It is the bottom of the third inning, and I am on my phone. My boys play travel baseball, and I have spent about 4,000 hours on the bleachers watching nothing happen for long stretches. I have also, during those hours, written code for my AI startup, rehearsed answers for an investor interview, pressure-tested a crisis comms plan, and argued with Claude about the infield fly rule.
My kids see me do this.
I could easily be the cautionary tale about modeled behavior. Mom on her phone, missing the game, checked out behind a screen, later surprised by her kids' device addiction. But AI is a welcome guest in my household, and here's what I think my three young boys are learning from it.
AI is not social media
My husband Pete is a product leader. Whip smart and chronically online in the way that tech people are. Before AI, he scrolled incessantly — X, Instagram, Slack, group chats — struggling to quiet his overactive mind with passive digital consumption. Since he started using AI, he's given up social media entirely.
Pete now spends his free time talking with Claude, interrogating ideas, using them to build things, and working through business problems that used to just rattle around in his head. Our kids don't see us doomscrolling anymore; they see us thinking out loud.
The tool reflects the person using it
My eldest son, Dash (13), has a Claude subscription and has started building complex games on Roblox. AI acts as his math tutor when 7th-grade geometry gets too much for his parents.
He says Claude is really good at helping him with school work, but he is also aware that kids can use it to cheat on assignments and tests. He already understands something many adults don't: AI reflects the judgment of the person using it.
Dash is also skeptical in ways adults often aren't. He complains that AI search results are frequently wrong, having once tried to look up the specs for an e-bike model and being confidently lied to. He rolls his eyes at what he calls "obviously fake" AI-generated videos because the spelling in the captions is wrong, people appear to be levitating, or poorly lip-syncing.
"I haven't been fooled yet," he told me proudly.
We only fear what we don't understand
I work in tech PR, so I'm familiar with how quickly world-ending narratives form around new technology, and how rarely they capture what something feels like in practice. Don't get me wrong, I'm still fearful of what will happen to my kids' future jobs, and their ability to think critically or problem-solve as adults. But in our house, we engage intentionally with AI to better understand it (and, as a consequence, fear it less), and replace lower-quality attention with higher-quality attention.
It also just makes life run better, which is its own kind of demystification. Before a family trip, we used to spend hours down TripAdvisor rabbit holes, half-reading travel blogs written by people trying to sell us luggage. Now we listen to a history podcast in the rental car and ask Claude for the top five things to know about wherever we're going.
Driving into Alberobello last summer (my 72-year-old dad in the back seat alongside the boys), we already knew we were walking into a UNESCO village of 1,500-year-old trulli — stone huts built without mortar so peasants could dismantle them fast when tax collectors came. Sure, we could have Googled that, but pulling up Claude and asking questions on the fly turned sightseeing into a conversation. Even my dad, who'd never touched AI before the trip, became a power user.
I don't know if any of this makes us an atypical family. As with most parenting decisions, it's probably too early to say whether I've miscalculated and will end up as the aforementioned cautionary tale.
I do know when the top of the fourth inning is, and that my son is stepping into the batter's box, and that's when I put down the phone.