| At Back to School Night I made the case that, as parents and educators of Primary Day-aged children, we have the opportunity to avert our children’s paths from the deleterious impacts of phones and social media. As I stated, we need to start implementing the key recommendations of social psychologists who have researched how a “phone-based” childhood usurps the true developmental needs of children and a “play-based” childhood. But there’s more. You are also going to have to be “the first line of defense and oversight” in protecting your children from the negative cognitive impacts of artificial intelligence. Towards this end, I highly recommend reading the brief essay that appeared recently in The New York Times entitled “Parents, Your Job has Changed in the A.I. Era.” Writers Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, authors of The Disengaged Teen, state that “We saw social media wreak havoc on young people’s emotional states soon after they debuted more than 20 years ago. With A.I., it isn’t just children’s emotional well-being at risk – it’s also their cognitive development.” Anderson and Winthrop warn that A.I. becomes harmful to children and adolescents when we allow them to use it in ways that undermine the development of critical thinking skills. In order to learn to think, synthesize, make meaning, hypothesize, connect, and evaluate, students have to exert mental effort. It is those formative processes that should not be handed off to A.I.. Studies have found, for example, that students who utilize A.I. in early stages of the writing process “exhibited the worst writing quality and motivation… When students put their essay prompts or problem sets into regular ChatGPT and it spits out perfect work, they are shortcutting their learning. If the training wheels on a child’s bike kept the rider upright and pedaled and steered automatically, the child would most likely not learn to ride. When students use Gemini or DeepSeek to do their history homework for them, that’s what’s happening.” And this risk is for well-educated college students. “We should be even more worried about children who have yet to fully develop their thinking skills.” The authors conclude that “If we don’t help our children to use A.I. wisely – to elevate ideas, gain skills, and build new knowledge – we risk a whole new level of learning loss,” the possibility of undeveloped critical thinking skills. “Other research, not yet peer reviewed, suggests that frequent cognitive offloading to digital devices may account for the recent decline in student IQ levels.” All of this means that “parents should be wary about children having unfettered access to a new digital technology” before its true impacts are known, even something as transformative as A.I.. |