The other day, my 10-year-old wanted to stay up late to watch a football game live.
I said no.
He argued. I held my ground.
He came back a little later with a different strategy. Much calmer, less child-like tantrum, better reasoning. Overall, more persuasive.
Eventually, I relented.
Somewhere within, I also felt proud as a parent on how well he had negotiated the situation.
The next morning, I discovered he had asked AI for advice on how to convince his father.
And successfully executed the plan. On me.
I had been out-negotiated by a 10-year-old. With some help from a machine.
One of those parenting moments when you don’t quite know whether to feel proud or played.
***
I don’t fear AI making me irrelevant at work. But I do worry about it making me irrelevant at home.
My children already use it for homework, for advice on things happening in their pre-teen Gen Alpha universe, and often for fact-checking what we, as parents, tell them.
Occasionally, they even consult it when they disagree with us.
For the first time, our children have access to a 24x7 advisor who can explain things, answer questions, settle arguments and even suggest how to persuade their parents.
This is so different from the childhood most of us grew up with.
Our parents didn’t always have the right answers. Sometimes they didn’t have any answers.
We had to wonder. Experiment. Get things wrong. Try again. Figure out how to get what we wanted. And learn to deal with the disappointment of not getting it.
The gap between a question and an answer, between a want and its fulfilment, was often where the learning happened.
AI is steadily shrinking that gap.
***
Perhaps our job as parents is changing.
We are no longer the source of all the answers. AI plays that part better.
Maybe our bigger role is to teach children when to trust an answer, when to question it, and when to struggle a little longer before looking for one.
Some lessons cannot be downloaded.
And some old parenting rules can’t yet be abandoned, like saying ‘no’ to a late night game request.
Next time, I better check my AI chat history before getting convinced by a polished argument from my kids.
#Parenting #AI