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.

One of the deeper problems may be what technology teaches us to expect from relationships. Social media can encourage children to imagine themselves at the center of a personal universe: my feed, my followers, my likes, my photo, my reactions, my preferences. Other people become important partly because of what they do for me. Do they notice me? Affirm me? Respond quickly enough? Include me? Make me feel good? That is not how durable relationships work. Friendship requires a child to eventually move from “Who is paying attention to me?” toward “Who am I paying attention to?”

Screen time becomes a particularly entertaining parenting problem when you have a lot of kids. One child says, “You let the older kids do that,” while an older child remembers with remarkable historical accuracy every privilege a younger sibling received three years earlier than they did. At some point I start wondering whether I should have kept a spreadsheet. But underneath the arguments about fairness is a more important reality: not all screen time is the same, and not every stage of childhood responds to it in the same way.