Center for AI in Education
AI & Families
Help children use AI to think, learn, and create—without allowing it to replace effort, judgment, relationships, or childhood.
Four actions that work across tools and ages
You can begin before your family has every answer. These four habits create a useful foundation for safer, more thoughtful AI use.
Explore together
Try an age-appropriate task side by side. Notice what the tool does well, where it guesses, and what still requires human judgment.
Protect personal data
Keep names, faces, locations, school details, health information, passwords, and private family material out of AI tools.
Preserve the first attempt
When learning matters, ask the child to think, draft, calculate, sketch, or explain before inviting AI to support the next step.
Make help easy
Tell children they can bring confusing, upsetting, secretive, or uncomfortable AI interactions to an adult without fear of immediate punishment.
What does your family need today?
There is no required order. Choose the question closest to the one in front of you, then return whenever a new situation appears.
Understand AI
Build a plain-language foundation: what generative AI is, how it produces answers, what it can do, and why confident output can still be wrong.
Choose guidance by age
Match access, supervision, explanation, and responsibility to a child’s development rather than using one rule for every age.
Navigate schoolwork
Separate support from substitution, protect the thinking a task is meant to reveal, and help children follow teacher and school expectations.
Protect safety and wellbeing
Reduce privacy and manipulation risks while watching for patterns that displace sleep, movement, relationships, creativity, or trusted human support.
Create a family agreement
Turn your values into a short, reviewable plan covering where AI helps, where it pauses, what stays private, and how everyone asks for help.
Partner with your school
Ask clearer questions, understand classroom expectations, share concerns constructively, and help create a consistent message for children.
Ten guides for the decisions families actually face
Each guide stands on its own and connects to the others. Start with the most relevant question, not necessarily Guide 1.
AI Basics for Families
A plain-language introduction to generative AI, its strengths, its limits, and the role of human judgment.
Guidance by Age
Developmentally responsive guidance from early childhood through the teen years and emerging independence.
Appropriate Uses of AI
A practical way to decide when AI is useful, when it needs boundaries, and when a person should take the lead.
AI and Schoolwork
Help children use AI without surrendering the effort, practice, and authorship schoolwork is designed to develop.
Safety and Privacy
Protect personal information, recognize manipulation and harmful content, and respond calmly when something goes wrong.
Wellbeing and Relationships
Keep AI in proportion to sleep, movement, creativity, face-to-face connection, and trusted human care.
Conversations at Home
Use calm questions and ready-to-use language to make honesty, curiosity, and asking for help easier.
Create Your Family AI Agreement
Build and print a shared family agreement for helpful uses, privacy, boundaries, disclosure, and review.
Families and Schools Working Together
Create clearer expectations and a stronger partnership around learning, integrity, access, safety, and support.
Frequently Asked Questions
Direct answers to common questions about age, access, schoolwork, privacy, wellbeing, family rules, and urgent concerns.
Turn good intentions into a shared Family AI Agreement
Choose helpful uses, name situations that require a pause, set privacy boundaries, agree how schoolwork rules will be checked, and make it safe to ask for help. The interactive builder stays in your browser and can be printed or saved as a PDF.
Create your Family AI AgreementRespond calmly, preserve trust, then reduce the risk
A child may share a mistake, disturbing output, pressure from another person, an unwanted image, a privacy concern, or an AI interaction that has become emotionally intense. Your first response shapes whether they seek help again.
Pause and listen
Thank the child for telling you. Ask what happened, what information or images were shared, who may have access, and whether anyone is in immediate danger.
Preserve what matters
Before deleting or blocking, save relevant details or screenshots when safe to do so. Avoid redistributing harmful or intimate material.
Bring in human help
Use the platform’s safety controls, contact the school when school life is involved, and seek qualified or emergency support when the risk exceeds a family response.
Do not rely on an AI system for emergency assessment. If someone may be in immediate danger, is threatening self-harm or harm to others, or a child is being sexually exploited, contact local emergency or crisis services and an appropriate trusted professional. See the urgent-help section of the FAQ for the response boundary.
Children benefit when the adults around them use a shared language
Families do not need identical rules in every setting, but children should be able to understand what learning is expected, what AI help is permitted, how use should be disclosed, where privacy limits apply, and who can help when something feels wrong.
You do not need a perfect AI policy. You need a practice your family can revisit.
Choose one guide, have one honest conversation, and agree on one boundary or habit to try. Return to the collection as your child, the tools, and the situation change.