Some days (most days?), I feel like I’m drowning in the AI-tool tsunami.
Every thirty minutes, there’s a new model that promises to change the world. And if you’re a parent, it’s easy to feel that creeping sense of left-behindness.
“How do I prepare my kids for a future I can’t even keep up with myself?”
What we have to remember is that fear grows when we don’t feel in control.
So ask yourself: what are you in control of?
Yourself. Your brain. The things you build, not the things you consume. This is true for your kids as well, and it’s an incredibly empowering truth.
Teaching kids how to be in control of their own minds (and not be controlled by technology) is one of the most urgent and important responsibilities happening inside homes across the world.
I believe the quality of your kid’s future depends more on intellectual ownership than on winning the race to master the next AI tool.
The best thing you can do as a parent is help your kid develop the part of themselves no technology can own: a mind of their own.
Helping Your Kid Develop “A Mind of Their Own”
Your kid doesn’t need to know everything by the time they graduate high school (of course), but they do need a head full of original ideas, unique insights, and the savviness to know what to do with them.
Welcome to “the spiky point of view.”
A spiky point of view is a unique belief that is strongly held, backed by research, and carries a little bit of heat with it: some flair, some spice, some chutzpah.
It’s surprising, but true. It’s not controversial for the sake of controversy, but it’s a perspective that not everyone agrees with.
For example, my spiky point of view is that the six-hour school day is wholeheartedly unnecessary. I believe kids can learn twice as much in two hours a day with AI-powered academics, then spend the rest of the day doing the deeply human work of learning grit, socialization, entrepreneurship, public speaking, and more.
Many people agree with this. Many don’t. That’s the point of a spiky point of view.
It’s not rage bait, but a conviction rooted in evidence and rigorous thinking.
The term “spiky POV” was coined by entrepreneur Wes Kao and it’s a fantastic filter for asking: do my ideas have weight and originality, or are they actually just recycled from somebody else?
What This Looks Like for High Schoolers
One of my favorite examples of this comes from an Alpha High student named Elle.
As a freshman, Elle only cared about two things: scrolling TikTok and talking about boys. Instead of shaming or dismissing her, Elle’s guide leaned into her interests and started asking questions.
They found that she was deeply passionate about the psychology and realities of teen dating. She later built AskElle, an AI-powered dating coach designed to help teenagers form safer, healthier, more confident offline connections.
She now has tens of thousands of users, and the app makes money only when users change their behavior, not when they spend more time on the platform.
Her spiky point of view: Teen technology should be judged by the offline behavior it improves, not by the screen time it captures.
Elle combined two of her biggest passions — TikTok and boys — and built something out of them. She became a creator, not a consumer.
This is totally possible for your kid, too.
Maybe your son is a serious football player who believes rest matters more than training harder. Maybe your daughter is an artist who believes teen art should be shown to adult audiences before adult gatekeepers certify it as professional.
Trust me, your kid has plenty of spiky perspectives.
They just need your help developing them.
Start asking them: “What's something you think people misunderstand about a subject you care about?” And then: “What makes you think that?” Lean into their unique passions, no matter how frivolous they may seem. (TikTok and boys, remember?)
I’m not saying your kid needs to go build an app or launch a company right now. And I’m certainly not telling you to raise kids with louder opinions. The internet has plenty of those.
I'm encouraging you to raise kids whose beliefs are:
Grounded in enough knowledge to defend
Held with enough humility to be challenged
And useful enough to change someone's mind and prompt them to take action.
Why Your Kid Can Do This (And AI Can’t)
Your kid can hold two conflicting ideas in their head at the same time. AI scours the internet and finds the average. Meanwhile, new human knowledge is created between the tension of two conflicting ideas. When pushing the edge of human knowledge, AI breaks down.
Your kid can examine an idea from first principles. AI cannot challenge its own foundation. Only humans have the ability to ask: what if we rebuilt?
Your kid knows what questions to ask. Humans have the integral skill of knowing the question we should even be asking in the first place. This comes from lived experience and unique insights.
Your kid can integrate ideas across domains and determine whether that integration is valuable. (Just look at the earlier example from Elle.)
AI is black and white: facts, summaries, insights. Your kid can live in the gray area, the Wild West of intellectual knowledge.
It is only in the gray where new ideas abound, where your kid can become truly original, spiky, and irreplaceable.
Replacing Fear with Excitement
We cannot predict which AI tools will dominate which industries by the time our kids graduate. But we can help them become people who have something worth saying.
Our children will become the authors of their own thinking. They will exhibit self-mastery over their minds and attention. They will be creators in a world of consumption.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not scared of this future.
I’m quite excited about it.
Next week: I’ll share a practical framework for helping your kid develop their spiky points of view. As long as they have this in their back pocket, they’ll be golden. (And all they need is a pen and paper.) If you aren’t already, make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it.
I always read Natalie Wexler's substacks and recently discovered this substacks, which I am finding interesting. As I a special education teacher to for low income, ELL students I do find how fast AI is changing education and careers a bit scary. It's a very different world for my students than for the students you write about.
This year I am trying to figure out if it makes sense to use AI writing tools with my 4-6 grade students as assistive technology or do we just keep stuggling to develop old fashioned basic literacy, without much student use of AI. (As I teacher I will definitely being using it more for lesson planning.) Anyhow, while I am not your intended audience I plan to keep reading here to learn more about AI use for more privileged, capable students, which may help me condsider how to use it for my students.