Raising Kids in the Age of AI
AI & the Work We Do, Part 3 of 4
My daughter is confident that AI will make her a better parent someday. She said it the way her generation says most things about technology, not as a prediction, but as a given. She's probably not wrong. When my son was a little boy and coughing incessantly in the middle of the night, I put him in a steamy shower (it seemed like the right move at the time, but the opposite was). Cold air was the answer. I didn't know that. AI would have told me in seconds. That kind of access to information, at the moment you need it most, is real and it matters.
I didn't push back. Convincing a 26-year-old strong female that you know better never goes well, in my experience. But I've been sitting with my own quiet reservation ever since.
Why AI Can't Replace Parenting Intuition
Parenting isn't mostly a logic problem. It isn't a research problem or an information problem, though it sometimes presents as both. It is, at its core, an emotional and intuitive one. You can read every book on child development, understand every diagnostic framework, have access to every resource, and still freeze when your teenager is throwing things and screaming at you and you need to stay present in a way that no amount of preparation quite covers. The knowing and the doing are not the same thing. And the gap between them is where most of the hard parenting happens.
The Limits of AI in Parenting: What Information Can't Do
I was not a perfect parent when my children were growing up. I am not a perfect parent of them now, as adults who continue to need and ask for my guidance and support. What I've come to understand is that parenting doesn't end; it evolves. I am growing and changing alongside my children, and now that they are adults, we can talk about all of it: the hard seasons, the decisions I'd make differently, the things we've both learned. That conversation has deepened our relationship in ways I didn't anticipate. And it has given them something I think matters more than any decision I got right: the understanding that growing is a journey, that perfection was never the point, and that it's never too late to keep becoming.
That is what I try to model for every family I sit with.
What No Parenting Tool Can Replace
My daughter will have better tools than I did. I genuinely hope they help her. But I also hope she discovers what becomes clear through decades of this work and through raising children: that the most important parenting questions are not information problems. They are presence problems. They are the slow, unglamorous, irreplaceable work of showing up for another person across years, getting it wrong sometimes, repairing it, and showing up again.
No technology tool built yet can do that. And I'm not sure one ever will.
Jennifer Benson is a therapeutic educational consultant and MSW, and partner of Crossbridge Consulting. She and Rebekah Jordan work with families navigating complex educational and therapeutic placements for children, adolescents, and young adults. This is the third in a four-part series on AI and the irreplaceable human work at the heart of their practice.
