Artificial intelligence has the potential to alter the lifelong hardwiring of future generations if given to kids younger than 6, leaving them ill-equipped to navigate human relationships, sustain the attention required for learning and making it more difficult to develop empathy.
That assessment — found in Dr. Dana Suskind’s new book, “Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity, & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI” — makes handwringing over screentime and social media look almost quaint in comparison.
In her third book, Dr. Suskind outlines how these emerging technologies are disruptive to a developing brain and offers guidelines for parents on how to assess whether (or which ones) to allow their children to use.
AI shows up for this younger age group in cribs enhanced with technology to offer parents troves of sleep data; smart tutors to work on language development skills in preschools or digital read alouds for storytime; and plushie companions that can greet a child by name, tell bedtime stories, and “remember” facts about their “friend.”
Suskind, professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, and co-director at the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health, has dedicated her career to child development and parenting.
When I talked to Suskind recently, I admitted right off the bat that I feel totally at sea about how to navigate AI as a parent. My gut instinct is to say, I don’t understand it, I don’t like it, and to run screaming from the room. We already parented through a pandemic, now we have to figure this out, too?
Because she has spent her entire career navigating questions from parents like me – as she told me later, “parents are really my heart” – she was sympathetic. Her book even luckily provides an easy assessment framework that even the least tech savvy among us can handle.
What followed was a long conversation about how to navigate parenting amid these new technologies, how the onus is on parents in the absence of regulations, and how “good enough” parenting – the kind where parents are present and engaged as their imperfect selves – is actually ideal for human development. This conversation was adapted for length and clarity.
Rebecca Little: As you write, the relationship between child development and AI “has the potential to transform childhood, family structures, and ultimately nothing less than our future as a species.” Can you talk about what makes artificial intelligence so uniquely transformative to early childhood?
Dr. Dana Suskind: This is truly the first technology that can mimic human interaction. We’re a very social species. The drive to connect is as primitive as the drive to eat. Connection and relationships are how we stayed alive and developed as a species. Now we have these technologies that can replicate it, and it’s going to seem like a relationship, especially to a young brain. And this relationship will be so much easier than messy, difficult human relationships which could make their brains unaccustomed or unable to navigate them, or prefer the seamless interaction with technology.
Babies are born with neurons that have to be connected through early experiences, and if it doesn’t happen, those neurons are pruned away. Kids are developing skills from age 0 to six that hardwire them forever. Let’s talk more about the importance of this early neuroplasticity.
It’s mostly understanding how humans develop relationships. I come from the world of child development, so I study the importance of language and interaction. I have seen the impact of language – that particular input, the nurturing interaction from parents – is a way to build the hard skills of language and literacy. But the biggest aha moment was understanding that it was also building social and emotional and relationship skills – the ability to really relate to other humans.
Babies are born way too early. Human babies are born with brains only one-third the size of the adult-size brain, and that’s different from any other species. Horses and dogs have almost adult- sized brains, which is why they can be so independent early on. The fact that we were born so early is both a huge opportunity and a huge risk.
Nurturing interaction feeds the brain, and is also the instruction guide for how to wire up the brain for the world that child is going to be living in. There’s more brain activity at that period of time than any other time – a million neural connections are formed every second from every snuggle, every word spoken in parentese, etcetera. But the brain starts pruning away the connections that aren’t used in order to be more efficient.
Part and parcel to this is the attachment phenomenon. Babies attach to adult caregivers for protection. It teaches babies what relationships look like. The risk of artificial attachment with these devices could change what a child expects from relationships. With “good enough” parenting, you’ve got someone who loves you, sometimes they mess up, sometimes they’re not happy with you, but it’s still going to be OK, and you learn to have a relationship with another human being who’s got all their imperfections. But with artificial attachment, in theory, it’s like having someone who’s always there, who’s always responsive, but who says you’re always right, and it’s just so easy. And that will teach you something distinctly different about what relationships should look like.
Dr. Suskind shared that essential skills are shaped by human interaction: deep connection, critical thinking, creativity, resilience, curiosity and the ability to read a room. Here, Mallory Seliga and her daughter Maisie Seliga watch a performer play with a dropper during “RAIN: For Babies and Their Carers” at Filament Theatre.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
What seems especially challenging is that parents have to learn to parent their kids in the time of AI and also prepare the kid for a world that will be altered by it. Those are two different challenges that are happening in real time. What are the ways in which parents can do both of those things?
What is so clear is that those two things, parenting in the age of AI and parenting for the age of AI, bring you to the same conclusion: human connection and messy relationships are the right answer. It’s actually the most beautiful thing that in the most technologic advanced moment in human history, the skills you’re really going to need are distinctly human skills: deep connection, critical thinking, creativity, resilience, curiosity and the ability to read a room. Those are built by human interaction.
Now, technology can do all of those hard skills that we’ve been optimizing our kids for, but having empathy can’t be optimized. It can only be built by human presence, repetition, and messy human interactions. Technology has already been slowly eroding our ability to connect with each other, but this is a wake up call. We have to double down on connecting and understanding each other. It’’s hard, but that friction is what makes us stay human.
Over the last maybe 30 years – whenever helicopter parenting or snowplow parenting became common terms – there was already criticism about kids raised with minimal friction, like kids arriving at college having never done a chore. We already know kids need some challenges and independence to learn how to be a person, but AI has the potential to make that journey to age 18 a skating rink.
Parenting is the hardest job. Snowplow or tiger parenting was a rational response to that moment in time. There was huge inequality in the U.S. and huge returns on education, so why not optimize so your kid can get into the best preschool, get the highest test score, or get into the best college? But I wonder if now parenting will be about presence, about “good enough” parenting, and maybe it will break the spell of “intensive” parenting.
Being present, being imperfect, is the best thing – just being yourself, loving your kid, and messing up. My children are young adults now, and I can tell you, I was just the perfect imperfect parent. Back then, I felt so much guilt. I’m a working mom, there was always so much going on at once. Now that I’ve written this book, I’m like, hmm, I helped you with my imperfect parenting. You’re welcome. [laughs]
I thought the same. I have unintentionally been practicing “good enough” parenting for the last 16 years. So I did it, kids! You’re all set. I often sound like an old lady talking about, “back in my day, we rode our bikes and watched VHS tapes, and when the movie was over, we went back outside!” But it’s not just yearning for a childhood that we as parents understand – it’s feeling daunted by having to navigate one unprecedented thing after another, mostly without an instruction manual. You have created framework called HOPE, which gives parents a simple assessment for whether a child should be allowed to interact with a certain technology. How do we use it?
It’s based on developmental science. H is that human connection is irreplaceable. It’s not just a nice to have, it’s a biological necessity and the number one thing to protect. So you have to ask, is this technology crowding that out or supporting it? O is for owning your imperfections, the power of friction and good enough parenting for building your child’s brain. P is for protecting the early years when you’re building the actual hardware of the brain; parents need to be super careful about this technology. Lastly E is for enhance, not replace. I am not anti-technology at all. I’m a cochlear implant surgeon. I’ve seen the power of technology. But it should enhance our experiences. So if it lightens the parental load or offers up data, fine, but when AI replaces human interaction, it’s a risk. The simple HOPE framework is evergreen, and that’s something that you can go back to even as technology advances.
That’s what I found so reassuring about your book. This all seems very overwhelming, but a four-letter framework is doable without having to figure out each new technology, and being a “good enough” parent is extremely doable. But there’s an even more succinct method: As you point out, a lot of the people who built these systems do not let their children use them. It seems an easy shorthand for a parent gatekeeper – does the person who invented it, use it?
Exactly. If you’re not sure what to do, just look at the tech titans and model what they’re using because if they’re not, that’s an important data point.
It’s not just screen time that we have to track anymore; it’s that so much of what kids are consuming is AI slop on YouTube, some of which is labeled educational. My kids sometimes use Siri to get a quick answer. But a lot of these systems use faulty sources – like Google AI assist – are citing Reddit, so now some dude who tossed off an opinion from his couch is a leading authority?
The slop is at an unprecedented scale. There’s always been misinformation, but it’s just so scalable now. I talk about Fred Rogers [Mr. Rogers from PBS] a little bit in the book, and he said he went into television because he hated it so much. What he meant was that it wasn’t necessarily the medium, it was the quality of the content being served up. We already know this fast content, these dopamine hits, are not good for our kids, but it’s also full of misinformation. These videos teach kids the wrong ABCs and how to count incorrectly. Shouldn’t somebody be responsible if my kid learns the ABCs wrong? If you’ve mistaught a whole generation of humans, who is accountable?
The potential to rewire a child’s brain seems like a four-alarm regulatory fire to me, but so far, there are very few regulations dealing with much of big tech at all. Why is it falling on parents to sort it out?
We’re at the beginning of this tech revolution. There are relatively few guardrails, and I’m hoping over time that we get them. Can you imagine if you went to the grocery store and said, I wonder if this candy has arsenic in it. I guess I’ll bring it home and try to figure it out myself. We’re putting so much on the humans. Beyond basic privacy rules, we need tiers of regulation based on the type of AI content. A technology that helps a teacher develop a lesson plan is very different from a technology that a kid is working with directly. I hope with the greater awareness now of the dangers of social media and screentime that we won’t sleepwalk into this next period. Young childhood will not wait.
A book ends, a show ends, but the algorithm on YouTube is designed to keep kids watching and suggest clip after clip. I’m sure most parents have had the experience of their child turning into Gollum when taking a screen away. Current AI and tech is focused on the attention economy, but what’s coming next is the “intimacy economy” built on trust and the human need to be loved, which is so much harder to disengage from.
Children are even more likely to anthropomorphize a robot or technology. We have a drive to connect with a caregiver for protection which is probably why the earlier you get these technologies, the more likely you are to connect with them in that way, to ascribe human qualities to it. But these devices can’t care, they’re just set up to mimic caring.
Technology, when designed the right way, can lead to human flourishing and to address so many of things I’ve been working on in my career to support parents. AI is analogous to artificial food. On the one side is whole wheat bread and canned foods that still remain nourishing. The food revolution led to a decrease in malnutrition, to growing cities so people could get off the farm and become educated, and a lot of good came of it. What happened over time is [the development of] ultraprocessed, cheap alternatives that stimulated our dopamine receptors and are hyper palatable. It’s frictionless in the same way AI can be.
With AI, I look at the things that are really helpful or that lift administrative burdens off parents. Parents want to parent. We didn’t have children because we didn’t want to be around them. It’s the realities of society that made it so. Tech that lifts burdens on the logistic side could clear the way so parents can be more present, or AI that supports children with developmental differences that diagnose it earlier or support the provider in providing personalized treatment are the gold standard. As long as they are scientifically driven, those are great things. What gets closer to that ultraprocessed food, and concerns me, are AI companions. These plush toys are embedded with LLMs and are being marketed as a healthy alternative to screen time and your child’s first best friend, but that is uncharted territory, and I would hold off on that.
Consistent across all three of your books is that we have to extend caring about kids beyond our own home or neighborhood. There needs to be some sort of collective concern that this generation of kids could be raised in this way that could fundamentally rewire their brains.
You’re starting to see rumblings of this already, like people booing AI at commencements and pushing back on data centers. People are worried about their jobs, but I think it’s actually something even more fundamentally basic: we don’t want to be replaced in the roles that we play in each other’s lives, as a partner, friend or parent. We could all be in our little, tiny Wall-E bubbles, but we don’t want that.
It seems like the prevailing wisdom on AI is “well, it’s coming, and you’re not going to like it. Too bad.” Really? We can’t do anything? That helplessness rings false to me, and you write that ultimately, we can decide what to allow into our lives and our children’s lives.
We’re at the beginning of this. We really are still much more in the driver’s seat than we realize. We just have to realize it and act collectively. The one thing that is absolutely true is that we all love our kids more than anything. It defies any rationality, and it’s a great motivator. There’s nothing more human than that.