The author works at Google and has kept her child mostly offline.
Courtesy of the author
I work at Google helping organizations implement and adopt AI solutions, yet I have spent the last eight years raising my daughter with nearly no access to tech beyond weekend family movie nights.What began as an intentional decision, one I knew would test my limits as a parent, especially during the endless "I'm bored" tantrums, eventually became the easy route. I would bring "mommy's bag of tricks," which included glitter, games, and glue, to every restaurant and keep my phone strictly off limits.But the glitter-and-glue phase didn't last forever. As she gets older, I increasingly find myself watching her peer group immerse themselves in technology and worry that I am setting her up to fall behind in the classroom. While my daughter has briefly used PowerPoint, her school projects are still on poster boards. Meanwhile, her friends are creating Canva presentations, videos, and using Pinterest for inspiration.What I am coming to terms with is that just saying no to tech has made it easy for me to avoid addressing the reality of the times we live in head-on. And now, I need to create a conscious plan for introducing technology that aligns with our family values and what I think is important.She told me to ask ChatGPTBut as I sat on my high horse of self-realization, I got hit with another dose of reality. We were on a car ride to school, catching up on homework, when she came across a word she didn't know. I couldn't explain what the word meant, so I grabbed my phone and asked ChatGPT to explain it to an 8-year-old.We got the answer and breezed through her exercise of writing a sentence with the word. This is normal behavior for me these days. Have a question, get the answer immediately. No big deal, right?
