Between fear, convenience, and the child, we might be forgetting
DR SAJAD QAZI
In the Kashmir valley and far beyond, a quiet negotiation is underway. On one side are parents, exhausted by long working hours, economic anxiety, and the constant buzz of digital life. On the other side are children growing up in a world where screens are not a luxury but a landscape, and now, where artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a new, unseen presence in their education, entertainment, and even emotional lives.
Between them lies a powerful, unsettling question: What does good parenting mean in an age when an app may know more about our children’s preferences than we do and when algorithms begin to shape their thoughts before we can?
This is no longer a distant, science-fiction worry. AI now quietly powers the videos our children watch, the games they play, the learning apps they use, and the social media feeds they will soon join. It can correct their essays, simplify their homework, translate their doubts into polished answers, and offer suggestions before they can form their own. To some, this is a miracle of convenience. For others, it is a creeping fear: Are we outsourcing what it means to be a parent to a machine?
The new pressure cooker of parenting
Modern parenting was already under strain long before AI entered the nursery. Parents today are expected to be everything at once: caretakers, income earners, emotional counsellors, career planners, tutors, and moral guides. In our own context, where political upheavals, economic constraints, and social expectations weigh heavily, these pressures multiply.
Into this pressure cooker steps AI, promising relief. AI tutors offer personalised learning paths. Language models help children write essays or complete assignments. Recommendation systems promise the right content at the right time. Tired parents can easily be forgiven for seeing AI as a helping hand in an exhausting race.
Yet the same technology that lightens the load also raises the bar. If your neighbour’s child is using AI for exam prep, are you failing your own child by not doing the same? If online platforms boast of “AI-enhanced learning outcomes”, does a parent who relies only on old-fashioned books suddenly feel inadequate?
A new form of competition is emerging: not just “Which school?” but “Which app? Which AI tool? Which subscription?” In societies like ours, already sensitive to comparison and social status, this digital race risks deepening inequality between those who can pay for premium AI-driven tools and those who cannot.
Children growing up in the algorithmic cradle
For today’s children, AI is not a separate technology; it is part of the air they breathe. Their cartoons are auto-played, their games are adaptive, and their search results are tailored. Long before they understand what an algorithm is, they live inside one.
This has deep implications.
Attention and imagination: AI-powered platforms are designed to maximise engagement, not necessarily growth. The more a child watches, scrolls, or plays, the more data is collected and the more accurate the predictions become. The result is a cycle where the machine learns to serve exactly what holds the child’s attention—even if that means content that is shallow, hyper-stimulating, or addictive. Imagination, which once grew out of boredom and unstructured time, now competes with the instant gratification of machine-curated entertainment.
Learning and effort: AI tools can summarise chapters, solve maths problems, or even write essays. Used wisely, they can be powerful aids for understanding. Used lazily, they can erode a child’s relationship with effort. If the answer is always a click away, the habit of struggling through a difficult concept—so crucial for building resilience—may quietly fade.
Identity and self-worth: As children grow older, AI-driven social media platforms play a decisive role in shaping how they see themselves. Algorithms amplify what gets attention and silence what does not. A teenager’s sense of worth becomes entangled with likes, shares, and views—metrics optimised by machines, not guided by human compassion.
In such a world, parenting cannot remain a passive act. If AI is always present, then so must be the parent’s conscience, curiosity, and courage.
Between fear and dependence
Public discourse around AI and children often swings between two extremes. On one side, there is an alarm: AI as a threat to jobs, privacy, mental health, and even democracy. On the other hand, there is enthusiasm: AI as the great equaliser, bringing high-quality education, translation, and information to every home, even in remote regions like ours.
Parents are caught in between, trying to balance fear and dependence. They do not want to deprive their children of tools that might help them compete in a globalised, tech-driven world. At the same time, they sense that something intimate may be slipping away: the slow, human process through which a child discovers who they are, not just what the world expects them to be.
The essential question, then, is not whether children should use AI—that debate is already settled by reality. The question is how they should use it, and under whose guidance.
Rethinking what we expect from children, and from ourselves
Modern expectations from children have quietly expanded. We want them to excel academically, speak global languages, master technology, be emotionally intelligent, physically active, socially aware, and morally upright—all while navigating a digital world more complex than anything their parents ever knew.
AI often enters the picture as a tool to meet these expectations faster: faster learning, faster homework completion, faster exposure to information. But in this rush, we risk turning childhood into a project, not a journey.
What if our expectations themselves are part of the problem? What if, rather than asking, “How can AI help my child achieve more?”, we began asking, “How can AI—and I—help my child become more human?”
That shift in question changes everything.
Instead of measuring success only in grades and achievements, we begin to value qualities that no algorithm can automate: empathy, patience, ethical judgment, the ability to listen, to doubt, to create something original even when it is imperfect.
In a region where we know all too well the fragility of life and the weight of uncertainty, these human qualities are not luxuries. They are survival skills.
A new social contract for AI and parenting
If AI is here to stay—and it is—then families, schools, and policymakers need a new social contract around children and technology.
At the level of the home, this could mean:
Co-using AI, not outsourcing to it: Parents sitting with their children while they use AI tools, discussing answers, questioning results, teaching them to see AI as an aid, not an authority.
Setting clear digital boundaries: Not just limiting screen time, but differentiating between creative use (writing, drawing, learning) and passive consumption.
Talking openly about algorithms: Explaining, in age-appropriate language, that what appears on a screen is not neutral—someone, or something, chose it for a reason.
At the level of schools and government, it means moving beyond slogans about “smart classrooms” and “digital learning” to ask harder questions: Who designs these AI tools? Whose values are embedded in them? How is children’s data stored, used, and protected? Are we training children merely to fit into a global labour market—or to think critically about the technologies that shape that market?
The irreplaceable parent
In the end, the greatest danger of AI in parenting may not be what the machines do to our children, but what we allow it to do to us as parents.
There is a temptation to let AI fill every gap: to calm a crying child with a video instead of a conversation; to rely on automated explanations instead of wrestling with a child’s question ourselves; to depend on digital nudges instead of building habits through patient repetition.
But no matter how advanced AI becomes, it cannot do the one thing that defines true parenting: show a child, through consistent presence, that they are loved not for their performance, but for their personhood. An algorithm can predict behaviour; it cannot replace the moral responsibility that comes from raising another human being.
As AI becomes more capable, parenting will not become easier. It may, in fact, become more demanding—less about controlling a child’s environment and more about shaping their inner compass.
In Kashmir and everywhere else, our children will grow up with machines that seem to know them deeply. The question is whether we will still know them better. That answer will not come from any app, but from a choice every parent must make: to use AI as a tool, without surrendering the timeless, difficult, and beautiful work that only a human parent can do.
(The Author is educationist and a public speaker and has PhD in child education)