Should Your Kid Use ChatGPT?

Every father I know is asking this question wrong.

They are asking it as a yes-or-no — should my kid use it, should my kid not use it — as though there were two coherent worlds, one with the tool and one without, and they were standing at a fork choosing between them.

That fork does not exist. Your kid is going to use it. Your kid's classmates are using it. Your kid's teachers are using it, half of them in secret. The kid down the street is using it to write his college application essays right now. The kid in your kid's group project last week used it for the parts your kid was supposed to do. The question of whether is settled. The question that is open is which kind of relationship your kid forms with the tool, and you are one of two adults in his life who get a vote on the answer.

The two relationships look almost identical from the outside and are completely different from the inside.

In the first relationship, the kid uses the machine the way a tired employee uses an intern. He hands off the parts he does not want to do. He skips the thinking. He turns in the output. He gets a grade. He learns nothing. He becomes, by sixteen, a kid who can produce a polished page about anything and understand none of it. He is not stupid. He is unbuilt. The reps that would have built him went to the machine, and the machine, being a machine, kept them.

In the second relationship, the kid uses the machine the way a curious researcher uses a brilliant but slightly unreliable collaborator. He asks it things. He argues with it. He notices when it is confidently wrong, which is often, and he learns the texture of that wrongness, which is one of the most important skills a young person can develop in 2026. He uses it to draft and then he tears the draft apart. He uses it to explain and then he tests the explanation. He treats it as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter.

The difference between these two kids, at twenty-two, is enormous. The first kid will have the resume. The second kid will have the mind.

Now: which one your kid becomes is not a function of the tool. It is a function of how you talk about the tool at the table, in the car, in the moment the homework gets stuck.

If you treat the machine as a threat, your kid will hide his use of it from you. You will lose the conversation. He will form his relationship with it in private, optimized for not getting caught, which is the worst possible context to learn a new tool in.

If you treat the machine as a magic answer box, your kid will treat it as a magic answer box, and his thinking will atrophy in exactly the way you fear.

If you treat the machine as a powerful, fallible collaborator that requires the user to remain sharp — and you demonstrate this in your own use of it, in front of him, with narration — then he will form that relationship too.

I am leaving out the part most fathers want to hear. I am not going to tell you the age. I am not going to tell you the daily limit. I am not going to tell you which app to install or which to block.

This is on purpose. The numbers are not the question. The numbers will be obsolete by Christmas.

The question is what your kid sees you do with the tool, what he hears you say about it, and whether the relationship he is forming with it in his head is the one you would have built for him, if you had been paying attention.

Are you paying attention?

The chapter in the book goes further than this dispatch can. But this is the door.

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From the forthcoming book MegaDad — releasing 25 September 2026. To be notified, see below.