How Parents Can Help Their Children Become Better Collaborators With AI
If you have ever wished for a personal assistant who knows your voice, your style, and your intentions so well that they could write your emails, draft your talks, or help you plan your week while you sit in the bath, you are not alone.
There is a famous scene of Winston Churchill dictating a national address from his bathtub. His secretary stands in the next room, reading back lines like, “Distinguished ladies and gentlemen…,” and Churchill grumbles, “They’re not distinguished. Get to the point!” He needed someone who understood not just his words, but his voice and intent.
The truth is that kind of assistant is no longer reserved for world leaders. With today’s AI tools, almost anyone – including the poorest person in South Africa can have a digital assistant that learns their context, preferences, and goals.
For parents and educators, this is both exciting and intimidating. On Click Safe Online, we usually talk about safety – and that remains non-negotiable – but there is another side to this story: learning to work with AI as a collaborator, not just “use” it as a gadget.
This article is based on insights from Jeremy Utley, an adjunct professor of creativity and AI at Stanford University, and translates his ideas into practical steps for parents, carers, and educators who want to help children build healthy, creative, and safe relationships with AI. You can watch his 13-minute video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv779vmyPVY&t=677s
1. From Churchill’s Bathtub to Your Smartphone
AI is no longer just a technical tool for engineers. It can:
- Help you draft documents and emails
- Brainstorm ideas for lessons, projects, or stories
- Role-play difficult conversations
- Speed up boring admin work
Jeremy Utley tells the story of a park ranger, Adam, who dreaded filling in paperwork just to replace a carpet tile. A job that took him 2–3 days of forms and statements now takes minutes because he built a simple AI-assisted workflow – in about 45 minutes, with no coding. That little tool is estimated to save the US National Park Service around 7,000 days of human labour in one year.
The message for parents is clear: non-technical people can do powerful things with AI, as long as they learn how to collaborate with it.
For our children, this is even more critical. They are growing up in a world where being “AI-literate” is as important as being digitally literate. But literacy here is not about pushing buttons – it is about asking better questions, thinking critically, and seeing AI as a teammate rather than a magic answer machine.
2. Step One – Don’t Just Ask AI Questions; Let It Ask You
Most people treat AI like this:
“I type a question. It gives me an answer.”
That is the simplest, most basic way to use AI – and it is often why results feel shallow or “meh”.
One of Jeremy’s most powerful ideas is this: use AI to teach you how to use AI.
You cannot ask Excel to teach you Excel.
You cannot ask PowerPoint to teach you PowerPoint.
But with AI, you actually can ask the system to help you discover where it can best help you.
Here is a prompt you (or your teenager) can copy into your AI tool of choice:
You are an AI expert and productivity coach.
Please ask me questions, one at a time, to understand:
- my work or study,
- my daily tasks,
- the parts I dread or find boring,
- my goals and responsibilities.
When you have enough context, give me:
- two obvious ways I could use AI to improve my work or studies, and
- two non-obvious ideas I might not have thought of.
Let’s go step by step.
What this does is flip the relationship. Instead of only you asking questions, you invite AI to:
- Interview you
- Understand your context
- Then, recommend tailored use cases
For a teenager, that could mean AI suggesting:
- “I can help you break down your exam revision into a daily plan.”
- “I can help you role-play a conversation with a friend or teacher.”
- “I can help you turn your notes into quiz questions to test yourself.”
For a parent, it might suggest:
- “I can summarise school policies or long emails from teachers.”
- “I can draft polite responses for difficult emails that you can edit.”
- “I can help you create chore charts or family agreements around tech use.”
Key point for families:
Teach children that AI is not just a vending machine where you throw in a question and hope for a snack. It can be more like a coach – but only if you invite it to ask you good questions first.
3. Step Two – Stop Treating AI Like a Tool and Start Treating It Like a Teammate
Research that Jeremy references shows something surprising:
- When people used AI simply as a tool, many became less creative.
- When they treated AI as a teammate, their performance improved significantly.
What is the difference?
If AI is “just a tool” and it gives you a mediocre answer, you might think:
- “This is useless.”
- “AI can’t do that.”
- Or at best: “I’ll quickly tweak this and move on.”
If it is a teammate, the mindset shifts. Think about a colleague handing you a rough draft that is not good enough. You do not just throw it away – you:
- Give feedback
- Ask for changes
- Clarify expectations
- Offer coaching
You can (and should) do exactly the same with AI. For example:
“This answer is too generic. Focus on children aged 10–13, and give me more concrete examples.”
“The tone feels too formal. Rewrite this as if you are talking to a busy parent in plain English.”
“You left out safety and privacy. Add a section on how to keep children’s data safe when using apps or AI tools.”
Even better, ask AI what it needs from you:
I’m working on a tricky problem.
What questions do you need to ask me to give the best possible answer?
Please list 10 questions, then ask them one by one.
For families, try these teammate-style exercises:
- Role-play difficult conversations
- Let AI play the role of a teacher, a coach, or a friend your child needs to talk to.
- Ask it to:
- build a psychological profile of that person (based on what you tell it),
- role-play the conversation,
- then give feedback: “If I were your friend, that sentence might upset me. Try saying it this way instead.”
- Collaborate on creative projects
- Let your child write the first paragraph of a story, then ask AI to continue it in three different directions.
- Ask your teenager to critique each version: “Which one works best and why? How would you improve it?”
This reinforces a core message: AI is not here to replace your thinking – it is here to respond to your thinking.
4. Step Three – Inspiration Is a Discipline: What You Bring to the Model Matters
In a class Jeremy taught with Grammy-winning hip hop artist Lecrae, students were told: “Go out and get inspiration in the world.” The MBAs looked confused. For many of them, inspiration was not even on their radar as something you could intentionally cultivate.
Lecrae’s line was brilliant:
“Inspiration is a discipline.”
The most creative people are deliberate about the inputs they feed into their minds – the books they read, the art they see, the music they listen to, the people they talk to.
The same is true with AI. Everyone has access to tools like ChatGPT. So why does one person get a bland answer, and another gets something genuinely fresh and insightful?
Because of what they bring to the model:
- Their experiences
- Their perspective
- Their questions
- Their examples and constraints
You can teach your children to “feed” AI better by:
- Keeping a little inspiration notebook or digital note:
- phrases they like
- story ideas
- problems they notice in the world
- screenshots of things that impressed them
- When they use AI, they can paste these in and say:
- “Use this style.”
- “Rewrite this idea in the tone of this quote.”
- “Here are three examples I like. Help me create a fourth one that fits.”
This trains them to see AI not as a replacement for inspiration, but as a multiplier of the inspiration they already have.
5. Step Four – Going Beyond “Good Enough”: Fighting the ‘First Idea’ Trap
A seventh-grader in Ohio once wrote this on a Post-it note:
“Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of.”
Psychologists call our tendency to stick with the first workable idea functional fixedness or the Einstellung effect. Herbert Simon called it satisficing – settling for “good enough” instead of pushing further.
AI makes this bias even more tempting because it is now incredibly easy to get a decent-sounding answer in seconds. That can be dangerous for learning and creativity.
To raise truly creative children, you can set a simple rule:
“We don’t stop at the first answer.”
Practical ways to do this with AI:
- When your child gets an answer:
- Ask them to request five more variations.
- Encourage them to compare:
- “Which one is strongest and why?”
- “What could we combine from versions 2 and 4?”
- For projects, insist on at least 10 ideas before choosing one.
- Ideas 1–3 are usually obvious.
- Ideas 4–7 start to get interesting.
- Ideas 8–10 are often where real originality appears.
Make it a game at home:
- “We don’t accept the first idea.”
- “Let’s get 10 ideas, then pick the weirdest one that still works.”
AI can generate volume and variation quickly, but it still relies on human judgment to decide what is genuinely valuable, ethical, kind, or appropriate – and that is where your role as a parent is irreplaceable.
6. Keeping It Safe: Ground Rules for Families Using AI
All of this creativity and collaboration only matter if it is done safely. As you experiment with AI at home, agree on a few clear rules:
- No personal details
- Children should never share full names, addresses, school names, phone numbers, or exact locations with AI tools.
- Use generic descriptions: “my friend”, “my school”, “my city”.
- Emotional safety first
- If a child feels uncomfortable, scared, or judged by what the AI outputs, they must know they can come to you immediately.
- Remind them: AI does not have feelings. It can be wrong, biased, or insensitive.
- Always review outputs together for important decisions
- For anything serious – emails to teachers, health questions, relationship advice – AI is only a draft, never the final decision.
- Encourage children to ask:
- “Does this sound kind?”
- “Is this honest?”
- “Is this something I would be proud to say in real life?”
- Be transparent with schools and other adults
- If your child uses AI to help with homework, teach them to:
- use it for brainstorming, outlining, or explanations,
- write in their own words,
- and follow their school’s AI policy.
- If your child uses AI to help with homework, teach them to:
- Model healthy use yourself
- Let your children see you using AI responsibly:
- “I’m asking it to help me brainstorm ideas, but I’ll choose and edit the final version.”
- “I’m checking this with another source because AI can sometimes make mistakes.”
- Let your children see you using AI responsibly:
7. “I Don’t Use AI. I Work With It.”
Jeremy ends with a simple but powerful line:
“The only correct answer to the question ‘How do you use AI?’ is: I don’t. I don’t use AI. I work with it.”
That is the mindset shift we want for our children.
Not:
- “AI will do my homework for me.”
- “AI will think for me.”
- “AI will replace me.”
But:
- “AI is a teammate that I coach and direct.”
- “AI helps me explore more ideas than I could alone.”
- “AI lets me practise conversations, plan better, and express myself more clearly.”
For parents, this means:
- Inviting AI to ask you questions about your life and work.
- Treating AI as a teammate you give feedback to, not a vending machine you complain about.
- Helping your children build the discipline of inspiration, curiosity, and critical thinking.
- Insisting that they go beyond the first idea and use AI to explore, not to escape effort.
If we can teach this generation not just to use AI, but to work with it, we will not only keep them safer online – we will help them become more creative, thoughtful, and empowered humans in the age of intelligent machines.