Everyone keeps asking what AI is going to take from our kids. I keep asking the opposite. What if, used on purpose, it gives us back some of the things we actually miss?

I was so sure I had it figured out.

Let me tell you about the Monday I found out I’d ordered my son a cookie for lunch. Just a cookie.

A little backstory. I had forgotten to order his lunch twice, back to back, two weeks in a row. If you’ve ever gotten the text from the teacher that your kid has no lunch, you know the exact feeling. It wrecks your whole morning.

So I built a fix, and I was proud of it. I took a picture of his lunch calendar and handed it to Claude in Cowork. The deal was simple. On the orange days, the ones I’d already ordered, drop a 7am reminder in my email that says “lunch is ordered,” so I don’t pack one for nothing. The other days get no reminder, because those are the ones I still prep myself. The schedule moves around, Mondays and Thursdays one week, Tuesday and Friday the next, and the thing that used to make me crazy was lying in bed at night, not remembering if I’d ordered, dragging myself back to the app to check.

It worked. The reminder came through. I felt so smart. One more nagging little thing, handled.

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And then, a couple of Mondays ago, I got a gut feeling. Wait. Did I actually do that right? My Claude reminder had already told me lunch was ordered. I logged into the app anyway. And there it was. I’d ordered him a cookie. Only the cookie.

I caught it myself, texted his teacher, panicked, grabbed his favorite pizza and drove it over. At the end of the day she told me he’d still been upset. I lost an hour of work. And a little bit of my son’s trust. I had been so sure I had it all figured out with AI.

AI did exactly what I asked it to. The catch is, it can’t care whether I got it right. That part is still on me.

Which is really what I want to talk about today.

So I went and asked someone who actually knows.

Here’s where I’ll be honest with you. I use AI all day, for my work, my business, this newsletter. And I still felt unsure about where it belongs in my family. That is an uncomfortable place to sit.

It’s also, apparently, a very common one. A lot of women are quietly sitting this out, and the research backs it up. We’re about 22% less likely to use AI than men. I feel that hesitation in my own chest. But I don’t want to be on the wrong side of it, and I really don’t want my kids to be.

So I sat down with Sarah Dooley, the woman behind AI Empowered Mom. She spent years building AI inside big companies, and now she helps families figure out how to actually use it. Her book, AI Empowered Family, is on the way. I came in with my cookie story and a hundred questions, and she handed me the one idea that reorganized everything. (FYI she also has an awesome newsletter that I highly recommend!)

Her insight: don’t start with the tool. Start with your values.

She and her husband wrote a short family mission and named a few core values before they ever made a single rule about technology. Once those are on paper, the AI decisions stop being agonizing. If your family value is a joyful celebration, then using AI to help plan the party isn’t cheating. It’s serving the thing you already care about.

Once you get clear on what you actually value, the day-to-day AI decisions kind of make themselves.

So I tried it. Here’s what came up for us.

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So I grabbed a notebook and wrote it down.

I sat with one question: what are we really protecting in this house? The same few things kept surfacing.

Security. My kids’ faces and names don’t go into AI, and they’re not on social media. That isn’t mine to hand over.

No over-reliance. The minute a tool turns into a crutch, it’s working against us.

Transparency. My kids see how and when I use it, out loud, never behind a screen.

Growth. If it’s making us sharper, great. If it’s making us lazy, that’s my cue to pull back.

Presence. This is the big one. I’ll happily use AI to amplify the real, in-person, slightly messy parts of our life. I won’t let it quietly become one more thing we lean on too hard.

Write those down and you get a single test that does most of the parenting for you.

Does this use of AI amplify presence, or replace it? If it amplifies, I’m in. If it replaces, it’s a no.

That test gets a lot clearer when you think about the kids specifically.

When do we hand them the keys?

The honest answer is that I’m still figuring this out, and anyone who tells you they have it perfectly mapped is selling something.

But there’s one idea I keep coming back to. Sarah pointed me to a framework her friend Julie Kelleher created and trademarked, called Parent in the Loop. The analogy Julie uses is teaching a kid to ride a bike. First your hands are on the handlebars. Then a hand on the seat. Then you’re running alongside, lungs burning. Then, only when it’s safe, you let go. AI is the same. With my littles, my hands are still firmly on the handlebars, and I am in no rush.

A couple of hard lines I’ve drawn in the sand. Companions are the first one. The thought of my kid pouring their heart out to an AI friend genuinely scares me, so that’s off the table until they’re much older, sixteen, maybe eighteen. I think about it exactly the way I think about social media age limits. Same logic. Same reasons.

The skills that make someone good with AI come first, long before the tool shows up. Critical thinking. Judgment. You only build those by doing things the slow, real way.

Something a friend told me has stuck with me. Her daughter, about ten, and her friends had to write a goodbye message to someone who mattered. The first instinct, instantly, was “let’s ask ChatGPT.” And I get it, I do. But that is not how a child learns to say goodbye. We want them to fumble for their own words first, to feel the lump in their throat, so that years from now, when they do have these tools, the muscle is already there. Kids reach for AI for the same reason we do. To take the friction out. But with some things, the friction is the entire point.

We do the real thing first, so the muscle is built before the tool ever shows up. AI can help them polish it later. After the thinking, never instead of it.

And once you see it that way, there’s one use of AI I’ve completely fallen for.

My favorite way to use AI all summer.

This is where the tool and the childhood I actually want for my kids finally meet.

Point the AI at the offline adventure. Then close the laptop and go live it.

Ask it for twenty ideas for a boredom jar. Have it design a backyard scavenger hunt, plan the campout, draw a pirate treasure map. Two minutes of prompting, and then it’s chalk and dirt and melting popsicles from there. The AI did the prep. We do the living.

And this is the gentlest possible way to bring a kid to the handlebars. You’re driving, they’re watching over your shoulder, and the whole payoff is something they make with their hands, off the screen completely. AI as the setup for presence. Never the substitute for it.

So here’s where I’d start this week.

Try this: the old-school list.

My actual summer list. Not a Pinterest board. The real, slightly dorky, sit-on-the-floor stuff I keep getting nostalgic for.

1. The old-school click camera. The film one I brought to camp and took on a trip. No screen to check. You just wait for the photos.

2. A Walkman. Yes, really.

3. Pick-up sticks. In my Amazon cart right now, pure nostalgia for the games we used to play.

4. Bike rides by the water. Even after camp and school. The weather is finally right for it.

5. Ice cream at the end of the day. Even when it’s already evening. Especially then.

6. Hopscotch. Chalk, a sidewalk, done.

7. A pogo stick. I got my daughter one, and it has been a hit.

8. The beach, once a month. No excuses. That one is mine.

9. Mini golf by the lake. The one my kids love.

10. Pizza down the street. Pick it up, walk it home, eat it together.

✦ THIS WEEK: THREE SMALL MOVES

1. Pick three from your own version of that list, the ones that would actually define your summer. Mine starts with the beach, once a month.

2. Write one family AI rule together, even with little kids. Ours is heading toward: “AI helps us make things and learn things, with a grown-up. It is never our friend, and never our secret.” A rule they help write is a rule they keep.

3. Use AI for just one of those three, to plan it, with your kid right there beside you. Let them watch you drive.

What I’m really after, under all of this, is simple. To stay close to the people in my house while the world speeds up around us.

So forget the perfect system. I clearly don’t have one. Get clear on what you’re protecting, and protect it on purpose.

Here’s what the cookie taught me. The lunches I botch fade fast. What sticks for my son is that I showed up, flustered, holding his favorite pizza, paying attention. Right there beside him, hands on the handlebars.

So go buy the pick-up sticks. Get the evening ice cream. Be gloriously, deliberately present. You’re more ready for this than you think.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

I came back to Montreal for a family wedding this weekend. It had been a while, and people were curious about what I’ve been up to. The newsletter, the AI consulting business, the acquisition work, the podcast appearances. Some people lit up. Some were genuinely confused. And a few said some version of the same thing: “this is so not you.”

And they’re right. The version of me they knew at 22 wouldn’t have done any of this. She was serious. She wore fancy work clothes and tried to look like she knew what she was doing. She followed the ladder because the ladder made sense, and it was the only roadmap she knew.

I used the time waiting at my gate to write in my journal. The ladder was a legitimate path for so long. It got me somewhere real. It just isn’t the best way anymore.

What I was actually building this whole time.

Let me tell you what was actually on my resume beyond the resume.

Auditor (ew). M&A consultant. Top 5 MBA grad. Tech VP.

That’s the title track. But the actual work was something different. Learning how to become the go-to person for international clients because I had built the exposure and the interpersonal range to handle it. Navigating boardrooms in cities where I didn’t always speak the language. Being one of the only women in a room of bankers and consultants for years on end and figuring out how to own the space anyway. Moving between Toronto and Montreal and overseas, multiple times. Having deals fall apart at the worst possible moment and learning how to read a room when everything had just gone sideways.

Every bit of that came with me. And it isn’t obvious from the titles.

Someone I know well got an offer at big law in New York. He speaks four languages and also has a degree from the Kennedy school (Harvard). You can say it started with a great undergrad and great early opportunities, but from my perspective he’s been stacking a kind of compounding judgment that will make him exceptional at everything that comes next.

What I mean by this is your skills outlast your tasks. It’s up to you to understand what you’ve actually built with them.

This is why its so important right now to understand how those skills compound.

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Am I (and it) really that different?

Over the wedding weekend, I learned from a good few people that they were genuinely scared about AI and what it means for their jobs. And I kept thinking: is it really that different than technology shifts before?

Think about what has happened across the last 100 years. Physical labor became cognitive work. Cognitive work became knowledge work. Now knowledge work is becoming something that requires directing and interpreting AI rather than executing the task itself. Each time, the people who adapted were the ones who could articulate what they actually brought to the table beyond whatever the current tool was.

When I was an M&A analyst, I thought the job was building financial models. What I actually got good at was going from 30,000 feet to understand a whole business and then back into the details to catch the risk that wasn’t obvious, the thing that could change the deal price or be the reason you tell a client to walk away. Building the model was the task on the job description, but the judgment was the skill that I carry to this day.

I remember being one of 7 people in a room talking about entrepreneurship through acquisition during my MBA. I was the only woman. Again. Those sessions now draw 65 or more people, and the room looks completely different. That shift is happening because more people started asking what else might be possible for them. That curiosity was always there. Now there are tools to actually do something about it (like the magic of Substack with Claude Cowork for this newsletter).

The people I’m watching thrive right now are the ones who figured out what they actually built, pointed it somewhere new, and started moving.

(There is a real risk we atrophy when we outsource too much of our thinking to AI. I touched on this last week re our kids, but it applies to us too. That conversation is critical enough to deserve its own newsletter soon.)

I know this is true because I’m living it.

I’m not the same person I was.

Here’s what I really want to unpack, because I think it’s very relevant to the shifts we’re going to be seeing over the next 2 to 3 years.

I started posting on social media and writing publicly. Which sounds small. But building in public changed who shows up in my life. I’m having conversations with people I haven’t spoken to in years. I’m going on podcasts. I’m getting featured in other newsletters. I’m getting experiences I wouldn’t have gotten if I had stayed on the typical path, which for me was: do good work, hope it gets noticed, climb the “title” ladder and leave it at that.

What I didn’t expect: posting things out loud brings people back into your world.

At 22, I was serious, more cynical (still am?), very focused on external markers. Good grades. Good company. Good title.

What I notice now is how much of that has flipped.

I want less external validation and a lot more internal. Not “did I get the promotion” but “is this mine, does this feel like the version of myself I want to be in two years?” And I’m not alone in this. I’m seeing more and more people in my circle getting genuinely curious. They are semi-panicking about AI but at the same time curious about what they can actually build and do with it.

I am not the same person I was when I left Montreal 15 years ago. I’m good with that.

So here’s the toolkit.

(FYI image above is me learning how to build a website with Claude Cowork + Lovable).

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Here’s where I’d actually start.

Two steps and one prompt.

Step 1: Run this prompt. Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT. The AI will ask you two questions — one about your professional work, one about what you do at home or on your own time. Answer by voice note or just type it out. You’ll get back a clear picture of the skills you’ve built that you’ve probably never noticed or were able to name.

Here’s the prompt:

“I want to understand what skills I’ve actually built across my life. Ask me one question about my professional work and one question about what I do outside of work — at home, in my free time, or as a volunteer. Based on my answers, give me a picture of the underlying skills I’ve developed and how they could translate into a new career direction, a passion project, or something I could start to monetize. Be specific. Don’t give me generic advice.”

From what comes back, find the one thing that makes you feel something. The one where you think: “actually, yes.”

Step 2 (Level Up): Build a Claude Project around it. A Claude Project is a dedicated workspace inside Claude that holds your files, notes, and context, and remembers it all every time you come back. A regular chat forgets the moment you close the window. A Project builds over time.

Start by pasting your skills analysis in as the foundation. Then add things as they come up: notes you kept on your phone, job descriptions that catch your eye, ideas from conversations. Claude connects the dots. It becomes a working system for figuring out where you’re going, not just a one-time conversation about it.

I’ll do a full walkthrough on how to set this up. If you want to get started before that, reach out to me directly.

And if you’re someone who feels like you’ve been on the sidelines of all of this, this last part is especially for you.

For anyone who felt like they had to sit out.

There are a lot of parents, and a lot of moms especially, who paused or shifted careers in ways that don’t map neatly onto a resume. The skills built during that time, managing complex logistics, negotiating with irrational humans, keeping a whole household running, never showed up in a title.

For a long time there wasn’t a clear way to translate any of that into what the world was calling career growth. Now there is a whole toolkit that can help you do the translation. You don’t have to be technical. You don’t have to have kept up. You just have to be honest about what skills you’ve built, and be willing to start.

The career path doesn’t have to be vertical to matter.

You have more than you think. Start there.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

A toddler on his father’s shoulders in a hotel lobby. There was an iPad propped behind the father’s head. The child was watching it. The dad probably didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He was just carrying his kid through a lobby.

A friend described this to me. She was in Mexico on a family trip, and everywhere she looked, kids at dinner tables, kids at the pool, kids in the lobby, all watching screens. I told her I had a moment like that too, at an all-inclusive the year before. A gorgeous outdoor restaurant, a three-year-old with a tablet propped at her place setting. It never crossed my mind to do that with mine. But it’s just normal now, and most of us have barely noticed.

And then I took my daughter to the library this weekend.

There was a boy at one of the computers, maybe ten or eleven. He wasn’t watching a tutorial or doing anything for school. He was just a kid on a screen, watching another kid do something vaguely weird in a fake hospital bed. Then Minecraft. My daughter walked up behind him and stood there completely still. She said, “I want to watch that.” I said, “No, we don’t come to the library to watch TV.” She came with me.

But on the walk over to the farmers market after, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I brought her there to get books, to be somewhere that felt like the 90s for an hour. A screen almost won in thirty seconds. It’s not that she’s addicted to screens. It’s simply that the pull was that strong. She’s four.

Screen problems are, in some ways, the old problem. The new one is harder to see. And I keep wondering: can we actually protect childhood this time? But first, you have to see what’s already happening.

We were never built for this.

I work in AI tools all day, every day. Which is exactly why something Jonathan Haidt said in a recent TED talk has been on my mind so much lately.

Haidt is the social psychologist behind The Anxious Generation, and one thing he said just clicked for me right away: humans aren’t just social like dogs or chimpanzees. We are ULTRASOCIAL, like bees and ants. Our bonding is physical and it requires bodies. Sharing meals, moving through space together, laughing together, touch. Millions of years of evolution have wired us this way. That shared, in-person, physical experience is how the connection actually happens, how it gets built into us.

I see it every single weekend with my own kids. When we spend a day with friends, actually in the same room, the laughter is different. The body language is different. The whole energy is different. And the feeling at the end of that day, compared to the feeling when you turn off the TV and everyone just kind of drifts, there is no comparison. You can see it in them. We are just so much happier when we are with people we love in real life.

And now we are building technology designed to replicate exactly that responsiveness without any of the real wiring underneath it. AI is always available. It never gets tired. It always has time for you. It sounds like what we all wish we had more of. Except it doesn’t need anything back from us. And chatbots are now being built directly into stuffed animals and toys, marketed as a companion always in the room. A friend who never has to go home. It’s worth naming what that actually is: an attempt to give kids the feeling of connection without another human being involved. For creatures built the way we are, that is not the same thing.

Human connection is who we are. It’s not optional.

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Here’s where AI is already sneaking in without us knowing

This is where the story gets harder to watch.

A therapist recently ran a session with a man and his “female partner.” The partner was an AI companion. A real session, happening right now in real time. A human being who brought an algorithm to couples counseling.

I recently caught up with a friend who has been paying very close attention to all of this, reading everything she can on what screens and AI are doing to kids’ development specifically. She told me about a girl who came home and said she used AI to brainstorm ideas for a sleepover party. That meant deferring to an algorithm for the one thing kids have been doing for themselves forever: deciding what to do on a Saturday night at a sleepover. The wrestling, the creative back and forth of actually figuring something out together, that IS the thing that builds creative thinking and judgement. And it just didn’t happen, it was mentally offloaded to AI.

She also told me about a kid who, instead of riffing with his friends to come up with a funny class song, asked ChatGPT to write it. Then everyone sang the AI’s song. I thought back to color war. The class trip bus. We’d just make something up. We’d try things out, something would come out of it, and it was ours. Now they don’t have to do that.

She called it exactly what it is: Innocent ways of stealing the kids’ creativity.

The evidence got there before we did.

We already have data on what happens when we don’t get ahead of this.

Sweden was the first country in the world to go all-in on digitizing schools, tablets at every desk, devices in nursery classrooms. After years of declining test scores, they reversed course in 2023. The Karolinska Institute issued a finding worth paying close attention to: “Clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning.” They went back to textbooks. They went back to handwriting.

A friend posted something on LinkedIn recently about returning to handwriting that made me stop scrolling. It was talking about the almost rite of passage of having to write a ten-page essay by hand, the physical pain of it, the crossing-out and rewriting and getting the outline right. One of the most progressive countries in the world just said we’re going back to that. My friend who I interviewed for this edition kept coming back to this same point. The importance of wrestling with a writing outline, making edits, physically putting words on paper. That process matters in ways we’re only now starting to understand.

And then there’s what we already know about social media. The generation before us gave their kids smartphones young, not because they were bad parents, but because the research wasn’t there yet and the companies moved faster than anyone understood. Now we have the data. We see the outcomes. We see the kids who grew up on those platforms and we know exactly what we would have done differently.

We watched it happen with social media. We’re not doing that again.

AI is not going away. I use it every single day for work and I genuinely believe in what it can do for adults who use it with intention. But kids aren’t developmentally ready for this. They have no baseline to question what they’re being told. They don’t understand that it might not be healthy to constantly be turning to a chatbot for answers. They don’t know what’s being taken from them, the ability to critically think, build judgement and taste.

I’ll be honest about my own experience. Some days when I’ve leaned on AI too much, I feel a little off, like I skipped a step I should have taken. And I’m an adult who knows how to catch that, who can cross-reference what I’m reading and push back on what doesn’t feel right. What happens when a kid who has no baseline to question any of this gets the same access? They can type “explain this to me like I’m three years old” and get any complex idea broken down in seconds. They can skip the part where they don’t know something yet. They can skip the part where they sit with being wrong. And that sitting, the discomfort and confusion of not knowing yet, is exactly what builds the capacity to actually think.

You are not the only one who feels this way

I thought for a while I might be overcorrecting. Being the alarmist mom.

Then a friend stopped me at the park last weekend, kids running around between us, and just said it flat out: “I’m honestly just scared.” No context needed. I knew exactly what she meant. Another friend told me at dinner the night before that she’s worried about what all of this is going to do to her kids. And another friend, one I’ve talked about before, has been quietly grappling with what it even means to sit with an idea anymore, to actually think something through from scratch without immediately handing it off.

Every single person I’ve talked to about this lately has said some version of the same thing. Scared. Not sure what to do. Trying not to be the alarmist mom while also knowing in their gut that something real is happening.

The friend I interviewed for this edition has been doing the actual slow work of building norms in her community. Not petitions. Parent having conversations. Small, livable agreements people can actually hold. What I learned from her is that if you go too “all in”, you can turn people off completely. You have to meet people where they are. She’s right. And she said finding even a few other parents asking the same questions changed everything.

More parents than you think are already scared and haven’t said it out loud yet. And that’s exactly what I felt when I spoke with her. I finally felt like I’m not crazy, and there are people actually doing something about this that I can learn from. I hope we do the same thing in our community.

If this resonated, share it with a parent who needs to hear this. More parents than you think are feeling this exact thing.

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What I’m actually doing about it

Not a complete system. Just where I’m starting.

First: I’m noticing. One place in our day where AI or a screen fills a gap that used to require someone to figure something out. The boredom gap. The “I don’t know what to do” moment. I’m not fixing everything at once. I’m just seeing it. That first move matters more than you’d think.

Second: I’m finding my people. One other parent who’s asking the same questions. Not a committee. One conversation. If you’re reading this, you already know someone who would want to read it too.

Third: I picked up The Anxious Generation. If any of what you’ve read here resonated, start there. It’s not a doom spiral. It’s a diagnosis, and more importantly a case that the tide is already turning. Parents and teachers and entire countries are pushing back, and it is working.

One more thing: I’m putting together a separate email specifically about how to talk to your kids’ school about AI. There are real questions worth asking, and you’re more powerful asking them with one other parent than alone. That’s coming soon, and it’s more practical than it sounds.

Here’s what I want to leave you with: this is already working. In schools where phones have been removed, teachers report the same thing over and over, they hear laughter in the hallways again. Real laughter, between actual kids. Haidt says parents are mobilizing faster than he expected. Countries are reversing course. Parents are finding each other, setting norms, having the hard conversations. The movement is real and it is growing.

AI is coming for a lot of things. It should not come for childhood without a fight. Not because technology is bad. Because the brain being built during those years is irreplaceable, and we know too much now to hand it over without being clear-eyed about what we’re doing.

Can we protect childhood? Yes. But only if we stop waiting for someone else to start.

This week’s dinner-table question: “Is there something you’ve asked your phone or a computer to answer that you think you could have figured out yourself? Was it easier that way, or did something get lost?”

Ask it to your kids. Ask it to yourself too.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

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What we had instead was six kids between the ages of 7 and 2.5, one house, a foosball table, and each other. The bonfire never happened. The boats never left the dock. What was supposed to be boating on a lake turned into a drive to a strip mall in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, where my kids ran inside and were absolutely thrilled to just have something to do.

By 7pm, I stopped checking on them. They’d figured out the foosball. They’d invented something on the curling table. They’d set up some version of corn hole I’m not sure anyone else has ever played. And all six of them were just chasing each other around the house, screaming, laughing, in a game that had no rules I could understand and apparently needed none.

I sat on the couch watching them and thought: we did not plan this. And this is the best thing that happened all trip.

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Four days, two cities, one plan that kept falling apart

This trip did not look how I thought it would, and that started before we even got to the Poconos.

We flew from Chicago to New York City on Thursday morning, spent the afternoon and evening there with family, and it was already cold. Friday we had lunch in the city, got in the car around noon, and drove up to the Poconos. It was supposed to take under two hours. It took three and a half. We stopped at a Walmart for groceries in the rain and arrived after everyone should have been in bed. My youngest refused to sleep in the pack and play, which he is probably too old for anyway, and none of us slept well.

Saturday it rained all day. Sunday morning we woke up early, got back in the car, and drove back to New York City to spend the day with family before flying home Monday morning. That’s when the nosebleed happened, mid-walk to the subway. It was pouring rain. We pivoted to a taxi, rerouted the whole afternoon on the fly, and still made it to the Lego store. By the time we got there we were too done for FAO Schwarz, which had been the plan right next door. My son fell asleep in the cab home. I was running logistics in my head the entire time while everyone else seemed fine, and honestly, I was not fine.

That is the actual trip. Four days, two cities, a round trip between Chicago and New York with a side trip to Pennsylvania, one freezing lake we never used, and a plan that kept falling apart.

And yet.

The skills my kids were building

On the drive home, I made a list in my head. Every moment that went sideways: the boating and bonfire that never happened, the indoor play space detour at a strip mall in Pennsylvania, the wrong terminal, the subway that turned into a taxi in the rain. Those were the moments doing the most work. Because of all the chaos and sideways plans.

AI is a very good assistant. It is a terrible teacher of judgment. Travel is a very good teacher of judgment. One does the planning. The other does the teaching. We need both.

Every parenting newsletter I’ve read in the last two years has some version of the same list: adaptability, critical thinking, creative problem-solving. I have never known what to do with any of it. How do you put “adaptability” on a calendar? Where does it go, between school pickup and weekend soccer?

Here is where it goes. It goes in the moment when six kids are stuck inside a house in the rain and nobody has a plan. Adaptability looked like a foosball bracket that ran until 7pm. Critical thinking looked like reading the room when your nose starts bleeding mid-walk to the subway, knowing you’re not getting underground in a rainstorm, pivoting to a taxi, and making the whole thing a different kind of New York City moment. Creative problem-solving looked like kids who ran out of things to do and invented something new anyway.

There’s research out of Harvard on how resilience actually gets built, and it’s simpler than it sounds. Not by protecting kids from hard moments. By being there with them while they work through one. Mild challenge, a parent in the next room, repeated. That’s it. I got back from this trip and realized: those were exactly the skills I’d been worrying about. I just didn’t recognize them while they were being built.

What I actually used AI for

I used AI to plan a lot of this trip. The predictable parts.

I used it to build the packing list, which took about ten minutes and covered things I would have forgotten. I used it to figure out which hotel to stay at in New York. I used it to think through whether to use our points on this flight and it helped me see that we should save them for a trip we have planned in February instead. And at the airport, I used it to find a faster path through security by going through a different terminal, where the walk to our gate turned out to be shorter than expected.

These are the predictable things. Friction removed. Not interesting.

What AI cannot do is tell you what to do when your kid’s nose starts bleeding on a sidewalk in a rainstorm with a subway entrance two blocks away. It cannot help your 7-year-old read that room and make a call in real time. It cannot make six kids figure out how to entertain themselves in a house in the Poconos when everything they planned for isn’t happening. The unpredictable things, the ones that went completely sideways, those are the ones building exactly what they need.

I’m using AI to make the trips happen. The trips are doing the rest.

Here are two prompts worth saving before your next trip (even a day trip counts!). Use the first before you leave. Use the second when you’re there.

Before you go:

“Plan a [weekend trip / day trip] with kids aged [ages]. Include ONE planned thing that might not go as expected: a backup option if something is closed, a meal that’s a stretch for them, or a 45-minute unstructured block with no plan. I want 2-3 moments of mild uncertainty we navigate together. Don’t make it hard. Make it real.”

When you’re there:

“I want to help my [age]-year-old develop better judgment in real situations. Give me 5 small travel moments — at the airport, in a new city, at a restaurant — where I can pause and let them make the call instead of making it for them. Include what to say when their call is wrong so it becomes a learning moment instead of a frustration.”

The chaotic trip was the right trip

For context: this past March we did spring break in Florida. Rented a condo, easy flight, same place for ten days, close to the beach, full kitchen. Predictable. Calm. No pivots. I probably had more fun, if I’m being honest. It was just easier.

But this trip? Four days, two cities, one freezing lake we never touched, a nosebleed in the rain, three and a half hours in the car with a Walmart stop. Pure chaos. More things went wrong than went right.

And my kids were fine. More than fine. They were adaptable in a way that I, running on less sleep with too much in my head, was honestly not. They adjusted faster than I did. I was the one on this trip who needed to learn something from them.

If your Memorial Day weekend looked like controlled chaos, compare it to your easiest trip. The easy one was probably more fun. But I don’t think it built what this one built.

This week’s dinner-table question:

Ask it tonight. Listen to the answer. They already know how to think about it.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

I did not look at my phone Saturday morning.

My older kids were already up when I found them hanging out on the couch. We made breakfast together, and then I did something I almost talked myself out of: I pulled out a week old newspaper since this weeks edition never arrived for some reason.

I’d been about to throw it out, but the Apple and Intel deal in the edition was one I hadn’t heard about and was still relevant. The piece about how China’s relationship with the West is changing was still worth knowing. So I sat down at the kitchen table and read it while my kids ate.

Nothing urgent. Nothing demanding a reaction. Just things worth knowing, at whatever pace I chose to read them.

I only looked at my phone an hour and fifteen minutes after I woke up.

And I was more myself by the time I did.

It sounds small. It wasn’t. There’s something I’ve been testing this week: no phone for the first hour after I wake up, no phone for the hour before I go to bed. And at night, before I close my eyes, I write down three gains from the day and three priorities for tomorrow. Not a to-do list. An anchor. A way to stay connected to why I’m actually doing this.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I’m not dreading Monday. More on that in a minute.

What the elders actually say

Years ago I read a book called 30 Lessons for Living. It’s built on hundreds of interviews with the oldest Americans, people in their eighties, nineties, and beyond, asking what they wish they’d known, what they’d do differently, what actually mattered.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those lessons lately. Something is finally clicking that I couldn’t see before.

The answer was almost never a credential. Almost never a title. Almost always, it came back to two things: how they spent their time, and whether they let themselves do the thing that lit them up, or kept waiting for the right moment to start.

They wanted less. And they cared far more about where their time actually went.

For a long time, I thought this was a little fluffy. Not realistic. “Do what you love” sounds great until you’re trying to build an actual life, pay for things, take care of people who depend on you. Passion doesn’t automatically pay. I knew that.

I’ve been rethinking that though, lately. With AI, the gap between what you’re genuinely good at and what you can actually monetize just got a lot smaller. The things that used to feel like hobbies, things that couldn’t pay the bills or buy back your time, they’re becoming real options now. Not because AI is magic. Because it removes the overhead that was always the barrier between the thing you loved and the income you needed.

A friend of mine recently asked, in a joking sort of way, how can she make money on social media through her passion for cooking. What once felt like a dream can now be reality.

The elders had the wisdom. Now we might actually have the tools.

What I actually built last week

About those Mondays. A few months ago, the consulting work finally clicked into place. And this newsletter became the thing I actually wanted to build alongside it, a way to take what I’m learning and bring it to the people in my world. The two started feeding each other instead of competing for the same hours. Sunday nights feel different. And Mondays feel different too. Not something to get through. Something I’m actually looking forward to. For the first time ever.

I want to get specific here, because this whole conversation needs to stop being theoretical at some point.

Last week I built two websites. For work. Start to finish.

No design agency. No design firm. No waiting weeks for someone to interpret what was in my head and come back with three options I sort of liked.

I used Claude Cowork with Claude Design to develop the visual direction, giving it examples of brands I loved and describing in plain language what I wanted the sites to feel like. Then I built the actual sites in Lovable, which is an app where you describe what you want and it builds it in real time. I said things like:

“I want dropdown buttons here.” “Make this section bolder.” “I want this layout vertical, not horizontal.”

That was the whole thing. Me, describing what I wanted, watching it appear.

From first idea to a live site: fifteen to twenty minutes. Twice.

The skill that made the sites good wasn’t technical. It was taste. Context. Knowing what I wanted the site to communicate and who it was for. Claude and Lovable were the executors. I was the creative director. The thing I brought that no tool could replace was my own judgment about what was right.

That is exactly what the economy is rewarding right now. And if you want to know where your specific skills fit in that economy, you don’t have to wait for someone to tell you. You can find out yourself.

The quiet career scan

Three people reached out to me this week. One asking how to start making money from the thing she does for free. One wanting someone to walk her through AI for work, the way a friend would over coffee. A third with a message I’ve been getting in variations for months: “I know I should be paying attention to this, but I don’t know where to start.”

All three of them are asking the same question: is there a version of the thing I’ve been wanting to do that this actually makes possible now?

Most of us don’t realize this is available to us. We don’t have to be actively job searching to understand our market. We can scan it quietly, stay informed, know our options, without committing to a single thing.

Bloomberg published a CEO survey this week. More than 40% of CEOs are cutting junior roles and moving toward senior workers. The reason: AI handles the entry-level output now. What it doesn’t handle is the call you make correctly because you’ve made it wrong before and learned. The relationship that opened a door no algorithm knew about.

Your title is one data point. What you can actually DO is the asset, and right now that asset is more portable than it has ever been.

Run this in ChatGPT today:

“I’m a [your role] in [your industry]. Without actively job searching, what would a quiet market scan look like for someone in my position? What industries value my skills outside my current one? What kinds of roles are growing that use what I’m already good at? Give me 3 specific moves I could make in the next 30 days just to understand my options, not to change anything.”

You’re not looking. You’re informed. There’s a real difference.

Level-up: Set this up as a standing weekly brief:

“Act as my career intelligence agent. Each week, give me a 5-bullet brief: one trend in my industry I should know, one adjacent field gaining traction for people with my skills, one role type in demand I’d be qualified for, and one thing happening in my field right now I should be aware of. My field is [X], my level is [Y], my key skills are [Z].”

I have a friend who works in HR consulting. I ran this prompt to test out what opportunities could look like for someone in that world. What I got back surprised me, in a really good way.

I’m also working on a dedicated version of this for you, a tool that runs this scan automatically twice a week so the job opportunities come to you without any searching. More on that very soon.

All of this, the websites, the career scan, the Monday mornings I actually look forward to, it’s only possible if you’re telling yourself the right story about what AI actually is. And right now, most people aren’t.

The story we’ve been told about AI is wrong. Sort Of.

I’ve been watching graduation speeches this week. Students booing every time someone mentions AI on stage. I completely understand it. Something is arriving that nobody asked permission for, and that’s unsettling.

But I saw a clip where someone said something that’s been with me since.

“It’s not going to replace you. It’s just going to change how human strengths are used.”

That is the whole thing.

The story most people are telling about AI is about what it takes away. There is truth to this, but its only part of the story.

I built two websites last week using my own taste and plain language. The agency model I used to need is gone. The design firm I used to have to hire is gone. What’s left is the question of what you actually want to build, and whether you’re willing to try.

For the first time in most of our lifetimes, the friction of starting something has dropped to almost nothing. You don’t need a studio. You don’t need to finish a course first. You don’t need three free hours on a Saturday that never actually come. You need thirty minutes and the smallest possible version of the thing you’ve been telling yourself you’ll start when the timing is better.

The timing is not going to get better. You already know this.

Run this:

“I’ve been telling myself I want to [your thing] but I never start because [your reason, no time, not sure it’s worth it, don’t know where to begin]. Design the absolute minimum version I could try this week. Under 30 minutes. No setup. No commitment. Just the thing that would tell me if this is real or just a fantasy.”

Then do exactly that thing. Nothing more.

I tested this prompt out by naming my desire to help more parents use AI. A lot of the feedback I received tracked with what I am currently testing out.

One last thing

The elders in that book aren’t warning us. They’re not lecturing. They’re just telling us, clearly and without decoration, what they wish they’d understood sooner.

They didn’t wish they had waited for better timing. They didn’t wish they’d been more careful about the thing that lit them up. They didn’t wish they made more money.

They wished they had started.

You still can.

One question for tonight at the table: what's the one thing your 90-year-old self will wish you had started this week?

Ask the kids first, if they are older. Sometimes the thing they name out loud is the thing you’ve been quietly carrying yourself.

I’ll see you after carpool. Danielle

Danielle

Last week I wrote that the skills rising fastest aren’t technical. This week I want to name what they actually are.

They’re analog.

My 6 year old came running off the soccer field on Saturday with a fistful of dandelions and one sunflower he had picked up somewhere on the way. We started walking toward the car. Then he stopped, looked up at me, and asked: can I just stay and pick more?

Of course, I told him. And then I felt this little drop in my stomach, because he had to ask. The most natural thing in the world for a 6 year old on a sunny Saturday next to a soccer field, picking flowers in a patch of grass, and he had to check first to see if it was allowed.

I looked up and saw the younger two also running around, picking up dandelions and blowing them in the wind. We stayed another twenty minutes, then walked over to the park I had promised them a few weeks back, when it was too cold and rainy to go.

The next day, the library. We walked out with twelve paperbacks between the three kids and a kids’ magazine my 6 year old picked for himself. The whole afternoon felt like 1994.

They didn’t need a lecture to do any of this. They needed an hour of unscheduled time and a parent who wasn’t on her phone.

Modeling presence, it turns out, is the part our kids actually absorb. Not the lecture about screens. The version of us they watch with our hands in dirt and a book in our lap.

I kept thinking about that all week. Then a Gary Vee essay landed in my feed and gave me a frame for what I was feeling.

The middle is dying

Gary Vaynerchuk published an essay in March called “The Retail Barbell Effect.” I came across it this week. One line in particular keeps coming back:

The middle is dying.

He’s writing about brands. He could have been writing about us. The whole pitch is that culture is splitting into two extremes. Extremely digital on one end. Extremely analog on the other. The middle is collapsing.

We have all been living in that middle. The middle of mom life is the phone in our hand at dinner. The middle is half-watching the kid show while half-answering Slack while half-thinking about whether we defrosted the chicken. The middle is the AI-generated email we did not really read. The middle is scrolling instead of resting.

The middle is the part that’s killing us.

Not AI. Not the phone. Not the TV. The middle.

The real talk: I keep seeing the same content on repeat

I’ll be honest. I came back to social media a few weeks ago to amplify what I am doing here, and I am floored by how much of it is the same thing on a loop. Everyone is copying everyone. The same trends, the same audio, the same setups. The “hallelujah something hallelujah” reel format is everywhere right now. I am one more scroll away from losing it.

I cannot tell what is original anymore. AI-generated content piles on top of the copying, dressed up so we can’t tell it apart.

That is when the gross feeling shows up. Not annoyed. Not skeptical. A knot in the stomach. The “oh, this is gross to look at” feeling that you cannot really shake.

The voice in the back of my head got loud. The one that says: I refuse to lose myself to this.

I refuse to be the version of me who scrolls through the family dinner.

I have a clear mental image of the parent I do not want to become. She is half-present at everything. She does not have time to walk over to the park. She is exhausted from a life she is technically running.

That is the identity pain in its 2026 shape. We are reading the room before everyone else does.

What I tried this weekend

So I leaned hard in both directions this weekend.

On the analog end, the moments stacked up. The farmers market on Sunday morning, where one of the kids taught the others a chasing game called “stranded boat.” A basil plant we brought home and put by the window so we can watch it find the sun, basil burrata pizza already on the menu one night next week. The Wall Street Journal on the kitchen counter, with my son climbing up next to me to look at the pictures in an article about watches. A rocket ship fort taking over the living room by the afternoon. My youngest at the park, eating a piece of dirt, spitting it out, looking at me, and trying it again. He’s the third kid. If you know, you know.

On the AI end: two new things.

The first one. I had messed up my son’s lunch order two weeks in a row through the school portal. So I screenshotted the prepaid order calendar, told Claude which days were orange (already ordered) and which were red (not), and asked it to drop a 5-minute reminder on my primary calendar at 7am for the days I had paid for. The whole setup took two minutes. Now I just glance at my phone, see the reminder, and know. I will never miss another lunch order.

The second one is the habit I am picking up right now, and here is the moment that made me start. I almost double-booked our Sunday morning next week. I had made brunch plans a month ago with a friend who is hard to find time with, and meanwhile my husband had been trying to coordinate something with friends of his for the same Sunday morning. Neither of us had put any of it on the shared calendar. I caught it by accident. That was when I realized: if we don’t make this easier, we are either going to stop committing to weekend plans at all, or we are going to overcommit and let people down. Neither is what I want.

So I stopped going into Google Calendar to add things. I open Claude on my phone and talk into it. “Book brunch in the morning next Sunday.” “Friends over in the afternoon, same Sunday.” Done. The friction of opening the app, picking a date, typing it in, sharing it, that friction was what was quietly stopping me from booking the analog hours in the first place. Killing the friction is what is freeing up the weekend.

Both of those AI moves bought me back time I am now spending on the analog end. That is the barbell, working in real time.

The Amazon Prime move is coming for everything

Ten years ago, none of us decided that two-day shipping should become our default. Amazon Prime just absorbed the question of where we order from. Nobody picked. The category became Prime, quietly, on every order.

Agents are about to do the same thing, except now the categories are bigger. Which take-out we order on a Wednesday. Amazon ordering toilet paper before we even know we are out, the whole household-supply category quietly running on autopilot. Which sport we sign our kid up for next year, if we don’t keep that one for ourselves. Remember the mom from a few editions back running eleven agents? She is already there, with Amazon running the orders before she even thinks about them. This is not five years away. It is now.

Gary Vee said it plainly on a podcast in March:

“I said, Alexa, order me a pizza. If you don’t say Domino’s, you’re dead. Agents will order for you if you don’t care.”

The agent picks a default if we don’t pick first. That is the whole game. And by the time we notice, the category will be theirs.

The barbell is how we get ahead of it. Hand over the routine middle on purpose. Protect the analog edges on purpose. Either we choose, or the agent chooses for us.

The B+ mom on the front page

The analog turn is showing up in places I did not expect. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal this weekend about a mom with three kids, ages 15, 13, and 7, who is essentially a B+ mom. She is very type A at work. At home she lets her two older kids do whatever they want across LA, as long as they are home by curfew. She doesn’t pack the weekends with concerts and coding camps and resume-building competitions. She leaves dishes in the sink sometimes. Letting go was the harder thing for her, and she did it on purpose.

The piece pointed at something a lot of us have been quietly noticing for a year now. The kids who got the most planned, the most coded, the most polished resumes? Those kids are not necessarily landing the jobs the planning was supposed to lead to. The promise we were sold (over-schedule the childhood, win the future) is just not panning out.

The analog version of childhood is not a downgrade. It might actually be the upgrade. Dirt. Boredom. Picking dandelions next to a soccer field. Walking the library with no plan. Watching mom read an actual newspaper. Building a rocket ship fort in the living room.

These are starting to look less like nostalgia and more like the strategy.

Here is how I am running it this week.

Try this before Friday

I am picking my two edges this week. I am sharing mine, and giving you three to pick from on each end. The whole exercise takes ten minutes.

Pick ONE for the AI end (the middle gets smaller)

Fully delegate. Not “help me with.” Hand the whole thing over.

1. The voice-to-Claude calendar habit. Tell Claude to schedule the time blocks and events you want this week and next weekend. Skip Google Calendar entirely. One important note: only give it access to your calendar, not your email. Calendar access alone is enough to make this habit work, and I have real concerns about handing AI broader inbox access right now. This is the habit I am picking up right now. The friction of opening the calendar app was what was quietly stopping me from blocking the analog hours in the first place.

2. The summer camp packing list. Open Claude (free) or any AI tool you already have. Paste this:

“Help me build a summer camp packing list. Camp name: [insert]. Kid’s age: [insert]. Length of session: [insert]. Quirks I want you to plan for: [list anything specific, like favorite sunscreen, favorite water bottle, whether they have their own sleeping bag or need to borrow one, favorite pillow]. Give me a labeled checklist organized by category.”

Add this one if camp packing in late May is giving you anxiety.

3. The weeknight dinner rotation. Open Claude, upload a photo of your freezer and pantry, then paste this:

“Here is a photo of what we have in our freezer and pantry. Give me five family-friendly weeknight dinners using only these ingredients. Two should have a step my kid can help with. None should take more than 30 minutes.”

If you know, you know.

Pick ONE for the analog end (the edge we protect)

On the family calendar. With a start and end time. Before bed.

1. Saturday 9-11am at home, no devices, all of us. Books, breakfast, building, dirt if the weather lets you. Phones in the box. Yours included. This is mine this week. We bought a little box for the counter, that is the rule.

2. Weeknight dinner, 6-7pm, phones in the box on the counter. The box is the rule. The least disruptive of the three. A smaller starting point if Saturday morning feels like too much.

3. Sunday afternoon at the library or a park. Bring a paperback. Leave your phone in your pocket or your bag. Watch the kids watch you. The modeling-presence move.

That’s the whole exercise. Two picks. Ten minutes. Don’t overthink it.

You’re not behind. You’re normal.

If we have been feeling this pull all spring, toward more in-real-life, toward putting the phone down, toward the library and the dirt and the dandelions, here is what I want us to hear.

We are reading the room. The two ends are exactly where culture is going, and we are getting there a beat early.

The middle is the part that’s killing us. We don’t have to fix the middle. We just have to stop spending time in it.

I am picking my two edges this week. Saturday morning at home, devices in the box. The voice-to-Claude calendar habit, locked in.

The dinner-table question we are asking tonight: “What would you do all day if we had no TV or tablets in our house?” Listen and take note of what they say. This will give you ideas of what the analog hour can look like next week.

If any of this got you thinking, hit reply and tell me what your two edges are. Or share this with a friend or someone who shares a home with you. The barbell lands better when more than one of us in the house is in on it.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

I didn’t have a clear answer. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was a whole stack of questions underneath the first one. Is the path they’re on actually going to lead somewhere? Will the job be stable? Will it pay them enough to live? Will they even enjoy it? And the one underneath all of those: we don’t fully know what work is going to look like in 10 or 15 years. We’re preparing our kids for something none of us can see yet.

So I spent a lot of this week digging into that. Here’s what I’m sharing today: where AI is and isn’t actually helping kids learn based on what the early data shows, the non-technical skills that seem to matter most for what’s coming, and what we can realistically do at home right now while we’re all figuring this out.

The Path Is Getting Harder to Follow

The deal most of us were handed was pretty clear. Study hard, get good grades, go to college, get a good job, climb. I know someone who did everything right. Graduated from one of the best computer science programs in the country. Came out the other side with no offers. Had to go back and specialize further just to get in the door. That isn’t a rare story anymore. Entry-level engineering jobs for developers ages 22-25 are down nearly 20% from their 2022 peak. The path that felt the most locked-in three years ago is the one taking the biggest hit right now.

As I mentioned last week, when you look at what skills are actually rising fastest, most of them aren’t technical at all. Judgment, communication, the ability to work in ambiguity, cross-disciplinary thinking. We’ll come back to what to actually do with that.

What’s Actually Happening Inside Schools

Here’s where it gets murky, and I think a lot of us feel it without being able to name it. What does this mean for school, the institutions that are supposed to prepare our kids for the real world?

McPherson Middle School in Kansas asked 480 students to hand back their Chromebooks in December and went back to pen and paper. The Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education, covering 50 countries, put out a report in January saying that under current conditions, the risks of AI use in education outweigh the benefits. Worth pausing on though: the risk they’re mostly pointing at is kids using AI to skip the thinking entirely and submit something that isn’t theirs. That is a real problem. But it’s not the whole picture of what AI in education can be.

On the other end of the spectrum is Alpha School, and they happen to be opening a new location here in Chicago. Their AI software, TimeBack, gets students into the top 1-2% nationally on standardized tests, with nearly perfect scores. They are accomplishing this with their one-on-one AI tutoring software, which knows exactly where the student is at, teaches to their pace, and fills in the gaps specific to them. The academic instruction happens in just two focused hours a day.

The teachers are still in the classroom, but more as guides than lecturers, helping kids when they’re stuck rather than trying to teach the same lesson to 25 different kids at once.

And then the rest of the day is free for life skill activities: group debates, music, sports, building things with their hands. A friend of mine who grew up in LA said she went to a school with a similar structure: learning in the morning, hands-on activities in the afternoon.

Which raises a real question: what if the flip is a good thing? Less screen time during the school day, handled more efficiently, so that our kids have more hours for the exact skills that are rising fastest. The non-technical ones, the ones that don’t require anything special.

The Skills That Actually Compound

Sinead Bovell advises governments and global companies on the future of education, and she said something that got me thinking quite a bit:

She means reading. Playing. Debating. Building. Thinking past the immediate problem to what happens in five or ten years.

I also have a friend who works in education and has her own consulting business on top of it. She talks a lot about the importance of reading a piece of literature together as a group and then actually arguing about it. Not looking up the right answer, not having AI summarize it for everyone. Disagreeing with each other, making a case, listening to someone push back, having to rethink your position. That is a skill that compounds. And it's the kind of skill no AI tutor, however well-designed, is going to build on its own.

Here’s what the early research on AI in education is starting to show: HOW kids use AI matters far more than whether they use it. When students get uninhibited access to an AI that just gives them the answer, their learning outcomes actually go down. When they get access to a well-designed AI that guides them toward the thinking without doing it for them, outcomes go up significantly. The difference is whether the cognitive work is still happening inside the kid’s head or whether it’s been outsourced.

Kids who outsource the thinking don’t just get worse results. They develop a confidence problem. They stop trusting that they can figure things out themselves. And in a world where AI is going to be a tool in most of what they do, that self-trust is going to be the variable that separates the people who use it well from the people who just follow wherever it points.

The skills that protect against that are the non-technical ones. Reading and wrestling with what they read. Asking questions that don't have a right answer. Building things that require sequencing, patience, and the tolerance for something not working the first time. Long-term thinking, cross-disciplinary curiosity. We can build all of these at home, in small pockets, without a program or a curriculum.

The same friend who asked me if our kids would be alright also brought something up in our conversation that sparked my own thought. She framed this whole AI shift as potentially as big as the industrial revolution, and pointed out that those moments tend to unlock something completely unexpected for everyday people. The industrial revolution created leisure time. The concept of after-work hours and weekends as something separate from labor didn't really exist before it.

And my first thought when she said that was: what does this shift unlock? What if our kids get to work on things they actually care about? If AI absorbs the routine and the repetitive, what's left for people might be the work they actually want to do. The problems they're genuinely curious about, the things that light them up. A world where our kids don't have the same 9-to-5 we have, because the work that's worth doing is the work only they can choose.

I’m genuinely excited for our kids when I think about it that way.

What We Can Do Right Now

Reese Witherspoon shared recently that at her book club, only 3 out of 10 women had used AI at all. She pushed them to start. Her point was simple. Waiting to feel ready is what costs time. And most of us, if we’re honest, are in the same place she was describing. You’re not behind. You’re normal.

So here’s where we have real control, organized around the skills that seem to matter most for our kids in the world of AI.

Critical thinking and debate: Sit with a book, a show, or something in the news together and actually talk about it. Not “did you like it,” ask your kids what they would have done differently, who they think was right, what the other side of the argument is. Make them defend a position. Push back on them. The muscle this builds is the one both Sinead and my educator friend named as essential: forming a point of view and holding it under pressure.

Ask a question at dinner that has no right answer. “If you could change one rule at school, what would it be and why?” Let them argue it. Don’t resolve it for them. That discomfort is the whole exercise.

I asked my 6 year old that question this week and the one thing he said was he would want school days to become free exploration all day so they could create whatever they wanted. Which leads to the next skill.

Creativity and building: Build something with their hands this weekend. Doesn’t matter what, something out of the recycling bin, a recipe they make up, a structure that’s supposed to hold weight. The point is the cycle: trying something, having it not work, figuring out what to try next.

Let them be bored. Genuinely, uncomfortably bored. The brain that figures out what to do next with nothing in its hands is the same brain that knows what to do when everything is in front of it.

My kids want to build a full-size school bus. Not sure how we’ll do that, but that’s the type of building I could get on board with.

Long-term and cross-disciplinary thinking: Ask them where they think something goes in five years. A technology, a rule at school, something happening in the world. They don’t have to be right. They just need the practice of looking past the immediate.

Ask them how what they’re learning in one class might connect to something in another. Math and history. Science and art. Cross-disciplinary thinking builds from being asked to use it.

The AI move that makes all of this lighter:

Instead of asking AI to educate our kids, use it to help design the experiences they need without using technology. Open Claude or ChatGPT and try this:

“I have a [age] year old. I want to build their critical thinking and creativity this weekend using hands-on activities, no screens, using what we already have at home. Give me three specific ideas and what skill each one is building.”

This is how we use technology to get out of the technology. I’ve been using a version of this for my daughter, building a hands-on afternoon routine around her sensory needs without spending hours researching it or paying a provider to build it for me. It removes the burden of figuring it out yourself and leaves you with something you can actually put into practice that day.

If any of this got you thinking, or if there’s a question you’d love me to dig into, send me an email. I read everything and I bring the best questions back into future editions.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

Sharp at the Strategy. Bad at the Slides.

For most of my career, in consulting and then in a senior tech role, a real chunk of my week was building, presenting, and shipping decks. Board prep. Leadership team reviews. Client deliverables. Big strategy reads where the work was the strategy, and the deck was the wrapper.

The work itself (the strategy, the recommendation, the way the pieces fit together) was where I felt sharp. Where I struggled was the layer on top of it. The deck itself. How it had to look.

I’d sit there with my mouse, getting antsy over the positioning, and still get comments back from my boss that the font was off, when the content was what mattered, the strategy we were going to implement, the sales team I was going to run.

If you know, you know.

I’m not even mad about it now, looking back. So much comes in presentation. We see that first. The spacing matters. The alignment matters. The fact that the title font on slide seven doesn’t match the title font on slide eight actually matters, because somebody is going to notice, and quietly start to wonder whether the rest of the work was rigorous either. That’s a real thing.

There’s a lot of writing right now about AI taking jobs. This isn’t going to be one of those.

Here is what I keep finding: when I make a long list of the parts of my work that drained me, that drained the smartest, most senior people I know, almost none of them are the parts where we’re actually adding value. They're the things that have to happen around the real work, to make it presentable, to make it digestible, to get it through the door. The status update. The internal coordination doc. The reformat-this-table-by-Friday email. The repetitive-task tax that doesn’t get cheaper the more senior we get. If anything it gets more expensive, because the hourly cost of the people doing it keeps going up while the work itself stays exactly the same shape.

That’s the part nobody talks about with the 5-to-9 reality. The 5-to-9 is parenting hours for most of us. We can’t add hours on the back end the way some of our peers can. So the only way the math works is if the hours we do have count more. And the way to make them count more is by handing off the layer of work that doesn’t really need our brain to something that can do it in the background, while we stay focused on the strategy.

Whatever your version is, it probably looks something like this:

1. The Friday recap email to your boss. (It keeps your manager looped in and puts your wins on the record where they actually count. The drag is that you're the one writing the same "here's what I worked on / here's what's next" template every Friday afternoon.)

2. The weekly scorecard update. (The numbers matter, and your boss needs the read at a glance. The drag is that you're the one pulling the same three reports every Monday and copying the same five numbers into the same five cells.)

3. The meeting prep one-pager. (A good one helps the meeting run sharper, and it lets your stakeholders ride along with your thinking. The drag is that you're the one writing out what's already in your head, every single time.)

That is the part AI is really good at.

We Already Have the Half That’s Hard to Teach

There are two reports out this month worth holding next to each other.

LinkedIn just published its 2026 Skills on the Rise report. AI literacy is now at the top of the technical skills list. Nobody is surprised by that. The rest of the list is the part that surprised me. Seven of the top ten fastest-rising skills aren’t technical at all. They’re conflict mitigation. Public speaking. Stakeholder management. Communication. The stuff that takes ten years to get good at and one bad meeting to undo.

A friend sent me a screenshot this week. LinkedIn was prompting her to add AI fluency to her own profile. The platform itself was telling her to put it in the qualifications section as a skill she should be claiming. She was surprised. I wasn't, because I'm seeing it everywhere now. Her work is strategic in nature, so “AI fluency” makes sense, but it wouldn’t have been a phrase anyone used a year ago. The bar moved while we were busy.

Cognizant put out its New Work New World 2026 read a few weeks ago. The headline number: AI now touches 93% of jobs. Not might. Does.

Sinead Bovell put it cleaner than I could: “Technology literacy is the new financial literacy.” I studied finance and accounting in undergrad. Financial literacy was my whole world for three years (college in Canada is 3 years - I didn’t skip ahead). Hearing AI literacy framed the same way did something to my brain. It moved the category from “specialty” to “baseline.”

Here’s the data point that bothered me the most. In the same set of reports, the data on who’s actually been using AI in their own work shows a real divide forming. Roughly one in three women have experimented with it. More than half of men have. The gap may be about who has had a quiet weekend free of someone else’s calendar to go open a chat window and play. Some of the sharpest, most capable people I know are on the wrong side of it because their Saturday was somebody else’s birthday party and their Sunday was groceries and laundry.

If that’s where you are, you’re in the largest cohort of senior professionals right now. The reason most of them haven’t experimented is calendar pressure. Birthdays, groceries, the three loads of laundry that eat a Saturday before anyone gets to open a tab.

Some of us are the senior, ambitious, time-starved half of the workforce that has been competently running our jobs and our households at the same time. We already have the seven skills out of ten that are harder to teach. The judgment. The stakeholder feel. The communication. The pattern recognition that comes from a decade of high-stakes rooms (kids bedtime routine counts here).

We already have the half that’s hard to teach. The half that’s left is one tool, used consistently.

Outside of Work Hours

So if half the win is doing less of the drain, what’s the other half?

A friend said something to me recently I haven’t been able to put down.

“I can hear the excitement in your voice when you talk about what you’re doing now. You’re working on things you really love. Things you’re thinking about even outside of work hours.”

It was the last part of what she said that resonated with me. Outside of work hours. What our brain wanders to when no one is making it think about anything is usually the thing worth pursuing.

I Built an App on a Saturday Night

I’m figuring this out alongside you, so let me show you what figuring it out looks like in practice.

This weekend, the weather turned cold in Chicago. Three kids melting down by 11 a.m. My husband and I looked at each other in the kitchen and one of us said it out loud: why does this feel so draining?

That night, before I jumped in the shower, I opened Claude on my phone. I told it: build me an interactive summer bucket list. Here’s my zip code. Here are my kids’ ages. Indoor and outdoor. Options for one kid alone, all kids together, any combination. Things within forty-five minutes of us. And don’t just give me the farmers market, give me the categories I haven’t thought of yet.

It built me an actual app. Not a list. An interactive thing, toggleable by indoor or outdoor, by which kid was going. Sixty-five activities, some we’d done before and many we hadn’t. The biggest unlock was the toggle. I could filter by weather, by which kid was going to be home, by combinations of kids. The system was doing the mental accounting I’d usually be doing in my head. My husband laughed at me, leaned over my shoulder, and said, “So what will Claudia tell us to do today?” Claudia is his name for Claude now. I didn’t start it. I’m not going to argue with it. Sixty-five things we could do is winning in my book.

Sunday morning, I pulled up the app, saw “Kids Empire,” texted a friend who knew the place, and drove the whole family there. Old-school go-carts. Money-loaded cards. No flashing lights. No phones. Claude (sorry, Claudia) had also recommended a gelato spot a few minutes away, but the kids were having too much fun, so we just got the ice cream sandwiches at the place. No one knew the difference. No one cared. Came home happy. I wasn’t on my phone scrolling for ideas because the system already had the answer.

Same kids. Same house. Saturday vs. Sunday. The difference wasn’t that we tried harder. The difference was that the “what do we do today” overhead, the part that was eating the day before it started, got handed off to something that does that work in twenty seconds.

Here's a stat from this month: parents using AI for the family stuff are getting back about four hours a week. Family Mind's tracker has the data, and No Guilt Mom landed in the same range.

What's been fun to watch is what some friends are doing with those hours. One friend is running three projects in parallel with AI's help: child education consulting, a cooking thing, editor for a children's newspaper. A year ago none of that would have fit alongside her real life, and now she's doing all three. I'm doing my own version (you're reading one of mine), and everywhere I look, people are quietly picking up passion projects that have been on the shelf for years and just trying them. The cost of testing something has fallen off a cliff.

And before we go any further, I’m not about to suggest anyone start a side hustle on top of everything they’re already running. Permission, not pressure. The thing on the shelf doesn’t have to become a business. It doesn’t have to become anything. It just gets permission to use a single afternoon to see if it still has a heartbeat. And to see if it fills your cup the way you imagined it might.

If AI can build me a custom app on a Saturday night in 3 minutes, what could it do for that thing in the back of your mind?

A Bathroom Vanity Reno That Sat for 4.5 Years

I want to give you the smaller version too, because not every unlock looks like building an app.

This week, when my husband finished his shower, he gestured at the cabinets in the master bathroom and said, “I think we should redo these. They’re ugly.”

We have lived in this house for four and a half years. The cabinets have been ugly for four and a half years. We have talked about repainting them roughly twice a year for four and a half years. Every time I have heard it, my internal answer has been the same: forget it. Because redoing the cabinets means picking the color, which means getting samples, which means finding a painter or doing it ourselves, which means a Saturday I do not have, and I am the one who has to drive all of that, because I am the one who knows what we like.

This time I did something different. I opened ChatGPT. I cleared the toothpaste off the sink. I took a picture. I typed: I like beach coastal vibes. Give me six options of what this color could look like.

A year ago I tried this same thing in ChatGPT for a different project. It was finicky. It took me thirty minutes to get one image that looked right. This time it took thirty seconds. Six clean options. Big time difference. Big mental load difference. I had assumed white. The dark navy option was not on my list. I showed it to my husband. He said, “I like the dark one.”

Four and a half years of stuck. Thirty seconds of unstuck.

This is the smallest version of the unlock. The version that says even the dumbest stuck thing in our house can move now. Not because of will. Not because we finally found the time. Because the barrier to take the first real step dropped to almost nothing.

The bathroom is happening.

I think about how many of those tiny stuck things sit in every house. The dresser redo we keep meaning to start. The pediatric dentist switch. The closet shelving. The summer camp registration we’ve been avoiding because there are nine browser tabs involved. None of them are going to define our year. But the cumulative weight of them in the back of our heads is real, and a lot of it can move now in fifteen-minute pockets we already have.

Two Things to Try This Week

One for the work half. One for the rest. Both small.

Move 1 — Name your drain. Hand one piece of it to AI.

This week, pick one piece of the drain at your job. Hand it to AI. See what comes back.

Step 1. Open one of these in a new tab:

• Open ChatGPT

• Open Claude

Step 2. Paste this prompt in. (Or hit the microphone icon and brain-dump it like you'd brain-dump it to a friend on a walk. You don't have to type it.)

I’m going to brain dump the recurring tasks at my job that drain me — work I don’t actually enjoy and isn’t even what I’m best at. (Examples for me: the weekly recap email, the scorecard report, the meeting prep doc.)

When I’m done, I want you to do three things:

1. Rank what I described from EASIEST to HARDEST to take a meaningful piece off my plate using AI today.

2. For each task, name the AI tool or capability that fits best (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Notion AI, ChatGPT Projects, etc.) and one sentence on what it does well for that task.

3. Pick the EASIEST one and give me the exact next step I could take in the next 15 minutes — including a starter prompt I can run today.

Don’t give me twenty ideas. Pick the smallest, most useful next move.

Here’s my brain dump:

Step 3. Type or speak your brain dump after that prompt. Send. See what comes back.

Move 2 — Notice where your brain wanders.

This week, just notice and write down. What does your brain wander to when no one is pushing it to think about anything? Walking the dog (I don’t have one, but maybe you do). Folding laundry. The five minutes between meetings. Whatever you keep coming back to, write it down. Don’t do anything with it yet.

Next week, I want to start digging into what AI is actually doing to school, and what we want our kids walking out of it knowing. Open question I keep sitting with: what do we want them to be able to do, when school can’t move fast enough?

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

It is 8:47 on a Tuesday night. There is one lunchbox still open on the counter. The toddler is in his crib, refusing to sleep, babbling at the ceiling. There is a work email I have not opened. And tomorrow is “market day” at school, where my kid is supposed to bring in “fake market items” to trade with fake money, and I still do not really understand how much fake money he is supposed to have, or what counts as a market item, or whether I missed a parent email about it three days ago.

Mental load is real.

There is a book on my mantle called Fair Play. My husband bought it, with genuinely good intentions. Eve Rodsky wrote it. The premise is simple and a little brutal. There are roughly 100 invisible “cards” that run a household. The doctor appointments. The snack restock. The birthday party RSVPs. The camp signups. The lunchbox washing. The school form signing. The running mental tally of which kid needs more socks, because the drawer is full of single ones and missing is somehow better than orphaned. In most households, those cards are not split evenly. They are sitting in one person’s hand.

I have not opened the book. I have circled it. I have walked past it. The hardest part of Fair Play, and most of the advice about mental load, is also the first step: get what is in your head out of your head, into a format somebody else can actually pick up and run with.

Which, it turns out, is something AI is unusually good at.

A Real-Life Receipt From Last Saturday

Before I get into the AI part, let me give you a real one that happened to me last week, because it captures the cost of the mental load better than anything I could write in the abstract.

My son started a new soccer league this spring. He had his first session two weeks ago. I told him that if he liked it enough to keep showing up, we would buy him cleats. The cleats had been sitting on my mental list ever since. Just the cleats. Nothing else from that morning.

This past Saturday was supposed to be his second game. I got everyone dressed, packed three kids in the car, and drove to the lakefront where the field is. We pulled up. Nobody was there.

My husband looked at me with The Look. The “are we at the right place” look. I called a friend whose kid is on the team. She said the words every parent hates to hear: “Oh no, you missed the email.” It had come in the night before, in the DREADED window, those few hours between school pickup and bedtime when nothing in your life is opened, read, or processed. The league had cancelled because of rain in the forecast. I never saw it.

We salvaged it. The lake was right there. The kids pulled scooters and bikes out of the trunk, and we spent the next hour and a half on the path along the water. It was actually one of the better mornings we have had in weeks.

But I want to be honest about what happened, because the salvage is not the point. The cost was not the missed email. The cost was the look. The friend I had to call to confirm I was the dummy. The little tape in my head all afternoon that said you should have caught that. And the small but real moment where my husband briefly questioned my logistics.

Now multiply that by 14 of those a week.

That is what we are actually talking about.

The Real Talk on AI and Mental Load

I am going to be honest with you. There is no AI tool, no app, no prompt, no magic 11-agent setup that is going to take the mental load off your plate completely. I wish I was making this up. I have looked. I have downloaded the things. There is no silver bullet.

But there are two things AI is genuinely good at right now, and both are shifting how I run our week.

1. Getting what’s in your head out of your head

This is the unlock. Here is exactly how I do it.

I open the Notes app on my iPhone. I hit the microphone. I start talking. Everything that is in my head, in whatever order it shows up. “Cleats for [son]. RSVP for the party on Sunday two weeks from now and add it to the calendar. Dentist for little one is this week, cannot remember which day. Book the NYC trip for Memorial Day weekend, check if our Chase points cover it. Did I reply to the school newspaper Q&A. Out of trash bags. [Kid] needs new socks.” I keep going until my brain is empty. No filter. No order. No punctuation.

Then I copy that whole dump, open the Claude app (if you do not have it yet, just download Claude from the App Store and use the free version, it takes 30 seconds), and I paste it in with this prompt:

“Make this into a list I can hand off to someone else. Group it by category. Prioritize by level of importance.”

That is it. That is the prompt.

What comes back is a clean, organized, actually-shareable list. Sorted by bucket (kids, household, logistics, calendar) and ranked so I know what is actually urgent versus what is just loud in my head.

The part nobody talks about is when I actually do this. I do not sit down for it. I never have. I do it on a walk. I do it while the kids are playing in the living room by themselves (which, as you’ll see in a minute, is something I am doing on purpose). I do it while I am making dinner with my phone propped on the counter. I do it in the two-minute window before I walk into school for pickup (there isn’t a line, that is just where I have my best ideas). Whenever the spill shows up, I just catch it.

Then I hand the output to my husband and say “Tell me which ones you’ve got.” FYI he’s doing the annual check ups this week. The list itself does not reduce the load. It makes the load handoff-able. And once it is handoff-able, it is actually splittable. That was the whole breakthrough for me. I was not carrying it alone because it was mine to carry. I was carrying it alone because it was stuck in a format no one else could pick up.

2. Doing the boring middle steps

The other place AI is really earning its keep is in the soul-crushing logistics. Two real ones from this week.

The school newspaper Q&A. My kids’ school newspaper sent me a Q&A to fill out. Questions about our family, our values, how my kids spend their time. I was actually excited about this one. The school does this for a good reason and I wanted to share our story. I just kept running out of time. So yesterday I finally opened Claude, hit the microphone, and babbled the answers in. Ten minutes later, I had clean, thoughtful responses I felt good about. The thing I had been meaning to do for weeks got done while I was eating a salad.

The Memorial Day weekend NYC trip. We had been saying for four months now that we would go to NYC to meet friends. I kept opening Google Flights, getting paralyzed by the options, and pushing the decision out another week. Last week I finally pasted everything into Claude: “Here is where we are going. Here is what we are prioritizing. Choose the airline and best flights for our preferences. Map out hotels in this area. Figure out if it is worth us using our Chase points, and if so how.” I had been carrying every one of those considerations in my head, trying to make them all fit at once. Claude laid them out in a table. We finally booked it that night.

Two things that had been hanging over me for weeks, both crossed off in under twenty minutes. None of this is hard. All of it is relentless. Stack 14 of these a week and you have half a workday back.

A Quick Side Note on the Eleven Agents

A friend sent me a podcast this week about a parent who, fully unprompted, built 11 AI agents to help run her homeschool. Eleven. One for math, one for reading, one for logistics. I listened to the whole thing on one drive. It was wild. It is also not me. I do not have 11 agents. I have a voice memo habit and one really good prompt. If you are hearing about people doing wild things with AI right now and feeling behind, please remember that I, the person writing the AI newsletter, do not have 11 agents either. You’re not behind. You’re normal. Start with one prompt. Build from there.

A Quick Detour to Business School

Quick detour. In 2018, I was in grad school, and some friends and I had an idea we submitted to the New Venture Challenge: you take a photo of the inside of your fridge, cross-reference it with your family’s preferences and dietary needs, and get a meal plan plus a grocery list for the gaps. We did not even get in. We were cut at the application round.

That feature now lives in approximately every consumer AI app on earth and costs nothing.

The lesson is not that we saw the future. We did not. It is that you do not recognize the tool you actually need until you become the person who needs it. A lot of us are right there with AI right now, looking at the noise, not sure if it is for us. It is for you. Specifically you. The version of you who is holding 100 invisible cards at once.

The Prize Is Not the Output. It’s the Time.

Here is the reframe I keep coming back to.

When I save 20 minutes drafting a piece for my kid’s school newsletter, the 20 minutes is the prize. Not the answered Q&A. The answers were always going to get sent. The question is whether I sent it during a window where I was also supposed to be making lunch, or whether I sent it in a matter of minutes and used the time back to go outside on a walk. (Newsflash: I did exactly that, right after I sent the Q&A back.)

That is the actual upside of AI for parents right now. Forget the grindy LinkedIn-influencer version of productivity. The real win is that AI buys back the parts of the day that get eaten by admin, so we can put them somewhere else. A walk. A book. A workout. A real conversation with a friend. Five quiet minutes with a coffee. Whatever the thing is that fell off the list when the kids showed up.

And sometimes, the place to put that time is back into our kids in a way that has nothing to do with productivity at all.

On Boredom, Paint, and a Cardboard Bus

Last week we talked about getting kids outside, in the dirt, off screens. This week I want to take that one step further, inside the house.

Earlier this week, my oldest pulled out every container of paint we own, lined up three cardboard boxes from our recycling pile, and announced he was building a bus. The two littles decided this meant they were also painting, but with less of a plan, and by the time I looked up, they were painting the cardboard, the floor, and each other’s arms. My husband walked in, looked at the chaos, looked at me, and said something to the effect of, “you know you do not have to let them do this.”

I know. I am letting them do it on purpose.

The more I read, the more I am convinced that the single most important muscle I can build in my kids in the AI era is being okay when nothing is happening. The ability to be bored. The ability to make something out of nothing. The ability to get into trouble in their own imagination and figure out the way back out. None of that gets built when I am hovering, narrating, and presenting them with the next perfectly curated activity.

A caveat, because I know. My kids are old enough to be feral in short bursts. If yours are still in the safety-pin-in-outlet years, this is not a “leave them alone for an hour” play. Start smaller. Dump a cup of dry rice into a mixing bowl with a measuring spoon, put it on a kitchen towel, and walk 15 feet away for 10 minutes. A wooden spoon and a Tupperware lid is a drum. Two couch cushions and a blanket is a fort. The game is not “disappear.” The game is “stop narrating their play for ten minutes and see what they do.” That is the muscle. It scales up as they do.

And the quiet side benefit: when they are playing by themselves, that is when I open the Notes app, hit the microphone, and dump everything that is in my head. The unlock on both sides of the house is happening at the same time.

Try This Before Friday

Pick the version that matches where you are this week. One is a low-stakes win you can run solo in two minutes. The other is bigger and worth it if you are ready. Both work. Neither requires a subscription or a setup (just a simple App download).

Option A — The Easy Win

(Start here if you haven’t prompted much yet.)

The School PDF Date Extractor. Dig up that PDF your kid’s school sent for next month, the one with the field trip and the half days and the 10th professional development day of the year. Open Claude (free in the App Store) or any AI tool on your phone. Upload, screenshot or paste the PDF. Then paste this:

“Here is a PDF from my kid’s school. Pull every important date, deadline, event, half day, and required item out of it. Format it as a list I can drop into my calendar. Flag anything that requires a parent action with a star. Sort by date.”

Give it 10 seconds. You will get back a clean list you can copy straight into your calendar. No emotional labor. No difficult conversations. Just five to fifteen minutes of your life back, and the quiet confidence of knowing you did not miss the pajama day.

Option B — The Bigger Swing

(Use when you’re ready.)

The Mental Load Dump. Open the Notes app on your phone. Hit the microphone. Say, out loud, every single thing you are currently tracking. Don’t filter. Don’t organize. Just talk until you run out. Copy what you said, paste it into Claude, and add this:

“Make this into a list I can hand off to someone else. Group it by category (kids, household, finances, social, medical, school). For each task, label it as a one-time, weekly, or recurring item. Rank it by level of importance. Format it so I can text it to someone or print it for the fridge.”

Send the result to your partner, a friend, grandparent or whoever else is in the thick of it with you. This one is less about the list and more about finally having the conversation with something to point at.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

72% of U.S. teens have used an AI companion. Not for homework, not for research. For companionship. For venting. For emotional support.

Among the teens who use them, a third said they preferred talking to an AI over talking to a real person when it came to serious or personal conversations.

These are 13 to 17 year olds choosing a chatbot over a friend, a parent, a sibling. Not because they don’t have people in their lives. Because the chatbot never judges them, never gets tired, and is always available.

If you want a name to watch out for, it’s Character.AI, the app where most of this is happening. It pulled in over $32 million in revenue last year. Kids are creating AI “friends,” giving them names, building relationships with them. And a YouGov survey of 2,000 young adults found that one in four say they could see AI replacing a real romantic partner. The whole AI companion category is on track for over $120 million this year.

There’s a term for it now: “AI situationships.” I wish I was making this up.

This is the part that sits with me as a mom. My kids are still little. They’re not on these apps yet. But they will be, faster than I think. And when I ask myself why kids turn to a chatbot in the first place, the answer is kind of obvious. They turn to a screen when the screen feels safer, easier, or more available than the real thing.

So the move is to make the real thing win. Get them around real people, in real places, having the kind of in-person experiences that build trust and connection a chatbot can’t fake. The more comfortable they are with eye contact, being bored with another human, figuring it out in person, the less they’ll need a screen to fill that space.

That’s easy to say. It’s harder to do when you’re staring at a Sunday morning with three kids and no plan.

Same Park. Same Swings. Same Sunday.

We go to the park down our street at least twice a week. It’s right there, it’s convenient, and when you live in a 3-bedroom condo with three kids, convenient wins. Chicago has tons of parks, so it’s not like we’re short on green space. The problem is I couldn’t think of anything DIFFERENT. I kept assuming you’d have to drive 45 minutes out of the city to find real nature or real adventure. Turns out I was wrong.

Last week I talked about Sam Altman wanting his kid to just play in the dirt. I nodded along, thinking yes, that’s what my kids need too. Then I looked around my sixth-floor condo and thought, okay, but WHERE?

So on a Saturday night, instead of scanning another newsletter or reading the news, I opened Claude and typed what was in my head:

“I have three kids ages [X]. I live in [Y]. Give me a list of 10 to 15 nature/hiking spots. Separate them into three groups: places close to my zip code, places 30 to 45 minutes away, and places up to 1.5 hours outside the city. Include pros and cons for my kids’ ages.”

Why This Isn’t the Same as Googling It

If I had Googled “things to do with kids near Chicago,” I would have gotten a generic Trip Advisor list or a blog post written for tourists. The same 10 suggestions everyone gets, regardless of whether they have a toddler or a teenager.

What makes AI different is the context you give it. I didn’t just ask for “things to do.” I told it my kids’ ages, what I was actually looking for (nature, not playgrounds), how far I was willing to drive, and that I wanted pros and cons specific to my family. The more specific you are, the more useful the answer. You’re not getting a generic list, you’re getting one built for YOUR situation.

Think of it this way. Google gives you the same answer it gives everyone (more or less). AI gives you an answer based on what YOU told it. It’s the difference between asking a stranger for restaurant recommendations versus asking a friend who knows what your kids will actually eat. (I use Claude through something called Cowork, which remembers my family’s details so I don’t have to repeat myself every time, but any free AI tool works for these.)

I got back a list I actually used. I picked a nature reserve INSIDE the city I’d never heard of, 20 minutes from my condo. The next morning I texted a friend who lives 40 minutes away but was only 20 minutes from the same reserve coming from the other direction. By mid-morning our kids were walking trails and spotting deer. Together. In person. No screens.

While they were running ahead of us I kept thinking about how many Sunday mornings I’ve spent just trying to keep the kids busy without turning on the TV. How it felt like groundhog’s day, same indoor activity, same 4 parks, same couple of museums. This felt different. The kids just looked happier.

I used AI to get my kids AWAY from screens. I used the technology to create exactly the kind of real, messy, dirt-under-their-fingernails experience that every expert says kids need more of. And it took me five minutes on a Saturday night.

Try This

Tonight at dinner, ask your kids: “What’s something you wish we did more?” Don’t correct them, don’t judge, just listen. Whatever they say, that’s your next prompt. Type it into ChatGPT, Claude, or any free AI tool, give it the details of YOUR life (ages, location, budget, what your kids actually like), and see what comes back. Bonus points for including details about your kids like active, sensory seeking, you get the idea.

5 Prompts to Try Before This Weekend

I’ve used the first three myself. The last two are prompts I added because they solve problems that drive me crazy. Copy any of them, change the details to fit YOUR life, and paste into any AI tool. The key is being specific. Don’t just ask a generic question. Tell it about your family, your preferences, your constraints. That’s what makes the answer actually useful.

1. The Weekend Adventure Finder (I used this one for the nature reserve story above)

“I have [number] kids ages [ages]. I live in [your city]. Give me a list of 10 to 15 spots that aren’t just playgrounds. Separate them into three groups: places close to my zip code, places 30 to 45 minutes away, and places up to 1.5 hours outside the city. Include pros and cons for my kids’ ages.”

2. The Grocery List Builder (I used this when we got back from a trip and had nothing in the house, turned it into a Costco run)

“I need to feed [number] people for the week, budget of [amount] from [store name]. I want a mix of protein, fruits, veggies, and snacks. Build me a list, then show me the meals that come from it, optimizing for dinners that work for everyone.”

3. The Credit Card Travel Maximizer (I used this for a trip to New York I’m trying to plan)

“I have a [your credit card name] and I’m planning a trip to [destination]. What’s the best way to use my card’s benefits for this trip? Include flights, hotels, and any perks I might not know about. Keep it simple.”

4. The Mental Load Dump

“Here’s everything on my mind right now: [just type it all, messy is fine]. Help me sort this into three categories: things I need to do today, things that can wait until this weekend, and things I can let go of completely.”

5. The Birthday Party Lifesaver (Added this because kids’ birthday parties are expensive and annoying to plan. If you know, you know.)

“My kid is turning [age] and I need birthday party ideas. Budget is around [amount]. I want something that doesn’t require me to host 15 kids in my house. We live in [city]. What are my best options, and can you help me draft the invite too?”

Save this list. Screenshot it. Send it to a friend who needs a better weekend.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

I’m not worried about some sci-fi future where robots take over. I’m worried because the path we were all told to follow, do well in school, get good grades, land a stable job where you’re rewarded for being smart and reliable, that path is quietly becoming outdated. And most of us haven’t caught up to that yet. Not for ourselves, and definitely not for our kids.

The Safe Path Isn’t as Safe Anymore

Someone close to me has a sister who just finished her computer science degree. Four years of school, exactly the kind of degree everyone says you should get. She can’t find a job. Not because she’s not smart or didn’t work hard, but because AI tools can now do a huge chunk of what entry-level developers used to get hired for. The ground moved while she was still in school.

That’s the part that really got me. It’s not that computer science is useless. It’s that the thing we all thought was the safest bet turned out to be one of the first things to change. And if that can happen to computer science, what else is going to look different by the time our kids are entering the workforce?

Anthropic (the company behind Claude) just published research on how AI is actually showing up across different jobs. They mapped it out and it looks like a web, touching everything from programming to customer service to data entry. Computer programming tasks? AI is already handling 75% of them. And here’s the part that stuck with me: they found that hiring of younger workers is starting to slow down in the jobs most exposed to AI. That’s our kids’ future we’re looking at.

Source: Anthropic Research

When you zoom out, it’s not one industry or one job that’s being affected. It’s everything that involves doing smart but repetitive tasks. The kind of work a lot of us were trained for. The stuff that used to be rewarded with stability and a good paycheck.

What’s going to be rewarded instead? Creativity. Breaking down messy problems that don’t have a clear answer. Being willing to try something, fail, and try again. Less “follow the playbook” and more “figure it out as you go.” That’s a huge change from how most of us were taught to succeed.

So What Are We Actually Teaching Our Kids?

If the skills that matter are changing this fast, you’d think school would be keeping up. I’m not so sure.

My son had a “technology class” recently. You know what they did? Tested out different filters. Like selfie filters. That was the lesson. Not how technology works, not how to think through a problem, not how to build something. Just playing around with different filters. I sat there thinking, they’d honestly be better off playing outside right now. At least then they’d be problem solving on the playground.

And that’s kind of the bigger question, right? Schools went all in on Chromebooks and screens over the last few years because it felt like progress. Everything digital, everything online. Now there’s a growing wave of parents and teachers pushing back and saying, wait, maybe handing every kid a screen all day wasn’t actually what they needed. Maybe what felt advanced was the opposite of what would actually help them learn.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the guy who literally built ChatGPT, said something in an interview that I keep coming back to. He said he knows his kid is going to grow up in a world where computers are smarter than people. He sees it coming more clearly than anyone. And he still wants his kid on the later end of interacting with AI. He wants him to just play in the dirt right now. The person who arguably knows more about this technology than anyone on the planet is choosing play over screens for his own child. That tells you something about what actually builds the foundation kids are going to need.

And then on the complete other end, there’s a school opening in Chicago called Alpha School where AI handles the teaching. Personalized to each student, about two hours in the morning. The rest of the day is projects, building things, entrepreneurship. It’s coming to the old Gems Academy location, right where I used to work, and before that close to where I lived in business school. So this one feels personal.

The model is intense and definitely not for everyone, but the core idea, that each kid gets exactly what they need instead of one lesson for 25 kids, that part makes a lot of sense. The question is what our regular schools can take from that approach without throwing out everything that makes school valuable, like learning how to be around other humans all day.

Somewhere between selfie filters and an AI-powered curriculum, there’s the thing our kids actually need. And I don’t think most schools have found it yet.

The Part That Surprised Me

Here’s the thing I wasn’t expecting. This isn’t just about our kids. It’s changing things for us too, right now.

I keep hearing stories from friends where their kids are the ones helping THEM with technology now. People who were always good with tech, always the ones who figured things out, and suddenly the roles flipped. It happened that fast.

But I’ve actually been experiencing the opposite, and it’s been kind of wild. I’ve spent my whole career in finance and operations. Numbers, models, strategy. I never once thought of myself as a creative person or a builder.

Since I started really using AI in my work, I’ve been building things I genuinely didn’t think I was capable of. The full brand for this newsletter? I built that. Financial models I would have needed a team for? I’m doing those on my own. I heard Sinead Bovell talk about this and it clicked for me. She described it as this moment where you realize, wait, I’m not just the analyst or the operator. I’m actually a creator. I can build things. What else can I become?

That question is the one that keeps me up at night, but in a good way. AI isn’t just changing what jobs look like. It’s changing what WE can look like. The titles, the lanes we stayed in, the way we always described ourselves, those walls are coming down. And that’s actually exciting.

So What Do We Do With This?

I think the most important thing right now is to start noticing. Knowing something conceptually (“AI is going to change work”) isn’t the same as actually seeing how it shows up in your life and your kids’ lives.

For your kids: Pay attention to what they’re actually learning in school versus what they’re going to need. Are they being taught to follow instructions and get the right answer, or are they being pushed to figure things out, get creative, and be okay with getting it wrong? The second one is what’s going to matter.

For you: Try building something with AI this week. It doesn’t have to be impressive. Use ChatGPT or Claude to make something you didn’t think you could make. A meal plan, a project outline, a design for something in your house. See what happens when you bring the idea and let the tool handle the execution. You might surprise yourself.

The world is changing fast and yes, that can feel scary. But the opportunity is massive, for our kids AND for us. We just have to be paying attention and willing to learn alongside them.

What’s Coming Next Week

This week was about jobs, school, and what we’re building toward. Next week it gets personal. AI is showing up in places that are going to make you uncomfortable. Kids choosing to hang out with an AI companion instead of playing with friends. Songs being generated by AI that sound exactly like your favorite artist but aren’t. One in four millennials saying they could see AI as a romantic partner. Meta talking about a future where the content on your Instagram feed is generated just for you, by AI, and nobody else ever sees it.

It’s getting weird. And we need to talk about it.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

He kept looking up at me like he’d cracked some kind of code. “Do you SEE the pattern?!”

I loved it. I was so proud of him.

And then my brain did the thing it does. I thought, is this even going to matter? Will he need to know how to add when AI can do this in a millisecond? Is what he’s learning right now actually going to be relevant by the time he’s working?

That thought hit me harder than it should have. Because I work with AI. Every day. I’m not a developer or an engineer, but I use it constantly. I use it to build financial models, stress-test strategies, run scenarios for businesses. It’s my job to figure out how these tools create value.

And I still had no idea what my own kid needs to be ready for.

That’s when I realized, if I’m confused, someone who works in this every single day, what about every other parent out there? The ones who keep hearing “AI is going to change everything” but are getting hit from every direction with information and opinions and noise and honestly have no way to figure out what’s actually relevant to them and their family?

There's no shortage of people talking about AI right now. The problem isn't that no one is explaining it. The problem is that there's SO much out there, and most of it is either too technical, too salesy, or just not written for someone who's trying to raise kids and build a career at the same time — someone who doesn't have endless weekend hours to spend vibe-coding their way through it.

I am constantly thinking about this stuff. Reading about it, testing new models and applications, trying to understand what this shift means for me, my career, my wider family’s careers, what my kids need to learn, how much they should be exposed to, what opportunities are out there, and candidly, what threats.

It can be overwhelming. And I know if it’s overwhelming for me, it’s probably 10x that for parents who aren’t spending hours a week going down this rabbit hole.

So I wanted to build something that takes what I’m learning and shares it in a way that actually makes sense for us. That’s what AI After Carpool is.

It’s the conversation I’m pretty sure a lot of parents are having in their heads after work, off the clock, in the quiet before the after-school chaos starts. The “wait, should I be paying more attention to this?” moment. I want to take that feeling and turn it into something useful you can actually do something with.

Short, honest, no fluff. Just me figuring this out in real time and sharing what I learn so you don’t have to spend the hours I’m spending.

I don’t have all the answers. But I use AI every day for work, I’m raising kids, and I’m figuring this out right alongside you. I just happen to be a few steps ahead on the learning curve.

Here’s what I keep coming back to from that night with my son. Yeah, he was learning to count. But more than that, he was teaching himself how to notice things. How things connect. Where the pattern hides.

The math was how he got there, but the real skill was the curiosity and the willingness to dig in.

And that skill, knowing how to see what’s underneath, is one of the most important things we can have in a world where machines are about to do the surface-level work for us.

That’s the kind of stuff I want to dig into with you. Not only “here’s how AI works.” But “here’s what this means for the people you’re raising and the life you’re building.” Practical. Real. The way I’d explain it if we were standing outside school waiting to grab the kids.

What’s Coming

I’m going to cover a wide range here, from the super basic to the stuff that’s going to make you want to text your group chat immediately. Here’s a taste:

• A cheat sheet I put together that breaks down the most common AI tools, how safe they are for kids, and what they're actually doing with your data, plus what to look for when evaluating any new tool that pops up

• Why Mac Minis are sold out everywhere right now (hint: it involves something called Open Claw and it’s a bigger deal than most people realize)

• Some of the creepy tools your kids might already be exposed to, and what to actually do about it

• How to start using AI yourself and with your kids so you’re not just reading about this world, you’re actually in it

The goal is to make this fun and exciting, not doom and gloom. There is SO much opportunity here and I want us to be ready for it.

Next week, I’m digging into the question I can’t stop asking myself: “Should I actually be worried about this?” No buzzwords, no panic. Just a real answer from someone figuring it out right alongside you.

If you know another parent who’s been quietly wondering the same things, forward this to them. That’s how we build this together.

I’ll see you after carpool.

Danielle

I made this cheat sheet because every “AI explainer” I found assumed I already knew what a large language model was. I didn’t. You probably don’t either. And that’s fine.

Ten tools. One line each. Rated on how popular they are, how safe they are for kids, and how well they protect your data. Bookmark this. Come back to it. I’ll keep it updated.

How to read the ratings: 1–5 scale. 5 = great. 1 = proceed with caution.

1. ChatGPT — OpenAI

The one everyone’s heard of.

Answer questions, write emails, help with homework, plan meals. If you only try one AI tool, this is probably it.

★★★★★ Popular | ★★★☆☆ Safe for Kids | ★★★☆☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: Content filters exist but kids can get around them. Your conversations train their models unless you turn that off in settings.

2. Google Gemini

Baked into Google. You’re probably already using it.

Quick answers in search, email drafts in Gmail, trip planning. You’ll use AI without realizing you’re using AI.

★★★★☆ Popular | ★★★☆☆ Safe for Kids | ★★☆☆☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: Google already knows a lot about you. Gemini feeds into that ecosystem. It’s everywhere. Which is the upside and the thing to watch.

3. Claude — Anthropic

Built to be careful. That’s literally their thing.

Explaining hard stuff simply, writing, thinking through decisions. Great when you actually want to trust the output.

★★★☆☆ Popular | ★★★★★ Safe for Kids | ★★★★☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: Most safety-focused tool on this list. Doesn’t train on your conversations by default. Less well-known, but that’s changing.

4. Microsoft Copilot

If your kid has a school laptop, it’s probably already there.

Writing in Word, summarizing docs, quick answers in the Edge browser. Your family’s built-in AI if you’re in the Microsoft world.

★★★★☆ Popular | ★★★☆☆ Safe for Kids | ★★★☆☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: School versions are more locked down than personal ones. If your kid uses Edge, Copilot is one click away.

5. Apple Intelligence

On your iPhone whether you asked for it or not.

Rewriting texts, cleaning up photos, summarizing notifications. Background AI that makes what you already do a little easier.

★★★★☆ Popular | ★★★★☆ Safe for Kids | ★★★★☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: Most features run on your device, not in the cloud. Your data stays on your phone. Less powerful than ChatGPT, but the most private option here.

6. Meta AI

Inside Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Yes, really.

Quick questions while scrolling, image generation in DMs. Low-effort AI because it’s already where you are.

★★★★☆ Popular | ★★☆☆☆ Safe for Kids | ★☆☆☆☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: This one makes me nervous. Your conversations can be used for ad targeting. It lives inside Instagram, where your kids are, with very little separation. Eyes wide open on this one.

7. Perplexity

Google search, but it actually answers your question.

Research anything and it shows you exactly where the info came from. Great for fact-checking and building critical thinking.

★★★☆☆ Popular | ★★★☆☆ Safe for Kids | ★★★☆☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: The fact that it shows its sources is a huge win for teaching kids to verify what they read. Solid middle-of-the-road choice.

8. DALL-E / ChatGPT Images

Makes pictures from words. It’s wild.

School projects, birthday invitations, creative fun with kids. A great “create, don’t just consume” entry point to AI.

★★★★☆ Popular | ★★★★☆ Safe for Kids | ★★★☆☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: Strong content filters and active child safety reporting. The tool is safe but the broader conversation about AI-generated images and deepfakes is the one worth having.

9. Grok — xAI

Elon’s AI on X. No guardrails is the selling point.

Unfiltered answers, trending topic summaries. Built to not sugarcoat things.

★★☆☆☆ Popular | ★☆☆☆☆ Safe for Kids | ★☆☆☆☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: Designed to have fewer safety rails. For kids? Keep them away. It generates content other tools would refuse. A “know it exists, skip it” for families.

10. Alexa+ — Amazon

Your kitchen counter AI just got a lot smarter.

Smart home, timers, quick questions, shopping lists, bedtime stories. The AI your family uses without thinking about it.

★★★☆☆ Popular | ★★★☆☆ Safe for Kids | ★★☆☆☆ Protects Your Info

The real talk: Amazon keeps voice data by default. There’s a Kids+ mode, but the device is always listening. Review your settings, it takes two minutes.

The Bottom Line

You don’t need all of these. You don’t need most of them. But you should know they exist, because your kids do.

Pick one. Play with it. Then talk to your kids about what it can do, what it gets wrong, and why thinking before trusting matters.

I’ll keep this updated as things change.

Save this. Share it with a parent who needs it.

I’ll see you after carpool.

— Danielle

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