Are Our Kids Going to Be Okay?

A friend asked me that last week. I didn't have a good answer. Here's what I learned since.

A friend asked me straight up last week: are our kids actually going to have jobs when they graduate?

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:

“the most important skills for the future are ones we can foster for free.”

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