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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