Parenting and AI: The Valley’s super nanny

Parents often run out of answers. Why does the younger child have stomachaches again? Why will the sister not stop whining? How can anyone contain a 10-year-old’s early adolescent defiance?

That uncertainty helps explain the appeal of ChatGPT and similar language models. When a parent has no idea what to do, the chatbot always appears to have an answer. Artificial intelligence has already become part of many families.

A Pronova survey in June found that 58 percent of the parents questioned had asked an AI system concrete questions about parenting. Parents with children under six did so particularly often. Yet two-thirds said they checked the generated answers only sometimes or never.

That level of trust, or perhaps exhaustion and overload, is alarming to the author. AI models draw on many different sources, not all of them reliable, and can confidently produce complete nonsense. The uneasy question is whether the author, too, is already using AI in the same way as most parents.