A pediatrician wrote about her 4-year-old this week. He’d corrected a bedtime book — cockroaches lay hundreds of eggs, not millions, he informed her — because he’d asked ChatGPT to fact-check it. His dad was proud. Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, writing for CNN Health on September 21, was worried.
Not because her son was wrong. Because he was right, and it happened too easily.
The line that matters
Dr. Bracho-Sanchez isn’t an educator, a curriculum designer, or an AI researcher. She’s a working pediatrician, writing about what she sees in her own house and in her practice. And she landed, on her own, on almost exactly the thing we’ve been saying since Lesson 1 of the Parent Track:
“These AI programs are interfering with key lessons of childhood, which is supposed to involve inefficient thinking. Kids guess, get things wrong, try again, argue about why and eventually figure something out. That process isn’t wasted time on the way to learning; it is learning.”
We call that productive struggle. She doesn’t use the phrase. She doesn’t need to — she’s describing the exact mechanism, from a different professional lens entirely.
Why “inefficient” is the point
Here’s the part of her piece worth sitting with:
“Artificial intelligence is extraordinarily good at collapsing that space. For adults, that efficiency can be useful. But for a developing brain, efficiency shouldn’t always be the goal.”
This is the whole argument, in one sentence. A calculator is efficient. A search engine is efficient. Those tools save you time on work you’ve already learned to do. An AI tutor that hands over an answer before a child has wrestled with the problem isn’t saving time on already-mastered work — it’s removing the work the brain needed to do in order to master it in the first place.
That’s the difference between augmenting a mind and quietly replacing the part of it that was supposed to grow.
Dr. Bracho-Sanchez goes further than a lot of parenting advice on this topic. She doesn’t say “just supervise the screen time.” She says something more specific and, we think, more useful: with young children especially, “there’s an even more basic question: Do they need to be using AI at all?” She’s not anti-AI. She’s anti-shortcut. Those are different positions, and the distinction is one we’d want every parent reading this to walk away with.
What this looks like at home
None of this means banning the tools or panicking every time your kid asks a chatbot a question. It means being honest about what the tool is for.
A few places this shows up in practice:
Let the guess happen first. Before your child asks an AI (or you) for the answer, ask them what they think it is, and why. The wrong guess is doing real work — it’s the thing their brain uses to build the right answer later.
Name what the tool actually is. Dr. Bracho-Sanchez suggests telling younger kids plainly: “This is a computer program that generates answers. It isn’t a person, and it sometimes gets things wrong.” That framing alone changes how a child relates to what they’re being told.
Use it alongside them, not instead of you. For younger children in particular, an AI tool is something to sit with together — not something handed over for independent use whenever they hit a wall.
Watch the transition, not just the usage. As kids get older, the more important question isn’t how many minutes they spend with an AI tool. It’s whether it’s quietly taking the place of a harder, slower, more human step — the friend they’d have texted, the parent they’d have asked, the confusion they’d have sat with a little longer.
The reassurance in this
If you’re a homeschool parent who already feels like you’re moving too slowly compared to what an AI-powered app promises, this piece is worth reading in full — not because it tells you anything you haven’t heard from us, but because it’s one more confirmation, from a completely different direction, that depth was never the slow way. It’s the only way that actually works.
The struggle your child goes through on a hard problem isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with your teaching. It’s the thing that makes the learning stick.
Read Dr. Bracho-Sanchez’s full piece at CNN Health.
What’s your house rule for AI and homework?
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