Tech Thursdays

Your Kid Is Already Using AI. Here's How to Help Them Use It Well.

Here's the part nobody tells you at pickup: the decision about whether your child uses AI has already been made. Not by you — by the world they're growing up in. More than half of teens now use AI chatbots for schoolwork, and researchers have found kids as young as 8 using these tools on their own. Three in four teenagers have talked to an AI companion.

So the real question was never should my kid use AI. It's how — and whether anyone with the right training is helping them do it in a way that makes them sharper instead of smaller.

That's what this series is for. Every Thursday — I call it Tech Thursdays — I'll give you one clear, usable thing: language that works at your kitchen table, the difference between AI use that builds a developing mind and the kind that quietly erodes it, and tools you can put to work tonight. No fear. No jargon. No lectures about how everything was better before the phones.

The numbers a parent can't un-know

You don't need a scary headline to take this seriously — you need the real picture, which is more interesting than the panic.

A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 54% of teens use AI chatbots for schoolwork, and about 1 in 10 now do all or most of their schoolwork with one. On the social side, Common Sense Media reported that 72% of teens have used an AI companion, 52% use one regularly, and — this is the number that stops parents cold — 31% said those conversations felt as satisfying as, or more satisfying than, talking with a real friend.

Read those together and you get the whole problem in one frame. AI is now woven into both halves of your child's life: how they learn, and how they feel less alone. That's exactly why pulling it away rarely works, and why doing nothing isn't a plan either.

Two camps, and why both are wrong

Most of what you hear about kids and AI comes from one of two camps.

The evangelists say it's all upside — give kids the tools, get out of the way, the future is here. They tend to know a lot about technology and very little about a nine-year-old's developing brain.

The doomsayers say ban it, block it, and treat every chatbot like a stranger in a van. They're right that the risks are real. They're wrong that fear is a strategy — because a kid whose AI use goes underground is a kid you can no longer help.

There's a third position, and it's the one I'll hold all the way through this series: AI is neither a miracle nor a monster. It's a tool that can build a child's mind or bypass it, depending on how it's used. The line between those two is the whole ballgame. I call it offloading vs. outsourcing — handing off the boring parts so you can think harder, versus handing off the thinking itself. Your kid can do both with the same app in the same afternoon. Knowing which one is happening is most of the job.

Why a psychologist — and why this one

Plenty of people are talking about kids and AI right now. Almost none of them sit at the intersection that actually matters for your family.

I'm Dr. Kristin Kroll, a licensed child psychologist and the founder of Little Dove Psychology, where I provide therapy for children, teens, and college students across Texas and PSYPACT states. My clinical lane is the anxiety underneath the screen — the worry, the avoidance, the late-night spiral that sends a kid looking for a bot that always answers.

But here's the part that makes the difference: I've been under the hood of this technology. I served as a clinical expert training AI chatbots on clinical appropriateness — one of the actual humans shaping how these systems respond when a kid types something hard into them. I've also seen AI used where the stakes are highest: I assisted a groundbreaking digital health company with its rollout at a leading children's hospital, using AI to support evidence-based care for youth at elevated risk for suicide.

So I'm not a technologist who picked up a little psychology, and I'm not an educator worried mostly about cheating. I'm a clinician who understands what AI actually does to a developing brain — and who has watched, from the inside, how these systems are built to keep a person talking. That combination is the reason I can tell you not just that something matters, but why, in terms of how your specific kid is wired right now.

What this series will cover

Each Thursday stands on its own, so you can start anywhere. But here's where we're headed:

• Is my child using AI too much? The signs that actually matter (it's not the hours), and a free two-minute check-in you can take to find out where your kid stands. Read it here.
• Family AI rules that work — the simple, age-tiered agreement you can fill in, sign together, and stick on the fridge tonight. (Coming next.)
• After that: age-by-age ideas for fun things you can actually make with AI together — turning a drawing into an animated story, a family trivia night, a co-written adventure, a real science-fair test — so AI becomes something you build alongside your kid instead of something they do alone.

Your two jobs never change

If you remember one thing from this whole series, make it this. No matter how fast the technology moves, a parent's job in the age of AI is the same as it's always been, and it comes in two parts.

Boundaries. You decide which tools, where, and how long — the same way you've always set limits on things that are powerful and easy to overdo.

Understanding. You stay close enough that your kid will actually tell you when something gets weird — when a bot says something that scares them, or when they realize they can't write a paragraph without it anymore. A kid who's been lectured hides. A kid who's been understood comes back and reports.

Boundaries without understanding produces a sneakier kid. Understanding without boundaries produces a kid who's running the house. You need both, and you can build both — that's the whole point of what we're doing here.

Frequently asked questions

Should I just ban AI until my child is older?

For most families, an outright ban backfires — your child loses the chance to build judgment with you nearby, and their use moves somewhere you can't see it. Boundaries beat bans. The goal is supervised practice, not prohibition.

Is AI making kids worse at thinking?

It can, and it can do the opposite — that's the offloading-vs.-outsourcing line. Used to skip the hard part, AI weakens the very skills school is meant to build. Used to push past a stuck point after a real attempt, it can stretch a kid further than they'd go alone. The use determines the outcome.

What age is "too young" for AI?

There's no single number, because the risk depends on the task and the child. The more useful question is whether an adult is close by and whether the tool is doing the thinking for the child or with them. We get specific by age in the Family AI Agreement.

Dr. Kristin Kroll is a licensed child psychologist and the founder of Little Dove Psychology, providing therapy for children, teens, and college students across Texas and PSYPACT states. She served as a clinical expert training AI chatbots on clinical appropriateness, and helps parents raise kids who use AI in developmentally appropriate, psychologically healthy, achievement-building ways. Based in Austin, Texas.

Explore all the ways to work together, or jump in (both free):

→ Take the 2-minute parent AI check-in · Get the free Family AI Agreement for your fridge

Considering a one-on-one? A parent consultation solves one specific situation — it's consultation, not therapy.