rides teach kids that conversation can wander, become boring, recover, take surprising turns, and end somewhere nobody planned.
Some Kids Are Not Losing Relational Skills, They Never Got to Build Them
Near the end of the conversation, Dr. Kathy challenged the phrase “relational deskilling.” She said adults may lose relational capacities they once possessed, but many children may never have developed them in the first place. That is an important correction. A teenager who struggles to make conversation or remain curious about another person may not be forgetting a skill. They may be under practiced.
That makes parental response much more concrete. We cannot merely warn kids away from artificial companions. We have to give them enough real relational repetitions to become competent with people. How do you introduce yourself? How do you ask a follow up question? What do you do when someone doesn't seem interested in what you're talking about? How do you tell a story without dominating the room? How do you sit with silence? What happens when you say something awkward? How do you recover when somebody misunderstands you? These skills are built experientially. The child learns to interview for a future job by first learning to look an uncle in the eye and answer a question. They learn friendship by discovering that somebody else's interests matter too. Human relationships are not downloaded as information; they are practiced.
Technology Becomes Less Powerful When Relationship Becomes Richer
Parents often ask what limits to set on social media or AI, and those boundaries matter. But rules alone cannot carry the whole strategy. If a child is starved for connection, removing technology may treat the symptom without addressing the hunger. This is why Dr. Kathy's practical advice kept returning to presence. Walk with your kids. Talk with them. Let silence happen. Eat together. Share stories. Teach them something you care about. Invite them into something you love. Let them teach you something too. Those actions build relational density at home.
And relational density changes the competition. A chatbot may be available every minute, but it cannot remember the camping trip the way Dad remembers it. It cannot laugh because everybody at the table knows the backstory. It cannot be tired from the same road trip. It cannot hand a child a family recipe and say, “Your grandmother taught me this.” It cannot genuinely pass down faith, wisdom, love, grief, humor, family history, sacrifice, and embodied presence. The technology may remain powerful, but the relationship becomes heavier.
Genesis 2 Says the Answer to Aloneness Was Another Person
Genesis 2:18 came to mind as we closed the conversation: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Adam stands in a good creation with meaningful work and the presence of God, yet God still sees something incomplete in his human experience. God's answer is not additional information, enhanced intelligence, or another assignment. He gives Adam another embodied person.
We should be careful not to read more into Genesis 2 than the text intends; the passage centers on the creation of woman and the marriage relationship. But it also reveals something fundamental about human creatureliness: God designed people for embodied human relationship. We are not merely brains seeking answers. That is what makes artificial intimacy such an important parenting issue. The greatest danger may not be one shocking thing a chatbot says. It may be the gradual substitution of simulated relationship for the experiences through which children learn to know and be known.
Security needs trustworthy people. Identity needs people who actually see us. Belonging needs reciprocal presence. Purpose requires someone beyond ourselves to love and serve. Competence includes learning to live among people who can be programmed. Those needs ultimately find their deepest fulfillment in Christ, but God's ordinary design repeatedly places us in relationships where we practice, strengthen, challenge, and express those needs.
Give Your Kids Something AI Cannot Give Them
Parents sometimes feel intimidated by technology because it knows more facts than we do. That misses the advantage we actually have.
Your child does not need you to know everything. They need you to know them. They need your particular voice, history, affection, correction, memory, humor, faith, and presence. They need the chance to disappoint you and remain loved, misunderstand you and repair it, teach you something, disagree with you, and still belong at the table. AI may answer their question faster. But it cannot be their father. It cannot be their mother. It cannot be their brother, sister, grandfather, teacher, pastor, coach, or real friend. So we do not have to compete with artificial intelligence by becoming more efficient. We can compete by becoming more relational.
Building Relationship Through the 8 Great Smarts
Word Smart: Share stories, ask open-ended questions, tell jokes, read aloud, debate ideas, and let conversation wander without needing every exchange to accomplish something.
Logic Smart: Solve problems together, ask why, work through competing ideas, and let kids experience disagreement without treating it as relational rejection.
Picture Smart: Look through photographs, draw, build, visit museums, create projects, or share visual memories that become part of family history.
Music Smart: Share favorite music, attend concerts, sing, play instruments, and tell children why certain songs matter to you.
Body Smart: Work, cook, hike, play sports, repair things, wrestle, or take walks together so relationship grows while your bodies are doing something.
Nature Smart: Explore creation together, garden, camp, watch stars, identify birds, or let curiosity develop through shared observation rather than immediately asking a device.
People Smart: Practice introductions, listening, follow-up questions, hosting people, reading social cues, apologizing, and making other people feel known.
Self Smart: Give kids quiet space to process while maintaining relational availability, and let them bring their reflections back when they are ready.
Remember: However your child is smart, remember this: technology can provide information, entertainment, and even the convincing sensation of companionship, but it cannot reproduce the formative reality of being known by another human being. Our kids do not merely need better answers. They need enough real relationship to become people who know how to love, forgive, listen, serve, disagree, repair, and belong.