New UK research published earlier this year found that almost all young Brits now use AI, with 71% saying it saves them a lot of time and 64% agreeing it is the best way to get advice quickly.
A separate Pew Research survey found that while 64% of teenagers regularly use AI chatbots, their parents estimated the figure at roughly half that.
More striking still, only 4 in 10 parents had ever had any kind of conversation with their child about it.
I’ve spent over 15 years working in education, in universities and colleges and international student recruitment, and I’ve watched technology change things in ways that routinely catch adults off guard, but as a parent, this particular gap feels huge.
It’s important to understand that this isn’t teenagers secretly staying up late to play video games, this change is something that’s becoming part of how a generation thinks and learns, and it’s largely happening without parents in the room.
The obvious response is worry, and I’m not going to tell you that’s wrong, there are real concerns here, we should worry.
The same UK research found that 41% of teens feel people their age relies heavily on AI for emotional support, and one in seven said they use AI to discuss things they don’t feel they can talk to anyone else about.
Children outsourcing their emotional lives to a chatbot is a different kind of problem from children using one to summarise a history essay, and parents who aren’t part of the conversation won’t know which is happening.
But I also think there’s a tendency to lump all AI use together with the broader fear about children and screens, and that conflation isn’t quite right.
When a teenager asks a question out loud and gets a spoken answer back, they’re doing something human beings have been doing since long before the internet, or schools, or books.
Reading and writing are extraordinary inventions but they’re relatively recent ones, and the expectation that children should seek out all their information by typing into a box and clicking on links is actually quite a strange modern habit, when you step back and think about it.
There are now more voice assistants active in the world than there are people in it. 8.4 billion of them.
The children growing up around this technology are comfortable with it, they’re talking, which is what children do, to something that talks back.
The figure I keep coming back to is the 4 in 10 parents who’ve actually discussed any of this with their kids. For everyone else, something that’s shaping how their children find information, form opinions, do their schoolwork and apparently work through their feelings is just happening in the background, without anyone asking how it’s going.
Even policymakers are starting to recognise that reality. Last week the Children’s Commissioner for England announced a new AI in Education Youth Advisory Board so young people’s experiences can help shape how schools and government respond to the technology, Recognition that AI is already part of their lives.
So, the conversation is worth having with children, and it doesn’t need to begin with a list of rules. Ask what they’re using it for, ask them to show you something they found out with it, ask them how they’d know if it got something wrong.
Children who’ve grown up talking to devices tend to be surprisingly thoughtful about the limitations of those devices, because they’ve bumped up against them, and… they might know things you don’t.
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