What You Need to Know About How Your Child Uses AI at School

Confession time: I’ve written extensively about the harm generative AI causes children, my 11-year-old isn’t allowed to use AI chatbots at home, and we’ve had many conversations on the topic. Yet, it wasn’t until this June, the last month of his elementary school experience, that I even thought to ask him about AI use at his school. 

I’m not proud of this oversight, but I’m coming clean here for two reasons: one, to let you know it’s okay if you haven’t thought about AI in schools yet; and two, to declare it’s time we all turn our attention to this issue. 

Here’s why you should care and my suggestions for how to make an impact. 

The risks to kids from using AI at school 

This technology is so new that we don’t yet know the full scope of how it impacts children, but what we do know isn’t great. 

Plenty has been said about AI’s effect on kids’ mental health, privacy concerns, racial bias, and age-inappropriate content. Those are important, but I want to focus here on an issue that’s gotten less noise: how AI impacts learning, the very thing we entrust our schools with. 

Stunts brain development 

You may have heard of the risk of cognitive atrophy from overuse of AI. Researchers have demonstrated that when people frequently offload cognitive tasks to AI, they risk weakening their ability to independently perform tasks requiring critical thinking and reasoning. 

Adults can course-correct and strengthen those mental muscles again. But experts increasingly warn that if kids overuse AI, they may miss a critical window for developing these skills and therefore risk never being able to build them at all. It’s an emerging theory related to AI known as cognitive foreclosure.

Weakens learning 

When students rely on generative AI without guardrails, their learning and retention of the material is likely to be reduced.  

Provides false information 

One thing we expect our children to get at school is accurate information. But the introduction of AI into learning environments compromises that basic tenet of education. 

• In August 2025, tests of leading AI chatbots revealed the bots made false claims in 35% of instances. And it’s getting worse: this is up from 18% the previous year. 
• A recent analysis showed that AI overviews were inaccurate 10% of the time.
• The same analysis found that in instances where the AI overview wasn’t outright wrong, more than half of those responses linked to websites that didn’t fully support the information provided, making it difficult for students to confirm accuracy. 

Finding out how your child uses AI at school 

My kiddo is going to middle school in the fall, so I’m right there with you starting at square one. Here’s how to find out how your child uses AI at school: 

• Ask your kid. This is only a starting place. Are kids able to use AI for image generation and coding in the classroom? Is the rule “out of sight, out of mind”? Unless there’s a strong school policy, AI use can vary from teacher to teacher and may even shift mid-year. But this will give you a baseline.
• Review the district’s technology policy. Most school districts publish a technology policy on their website. See if yours includes anything about AI. (Most don't; it's still very much the Wild West out there.) 
• Talk to the school. In the absence of a district policy, you’ll need to approach the school for answers. This is also useful if your district does have a policy to find out how it’s being implemented at the school level. 

What to do if you disagree with how AI is used at your child’s school 

If you aren’t happy with how AI is used at your child’s school, or if the policies are still being developed, here’s how you can make an impact: 

Collective action 

Parents have more power than we often assume, especially when we work collectively. Some states and districts already have parent-led efforts underway to influence AI policy in schools. If yours doesn’t, consider starting one; this resource can help you get started. 

Educate your child

Regardless of how your child uses AI in school, these tips can help inoculate them against some of the impacts, now and in the future: 

• Teach them the risks AI poses to their brain and learning. 
• Help them examine how they use AI for learning and discover ways to do so more discerningly. For example, kids can ask it to create test prep questions, rather than using it to complete homework. 
• Show them how to think critically about AI output. Tell them how often AI can be wrong and why it’s important to question and verify any information it provides. Experiment with AI with them to practice these skills. 
• Watch how they use AI. BrightCanary helps you monitor everything your child types on their personal device, including all AI platforms. This won’t show you what they do on their school computer, but it will give you insight into how they use AI more generally. 

The bottom line

When AI is part of the learning process, it can weaken critical thinking, diminish learning, and may even stunt brain development. AI tools also produce false information at startlingly high rates, with error rates that are climbing, not falling. 

To minimize the potential for harm, find out how your child’s school uses AI in the classroom, get involved in advocacy efforts to shape the district’s policy, and teach your child how to think critically about how they use AI. We can’t ban our children from using AI forever, but the hope is we can help them learn to use it as a tool, not a crutch. 

Check out our guides to Claude AI and ChatGPT for kids, and learn more about how BrightCanary child monitoring works. 

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