Do you worry about AI? Most adults do. We wonder what it means for jobs, for creativity, for how we think. And then we look at our four-year-olds and wonder what it means for them.
Twenty-five years in classrooms will teach you something: the skills that matter most in an AI-driven world look nothing like tech skills. Instead, they are skills that make us uniquely human, and we begin developing them in our earliest years.
The Real Concern
The concerns adults raise about AI are worth taking seriously. Relying on AI can short-circuit critical thinking. It can provide answers before we get the chance to be curious and wonder. It can convincingly create a feeling of connection with something that looks a lot like human connection but clearly isn’t.
Avoiding those concerns doesn’t serve our kids. Acting on them does. AI is reason to be more intentional than ever about these early years. Young children are more capable than we give them credit for. The ones who will thrive alongside AI are the ones who know how to think for themselves, communicate, and feel. So, let’s ensure we’re giving them opportunities to do just that.
The Skills That Matter
Judgment. Analytical thinking. The ability to form an opinion, wrestle with it, and defend it. Adaptability. Empathy. These are the skills being called for. And they are built in spaces like the block corner and the snack table.
When your child argues that the blue block goes on top of the red one, negotiates whose turn it is on the swing, or decides she doesn’t like the way a story ended, she is laying a foundation rooted in emotional intelligence. We don’t need to introduce AI into the early childhood classroom — and we shouldn’t. We need to protect the experiences that build the children who will be ready to meet it.
What You Can Do at Home
You don’t need a curriculum. Try to resist doing things for your child a little more often. Ask your child what they think and then wait for the answer. Ask them why. Ask them if they still think that after they hear someone else’s idea. Let them be wrong. Let them figure out they were wrong. Let them be bored long enough to come up with their own idea. When they’re frustrated, don’t fix it right away. When they disagree with you, hear them out. When they surprise you with a thought you didn’t expect, tell them so. Those moments add up to a child who trusts their own thinking.
The spark of “I did it!” — that moment of self-trust — is something no algorithm can give a child. But you can. And it turns out, it’s exactly what they’ll need for the world they’re growing into.
