One strange thing about parenting in the age of AI is that the tool often works exactly as advertised. A teenager has a question, and within seconds they have an answer. They need ideas, and AI generates ten. They do not understand a concept, and the technology explains it again in simpler language. That can be incredibly useful, but it raises a developmental question we cannot ignore: what happens if the tool becomes so effective that our kids stop practicing some of the thinking they still need to learn how to do for themselves?

A child watches one video about a game, a celebrity, a sport, a style, or an idea, and suddenly the internet seems convinced it’s the most important thing in their life. One video becomes fifty, and within a few days the feed feels less like a collection of options and more like a world that has been custom built around one interest. Adults experience this too. Search for one product or pause on one video long enough, and suddenly similar content appears everywhere. What feels like personalization can become something much more formative when the person on the other side of the screen is still figuring out who they are.

Back to school anxiety can show up in remarkably ordinary places. It is there when a child suddenly cannot find the shoes that were sitting beside the door five minutes ago or when the kid who seemed perfectly fine Sunday night develops a stomachache Monday morning. Some of that is simply the cost of changing rhythms after a long summer. But for younger children especially, this school year may be asking them to use relational and learning muscles that did not develop under ordinary circumstances. Some of today's youngest students spent formative early years in pandemic disruption, with more family time and fewer opportunities to practice the social rhythms of a classroom. So when a child says, “I don't want to go,” the question may not be how quickly we can eliminate the anxiety, but what the anxiety is trying to tell us.