My son, Mahaan, was 9 the first time I watched him fail at something in real time.We had just moved to Sintra, Portugal, and he’d joined the local football league. No one on the team spoke English. No one looked like him. In those first weeks, I’d watch him keep glancing back at us between huddles, a look on his face that said, clear as anything, “I have no idea what these people are saying.” There was no app or translation he could pull up mid-drill. He just had to stand there, not understanding, and figure out what to do with that.What he did was sit in it. Over several weeks, he learned to read his coach’s hand gestures. He slowly found ways to connect with his teammates that didn’t require language ― a pass, a nod, a joke that worked without words. By the second month, he was best friends with half the team.I think about that season a lot now, mostly because of how rare it’s becoming.Every conversation about kids and AI seems to land on the same worries: cheating on essays, shortened attention spans, a generation that can’t write a sentence without a prompt. Those are real concerns. But after two decades spent studying how children actually learn, and a handful of years watching my own two kids grow up in a dozen different countries, the thing that keeps me up isn’t plagiarism. I’m afraid we’re raising a generation of kids who will never have to sit inside discomfort long enough to learn what they’re made of.There’s a concept in learning science called assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is when new information fits neatly into what a child already understands — easy, comfortable, low friction. Accommodation is what happens when it doesn’t fit, when the old mental model breaks and has to be rebuilt; this is where things get uncomfortable, and also where almost all real growth happens.AI, used the way most of our kids are currently using it, is an assimilation machine, and that’s what concerns me most.My daughter, Laaha, is a writer. She carries a typewriter with her, an actual one, and disappears into it for hours. Watching her work without AI is watching someone wrestle with a sentence until it says the thing she actually means, not the thing that was easiest to produce. The few times she’s used AI to help with a piece of writing, the results came back faster and cleaner, but something in them felt thinner. The sentence had an answer in it, but not a search. She noticed it before I had to point it out, that the writing that meant the most to her was always the writing that had cost her something to get to.That process, that reward ― that’s what I feared my kids would lose. So a few years ago, my husband and I made the decision to leave a conventional life behind and start moving our family through different countries and cultures, building our kids’ education around the world instead of around a single classroom.The author speaking about living globally for her Boundless Life organization.Photo Courtesy Of Rekha MagonPeople assumed we were running from something or chasing some Instagram version of freedom. We weren’t. We were trying to engineer something specific back into childhood: situations our kids couldn’t Google their way out of. A new country where they don’t speak the language yet. A friendship that has to be built from absolute scratch, with someone who looks nothing like them and grew up nothing like they did. A problem ― logistical, social, emotional, that has no clean answer.When we first moved to Kotor, Montenegro, the stoic, reserved culture of the Balkans came as a shock to my daughter. Laaha was 11, and by then she was used to running small errands on her own. She’d done it in every other country we’d lived in. But in Kotor, asking a tall, stone-faced vendor how to weigh and bag vegetables at the market felt like too much. For the first few weeks, she wouldn’t even try.Then, slowly, walking the streets of that small historic town on her own, she met Maria, a woman in her 30s who sold boat tours outside the old town walls. The two of them became fast friends. Through Maria, Laaha’s whole sense of the place shifted; she started to see the warmth underneath what had first read as coldness. Two months later, on Laaha’s birthday, Maria knocked on our apartment door with a gift and a card. When we left Kotor and Laaha had to say goodbye to her, the tears on both their faces are something I’ll never forget.A beautiful relationship was formed, but it didn’t come easy and it didn’t come right away. It took the unglamorous skill of staying in a hard moment without an exit, which is what I fear children losing. The ability to sit with not knowing. To be bored without immediately filling the boredom. To be in a room with someone you don’t understand yet and stay long enough to start understanding them, instead of closing a tab.That skill doesn’t come from a curriculum. It comes from being intentionally, repeatedly placed in situations slightly beyond what’s comfortable, and not being rescued from them too quickly, by a parent, an app or an answer that arrives before the question has finished forming.I think about Mahaan again, a year later, in Syros, a small Greek island where we lived for three months. I put him, 10 years old by then, in charge of figuring out our washing machine. There were no instructions in English, just a panel of Greek symbols he didn’t recognize. He sat in front of that machine for the better part of an afternoon, working through what each symbol meant by trial and error. When he finally got the first load running, the look on his face wasn’t relief. It was pride, the specific kind that only comes from solving something nobody handed you the answer to. I don’t know exactly what the world will look like by the time my kids are adults. Nobody does, and I think that’s the honest starting point for any conversation about how to raise kids right now, AI or no AI.What I want for them isn’t a head start on a particular set of facts. It’s the capacity to walk into a totally unfamiliar situation — a new country, a new job, a relationship with someone who sees the world differently — and stay there long enough to figure it out.That capacity gets built the same way it always has: through repeated, real, occasionally uncomfortable practice. Not through a tool that does it for you. So, as difficult as it is, what I’m working on is resisting the urge to hand my kids the answer the moment they look stuck. For now, while we still get to choose, that struggle is ours to protect.Rekha Magon is the co-founder and chief education officer at Boundless Life, a global platform enabling families to live, work and learn around the world. She has spoken at SXSW, and her work has earned multiple recognitions, including Canada’s 9th EdTech Innovation Award, Skift Innovation Awards, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2026 and a Finalist for Emerging Leader of the Year Education Pioneer Award.Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.