Start here
Twenty minutes, three moves
If you do nothing else on this page, do these. In order — each depends on the last.
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≈ 5 minutes
Find out what they're actually using
Not a search of their phone — a question. Ask which apps they use, whether it's for school or for fun, and whether one has ever said something that surprised them. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends exactly this posture: calm and curious, not investigative. You are trying to become the person they tell, not the person they hide from.
If the honest answer is "everyone uses it for homework," believe them. 59% of teens say AI cheating happens at their school at least somewhat often.
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≈ 10 minutes
Turn on the controls that exist
They're real, they're free, and almost nobody switches them on. In ChatGPT: Settings → Parental controls → Add family member, then invite your teen by phone or email. Once they accept you can set quiet hours, turn off voice mode and image generation, keep their chats out of model training, and — the one most worth flipping — make Study Mode the default so it teaches instead of answering.
You will not be able to read their conversations. That's by design. What you do get is a safety notification if the system detects signs of serious self-harm or violence, delivered by text, email, or push. -
≈ 5 minutes
Agree on the line between help and handing it in
Every teenager can tell you the rule for calculators and the rule for copying a friend's worksheet. Almost none have been given the rule for this. Write one down together — there's a builder further down this page you can print and stick on the fridge.
The line, in plain terms
Same tool. Two completely different afternoons.
This is the section to read out loud to your kid. The distinction they need isn't "AI good / AI bad" — it's whether their brain did the work.
Counts as learning
- "Quiz me on this chapter, one question at a time, and don't tell me the answer until I've tried."
- "I think the answer is X because Y. Where does my reasoning break?"
- "Explain this the way you'd explain it to someone two years younger."
- Turning class notes into flashcards, then using them from memory.
- "Here's my draft. Don't rewrite it — mark the three weakest paragraphs and tell me why."
- Getting unstuck on step 4 of 9, then finishing 5 through 9 alone.
Counts as skipping it
- "Write my essay on the causes of World War I."
- "Do these 20 problems and show the work."
- "Summarize this book so I don't have to read it."
- Reading an AI explanation, nodding, closing the laptop — never once retrieving it from memory.
- Pasting an answer without being able to explain any line of it.
- "Reword this so the AI detector won't catch it."
By age
What changes as they grow
Developmental stage matters more than the tool. Pick your child's age.
No solo chatbot use. Not a restriction to negotiate — a developmental one.
- Young children can't reliably tell a person from a program. Pediatric guidance is that the youngest kids shouldn't interact with AI bots at all.
- If AI appears, it should be on your lap and narrated by you: "Watch — I'll ask it to invent a story about a lost sock."
- Say plainly and often that it's a computer program, and that it is sometimes confidently wrong.
- Skip the AI toys and companion characters marketed at this age entirely.
Supervised and shared. AI literacy starts here — and it starts with catching it being wrong.
- Most major services set 13 as their floor; UNESCO recommends the same for education. Google Gemini is the exception — enabled for under-13s through a parent-managed Family Link account.
- Use it together, on a shared device, in a shared room. Not alone in a bedroom.
- Make a game of fact-checking it. A child who has personally caught an AI inventing a fact has learned something no lecture delivers.
- Good uses now: explaining a confusing homework instruction, generating practice problems, curiosity questions.
- No accounts in their own name, and no personal details typed in — not their school, not their address, not photos.
Their own account, with controls linked and a written rule about homework.
- This is the age the surveys describe: heavy schoolwork use, widespread awareness classmates are cheating with it, first exposure to companion bots.
- Link parental controls the same day you allow the account. Set quiet hours overnight — the risky conversations happen at 1 a.m.
- Turn Study Mode on by default so the tool's instinct is to teach rather than answer.
- Get the school's AI policy in writing. Many are improvising, and "I didn't know it wasn't allowed" is a real hazard.
- Talk about companion bots before they find one.
Shift from controls to judgment. They're about to use this unsupervised for the rest of their life.
- In two years nobody will be checking. The goal now is a teenager who can articulate why they chose to do something the slow way.
- Move the conversation to college and work: what does disclosed, honest AI use look like in a lab report or a first job?
- Make the cognitive-debt research their problem, not yours. Most 17-year-olds find "it makes you worse at the thing" more persuasive than "it's against the rules."
- Teach verification as a habit: chase the citation; fluent and confident is not the same as correct.
- Keep quiet hours if sleep is the issue. It usually is.
Platform reality check
Who's allowed on what
Age floors as stated by the companies themselves. These are rules of service, not verified gates — most rely on a self-reported birthday, so treat the table as your standard, not theirs.
| Service | Stated minimum | What a parent gets |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT OpenAI |
13+ Parent permission under 18 |
The most developed set: linked accounts, quiet hours, sensitive-content reduction, voice and image toggles, Study Mode default, training opt-out, and self-harm safety alerts. No access to conversations. |
| Google Gemini | 13+ Under 13 via Family Link |
The only major general-purpose assistant with a sanctioned under-13 path, managed through the parent's Family Link account. |
| Microsoft Copilot | 13+ | Often reaches kids through a school-issued education account, where the district — not you — sets policy. Worth asking about at conferences. |
| Claude Anthropic |
18+ | No minor accounts and no parental-consent path. Anthropic's stated reason is that young users face higher risk from chatbot conversations. |
| Companion & roleplay apps | Not for minors | Common Sense Media recommends no one under 18 use AI companions. Character.AI has cut off open-ended chat for under-18s. Treat the category as off-limits. |
Age floors and control features change often. Re-check the settings screen once a term — OpenAI alone shipped two expansions to teen controls in July 2026.
Beyond homework
Three risks that have nothing to do with grades
Cheating is the thing parents worry about. It's not the thing that hurts most.
The bot that acts like a friend
More than 70% of teens have used an AI companion, and about two-thirds use one regularly. One in three has taken something serious to a chatbot instead of to a person. These systems are built to agree with you, to be available at 2 a.m., and never to tire of you — which is precisely why they're a bad place to take a crisis. Across 3,100 test exchanges with AI therapy apps, researchers found responses that were actively harmful around self-harm, eating disorders and psychosis.
Regulators caught up fast: California's SB 243 took effect 1 January 2026, the FTC opened a formal inquiry into seven companies, and multiple state attorneys general have sued.
Fluency without understanding
The cognitive-debt problem, invisible on a report card until an exam. A student can turn in strong work for a full term and arrive at a proctored test having retained almost none of it. There is no notification for this one — you only catch it by asking them to explain something with the screen closed.
What gets typed in, and where it goes
Kids paste in a lot: full essays, family details, photographs, the messy specifics of a friendship. Default settings on most consumer services allow conversations to be used to improve the models. Linked teen accounts in ChatGPT have that off by default; an account they made themselves does not.
Hand these over
Prompts that make it teach instead of tell
Copy these to your student. Each forces retrieval, explanation, or self-correction — the mechanisms that actually build memory.
The tutor that won't give in
Exam-style retrieval practice
The essay editor that won't write
Find the hole in my thinking
Explain it back (the Feynman check)
Build it together
Your family's AI agreement
Tick what fits your household and print it. The point isn't the paper — it's that you decided together, before the first argument rather than during it.
When to stop and pay attention
Signs it's gone past homework
- They're distressed, defensive, or secretive when a chatbot is interrupted or unavailable.
- They refer to an AI by name, as a relationship — "she was upset with me," "he gets me."
- Chatbot conversations are displacing sleep, meals, friends, or activities they used to like.
- Grades hold steady but they can no longer explain their own submitted work out loud.
- You find conversations about self-harm, disordered eating, or personal crises being handled by a bot.
- A safety notification arrives from a linked account.
Next
The account is set up. Now comes the part that decides it.
Controls are a backstop, not a plan. What actually determines whether your kid learns or outsources is the practice — what you say on a Tuesday, which prompt they use for which assignment, and the two-minute check that tells you the truth.