The Thinking your Child isn't Doing

DISCOVERING AI: Igniting Human Potential
By Amy D. Love, Founder of DISCOVERING AI and of the Global FAMILY AI GAME PLAN initiative

AI doesn't just make tasks easier. During the years the brain is still forming, the tasks it skips may never get built.

Last week, we talked about the moment most parents do not see coming. The first time a child reaches for AI before reaching for their own thinking. This week, we need to talk about why that moment matters as much as it does, because the answer goes deeper than screen time or distraction. It goes to the architecture of the developing brain.

AI does not just make tasks easier. It reshapes the environment in which your child learns to think, and the distinction matters enormously. A cross-disciplinary report drawing on expertise from neuroscience, child development, and AI product design makes this plain: from birth through approximately age 25, the brain is in an extended period of neuroplasticity, during which environmental stimuli play a pivotal role in shaping neural pathways and cognitive function. The experiences children have during that window, and the tools that mediate those experiences, become part of the architecture of how they process the world. This is not metaphor. It is neuroscience.

The concern that follows is not theoretical. Research published in the peer-reviewed journal Societies found that when adults consistently offload thinking to AI, they lose cognitive capacities they once built. For adults, that is a real cost worth taking seriously. For children, the implication is more significant still. A child who grows up routinely delegating thinking to an AI system may never build certain capacities in the first place. They are not losing something they had. They are missing the formation that should have happened. The difference between those two things is enormous, and it is the difference that no app store review will mention.

We are already seeing early signals of this shift playing out at scale. A nationally representative RAND study tracking American youth across 2025 found that the share of middle and high school students using AI for homework jumped from 48% in May to 62% by December, a 14-point rise in seven months. What makes that number more striking is what came alongside it: 67% of those same students said they believed that using AI for schoolwork would harm their critical thinking skills, a figure that itself rose more than ten percentage points over the course of the year. Students are using AI in growing numbers and simultaneously expressing concern that it is working against them. That is not confusion. That is a signal worth paying attention to.

Another finding from this period should land differently for parents than it might for a policymaker reading a report. A survey of teachers and students conducted by the Center for Democracy and Technology across the 2024-25 school year found that 38% of students agreed it is easier to talk to AI than to their parents. More than two-thirds of both parents and students agreed on something even more striking: parents have no idea how their children are actually interacting with AI. These numbers are not an indictment of any particular product or platform. They are a portrait of what happens when technology moves faster than the conversations families need to have about it.

The risk, in other words, is not that your child is using AI. The risk is that they are using it without any shared framework for when it supports their thinking and when it starts replacing it. And in the absence of that framework, the default is always the path of least resistance.

Next week, we shift from understanding the problem to owning the solution, because if AI is already shaping how your child thinks, one question becomes unavoidable: who is guiding that process?