"My Kids Watch Me Use AI Every Day. Here’s What They’re Learning."

A mother of three young boys spends 4,000 hours on baseball bleachers. She is not scrolling social media. She is using artificial intelligence to work, plan family trips, and argue about baseball rules. Her children see her do this. And she believes that is a good thing. "I could easily be the cautionary tale about modeled behavior," she writes. "Mom on her phone, missing the game. But AI is a welcome guest in my household." She works in tech PR. Her husband, a product leader, used to scroll endlessly through social media. Since he started using AI, he has given up social media entirely. Now, their children see them "thinking out loud" with AI tools like Claude. Her 13-year-old son, Dash, has his own AI subscription. He uses it to build games on Roblox and as a math tutor. But he is also skeptical. He complains that AI search results are often wrong. He once tried to look up specs for an e-bike and got confident lies. He rolls his eyes at "obviously fake" AI videos with bad spelling and floating people. "I haven't been fooled yet," he told his mother. The family uses AI to plan trips. Before visiting Alberobello, Italy, they asked Claude for the top five things to know. They learned the village has 1,500-year-old stone huts built without mortar. Even the 72-year-old grandfather became a power user. The mother admits she still fears what AI will mean for her children's future jobs and critical thinking. But she believes using AI intentionally replaces lower-quality attention with higher-quality attention. "When the top of the fourth inning is, and my son is stepping into the batter's box, that's when I put down the phone," she says.