Last week, Sam Altman suggested parents use AI to make a daily podcast for their kids, and 227,000 people told him to just talk to his children.
I’m not here to defend him. But I’m a mom, I work in AI, and the truth is AI helps me parent every single day. Just not the way he described.
This week’s episode of Office Hours is four real examples from my actual house. A game, an app, a deck of cards, and a prompt.
Why the AI parenting debate is stuck in extremes
Parenting and AI are usually framed in extremes, like everything with AI. Either the system threatens to replace human care, or it promises to fix every difficult moment. Neither framing helps when you are sitting in a dark room beside a child who cannot settle.
Our culture treats AI as either a saviour or a threat. I’m more interested in the third option: using it in your life without surrendering your critical thinking or your authority. That’s what AI literacy looks like at work, and it’s what it looks like at home too.
Watch for the pattern in these four examples. There is one, and I’ll name it at the end.
1. I built my kids a French reading game with AI
My kids are in French Immersion. I speak enough French to order in a restaurant, and that’s roughly the ceiling. I can’t sit and teach them to read in French. I can’t hear the mistakes.
So I built them a French reading game with Claude. It’s called Word Quest Island. It reads words aloud in French, helps them spell, helps them listen to pronunciation. They love it.
Also, they give me feedback and watch me change the game in real time. It’s teaching them to read, and it’s teaching them that AI is something you build with.
Two years ago, I would have needed a developer and a French speaker to make this. Now it needs a parent who cares and an afternoon.
2. The AI app that carries my mental load
This one is for every parent with ADHD, and honestly every parent without it.
I use Norton’s Family Assistant agent, which launched in beta this June.
Full disclosure: they offered it to me free to test, and I’m not being paid to talk about it.
I’ve written extensively about the dangers of connecting AI tools to your email, messages, and calendar. I made an exception here because it’s Norton, because I had the chance to ask them directly how they defend against prompt injection, and because it takes no actions on my behalf.
It connects to my email inbox, calendar, school platforms, and answers one question. What do I need to do today?
For me the hardest part of parenting is that school runs on 17 channels and I can’t keep up.
3. We made AI trading cards as a Father’s Day gift
This one is favourite, because it has nothing to do with productivity.
For Father’s Day, the kids and I made personalized trading cards for our whole family with Claude Design and Gemini’s Nano Banana. Everyone got a card with their own stats. One boundary: I don’t upload photos of my kids to AI, so I described everyone instead. The illustrated versions are close but not quite us, and I’m okay with that.
It saved me zero minutes. It took days, and then I had to find a company that prints custom card sets. A complete labor of love, and we’ll have them forever.
4. The bedtime prompt I use on myself, not my kids
I wrote about it for Sam Illingworth’s Slow AI.
Bedtime, end of a long day, one of my kids scared and calling me back up the stairs for the fifth time. My patience was gone.
So I opened an AI tool.
Here’s the prompt in full:
Help me understand a difficult bedtime with my child. Ask me questions that help me name what I am feeling. Ask me what my child might be sensing without offering advice. Then help me consider how AI could support calm attention in real time, for example by helping me slow my thoughts, identify emotional signals, or remain patient. Ask one question at a time. Do not give answers. Your role is to help me notice my own experience with more precision.
It tried to give me tips anyway, which I’d already tried, and I had to push it past that. But then it asked me to describe the physical sensation of my frustration, and naming the tightness in my chest showed me I was in reaction mode. That question bought me the sixty seconds of regulation I needed.
I went back up. Told him his fear was real. Admitted to myself that my frustration was real too. He went to sleep. I finally sat down.
The AI talked to me, about my reaction, and my son got a calmer mother out of it.
The one rule: point the AI at the adult
Four examples, one rule. The AI works with the adult, not at the kid.
I built a game I couldn’t build without AI. The app carries the logistics so my working memory doesn’t have to. The cards are an artifact for connection, not a substitute for it. The prompt regulated me so I could regulate the kid.
Not one of these puts AI between me and my children. They all put more of me in the room.
So if you need a test for anything you’re handing over, at home or at work, use this one. Does it make you more present, or less?
Technology should expand our awareness, not override it. Same principle in the office and at home.
