My daughter is in 7th grade, and she uses AI for school. She generates study guides. She gets feedback on her essays against a rubric. She summarizes long readings.
I’m not against any of it. But early on, we noticed we needed a way to tell when AI was helping her and when it was quietly doing the work for her.
One question we ask at home
Here’s the test we use:
Did AI help me think, or did AI think for me?
In other words, was AI a coach, or a crutch?
When AI takes away busywork, that’s great. It frees up time for real thinking. But when it skips the thinking itself, that’s a shortcut.
Thinking is like a muscle. If AI lifts every weight, the muscle gets weak. And a strong AI paired with a weak human brain still gets you a weak result.
The order matters
The simplest rule: think first, then ask AI. Here’s what that looks like in our house.
- Jot down your own thoughts first. Even a few messy lines. Now AI is responding to your thinking, not replacing it.
- Ask AI for questions, not just answers. “What am I missing?” stretches the mind. “Write this for me” doesn’t.
- Check the answer. Where might it be wrong? AI sounds confident even when it isn’t right.
- Keep the final work in your own words. That’s ownership.
Let them get stuck sometimes
Every now and then, try the hard thing with no help at all.
I know this is uncomfortable to watch. When our kids struggle, we want to rescue them, and now there’s a tool that rescues them in two seconds. But getting stuck isn’t failure. That’s actually where deep thinking and imagination happen.
A child who has felt stuck and found their own way out learns something no tool can hand them: I can figure things out.