A few weeks before my daughter’s fourth birthday, I stumbled across an AI party planner called CelebrateAlly. “Looking to plan a themed party, a surprise bash, or just a relaxed get-together?” read a banner on its website, which promised that the app would take care of “all the details—themes, activities, and decorations.” It also offered to write birthday cards, “capturing your heartfelt sentiments beautifully!”
The offer had a certain appeal. I was overwhelmed, entering the phase of planning where I actually had to execute on my daughter’s vision for her bash. We’d been talking about the party for months, and her requests were specific yet constantly changing. (She wanted a unicorn cake—no, a unicorn piñata; to invite only her cousins—then a few of her friends too, and then all of the kids on our block.) But I was genuinely curious to hear them. Each question I asked her was a way to draw closer to her: I learned about who she is right now while, I hope, showing her that I really want to know. After all those conversations, using AI would have felt like a betrayal.
So I didn’t—but I’ve found it impossible to avoid the ads for AI tools cluttering my social-media feeds. A few months ago, Welch’s Fruit Snacks launched a “Lunchbox Notes Translator” on their website, which promised to transform “candid parental sentiments into heartfelt messages”—for example, turning “You make me tired” into “I love how independent you can be!” The forthcoming app Trove offers “AI-guided storytelling”; another app, Kidli, says that it will use AI to “help you raise happy, healthy, and smart kids” (though exactly how is unclear). Then there’s Snorble, a $300 AI robot designed to help kids sleep better. In its promotional video, when a child wakes in the night with a bad dream, Snorble smiles and says, “It’s okay, I’m here with you,” presumably soothing the child back to sleep, no human interaction necessary. Milo, an AI tool that claims to help with the organizational tasks of running a family, summed up the mindset espoused by many of these apps: “Don’t ask Mom, ask Milo.”
Some of these tools are yet to be fully funded or launched. The Lunchbox Notes Translator, which was much maligned on social media, is now on a “snack break.” But others are already quite popular. Last year the parenting influencer Becky Kennedy (a.k.a. “Dr. Becky”) released an app that, among other things, lets parents bring dilemmas to an AI chatbot named GiGi. It now has more than 90,000 paying members, one spokesperson told me, and may be a sign of AI’s coming influence on child-rearing.
For parents, 41 percent of whom are often “so stressed they cannot function,” according to an advisory issued last year by then–Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, any offer of help may be alluring. With these apps promising to enable people to parent better—responding to messages from school, laying out perfectly Tetris-ed play-date calendars, preparing carefully calibrated scripts to respond whenever a child has a tantrum—it’s perhaps no wonder some are taking off.
Yet when parents outsource the work of raising their kids to a bot, both adults and children are bound to miss out. In my case, with CelebrateAlly, the app might have made for a more picture-perfect bash—but the party wasn’t the point. What my daughter needed from me, and what the time we spent planning together gave her that an AI never could, was my attention and care. Apps may promise to optimize parenting, but ultimately, they threaten to sap its intimacy and humanness.
Take the apps that create scripts for difficult conversations with kids. The AI might seem omniscient, but parents know much more about their children than any large language model ever could. “I know that if I give my kid a hug, in this way or at this moment, they’re going to lean into me and be all cuddly,” Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow and the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, told me. Winthrop called information like that “tacit knowledge”—the small, intangible things about a child that only another human can pick up on. Decisions based on this type of knowledge—not those made by a chatbot—are what help make a child feel truly cared for.
As I read about the Lunchbox Note Translator, for instance, it occurred to me that when I pack my 7-year-old son’s lunch, the love letter I include is a Starburst. I take extra care to make sure that I put in his favorite color (red) on big days. That chewy little square is just one way I show him that I know him as only I can.
My gesture may seem small—but, contrary to what some AI tools may seem to imply, in most cases, small is plenty. And that points to another problem with AI’s promises of optimized parenting: Rather than dismantling families’ to-do lists, the apps tend to encourage a do-it-all model of parenthood (and of childhood) that constantly demands more from parents. Milo, for example, promises to help filter through “school apps, sports schedules, and endless group texts” to make a to-do list. But after the app arranges the list, parents are still responsible for completing it. If my family’s daily activities ever balloon to the point of needing digital project management, I’d rather reevaluate our priorities than ask AI to help us juggle more. Instead of downloading yet another app, other parents, too, might be better served by trusting their own instincts and doing less for their kids: scaling down the birthday party, skipping the lunch-box note entirely, saying no to the third (or fourth, or fifth) after-school activity.
Of course, many parents still want and need help. And AI may be useful for some household tasks. But parents risk isolating themselves if they turn to AI too frequently, rather than to friends and family. Kennedy told me that the idea for her app’s bot came out of conversations with followers who desperately wished they could text her during their tougher parenting moments. She said that she would never want to replace mom-to-mom interactions. But I struggle to imagine that paying for Kennedy’s app wouldn’t stop some moms from texting their friends: Why risk exposure and vulnerability with a fellow parent when they can ask an AI bot that has been carefully trained to speak only words of encouragement?
If they hold off on reaching out to friends and family when the going gets hard, though, parents may lose out on more than just in-the-moment guidance. Asking for help “is often the way we build community,” Winthrop told me. The friends a parent calls when they run into a tricky situation may become part of their bigger support system—a network that parents need. As Winthrop put it: “A chatbot’s not going to feed your cat or take your kid to school when you have a work call.”
A chatbot is also not going to show up to your child’s birthday. As is often the case with celebrations for little kids, the guest list for my daughter’s party included as many grown-ups as children. There was the school mom who knows how passionate my daughter is about Frozen and suggested hiring the same Elsa actor who had been a hit at her own daughter’s party. There was the mom next door who knew just where I could order the rainbow-shaped cake my daughter wished for. We didn’t have balloon arches, the cake came out a bit funky, and the Elsa experience was unbelievably awkward for the adults (though the preschoolers loved it). Still, I am so glad we all planned it—me, my daughter, and our community—slowly, imperfectly together.
The post Keep AI Out of Parenting appeared first on The Atlantic.
