AI and education. Did you know that 9 out of 10 kids in middle and high school are using AI. It’s everywhere but what does it really mean for your child?
Common Sense Media (gotta love the name) released a study in 2026. They surveyed more than 1,200 kids ages 9 to 17 across the country, and here is what they found. Eighty-six percent of kids are using AI. Nearly nine out of ten kids. In fact, one in four uses AI every single day.
Statistically speaking your child is probably using AI. That’s worth exploring to understand AI and education. Here’s the part that we need to be concerned about. Forty-four percent of parents have never had a single conversation with their kid about how to safely use AI and when the use crosses the line and becomes cheating. That’s almost half of us that need to understand more about AI and education.
There’s a place for AI and education. For a neurodivergent kid, especially one in upper middle or high school, the right AI tool can be the difference between participating in school and shutting down. I’ve personally seen it happen in real time.
Imagine a tenth grader with dyslexia. She’s been assigned three chapters of a history textbook to read by Friday. The reading is dense. The words on the page take her three times as long to decode as her classmates. She wants to understand the events, but she runs out of gas by page two. Before this shift in technology, she might have copied a friend’s notes, gotten a C, and walked away believing she’s bad at history.
Now, she opens her textbook in a tool like NaturalReader or Speechify, and she listens while following along visually. She finishes all three chapters. She comes to class ready to talk. The stamina-load was just lifted enough to let her brain do what it was always capable of doing.
That is not cheating. That is a wheelchair, or glasses. That’s an AI and education tool doing exactly what tools are supposed to do.
And it’s not just text-to-speech. For our ADHD kids, planning tools that turn a vague assignment into a list with clear steps can be the bridge between paralysis and starting. For our kids with dysgraphia, drafting partners that help them get scattered thoughts into a first outline can finally let the ideas in their heads make it onto the page.
These are real, meaningful uses. They play a role for AI and education. I would defend them in any IEP meeting on any day of the week.
Now here is where the Common Sense research gets really interesting. The researchers asked kids, “How hard is it for you to stay focused on school assignments?” They cross referenced the answers with how often those kids use AI.
Here is what they found. Fifty-six percent of kids who have a hard time staying focused use AI for schoolwork every week. But for kids who don’t struggle with focus, it’s 45% of students. That’s 10pp (percentage points) lower.
They saw the same gap for kids who find math hard: 55% of those kids use AI weekly for schoolwork. They saw it for kids who find writing essays hard: 53%. And for kids who have a hard time sticking with something challenging: 55%. That’s worth digging into to understand the possible impact of AI and education
So, the kids who are most likely to be using AI heavily for schoolwork are the kids who already find school the hardest. The kids with the focus challenges. The kids who struggle with writing. The kids who give up on hard things.
In other words. Our kids.
The very kids who most need to be building those reading, writing, and focus muscles are the ones quietly outsourcing the workout. The Common Sense Media researchers said something in their conclusion that I want to read to you directly. They said this raises questions about whether AI may be substituting for skill building among the young people who most need to develop their skills.
We can’t let AI replace skill building among the vulnerable group that most needs to improve the skill. We don’t want that type of AI and education.
We’ve identified a real risk for our kids. So let’s talk about what happens when AI does the work your child’s brain was supposed to do.
That skill is never mastered. The reading comprehension muscle doesn’t get stronger because the muscle didn’t get used. The writing voice doesn’t develop because the voice on the page is the AI’s voice. Thinking is messy, slow, uncomfortable work of taking ideas and turning them into your own words. We get better at it the more we do it. We can’t allow it to get outsourced.
Think of it like physical therapy. If your child broke her arm and the doctor gave her a sling, the sling helps. But if she’s still wearing that sling a year later and never doing the physical therapy exercises, the arm gets weaker, not stronger. Think of AI tools as slings. They are not the workout.
Good so far?
Here’s another finding worth discussing. Common Sense Media asked kids how hard it would be to go a month without AI. One in five (20%) said it would be hard. Among daily users, 42 percent (almost half) said it would be hard. But that is a hypothetical question. When students who currently use AI for homework, can’t use it, sixteen percent of kids said they have difficulty starting or completing their homework.
And that, my friend, is dependency. Quietly forming in our middle schoolers and in high schoolers.
How do you tell the difference between empowering tool and creating dependency. There’s a simple question you want to ask yourself.
Is this AI tool helping my child access the work, or is it doing the thinking for them?
Let’s walk through it. Reading a hard text aloud so your child can follow along? That’s access. The thinking still happens in the brain. Summarizing the text in a paragraph so they never have to read it? That’s outsourced thinking. Helping her brainstorm ideas for an essay together? Access. Writing the essay? Outsourced thinking. Turning a messy verbal explanation into a clean outline? Access. Turning a one-sentence prompt into five polished paragraphs? Outsourced.
Same tool. Two different jobs. One builds your kid up. The other shrinks their brain due to inactivity.
You don’t need to be a tech expert. You just need to ask the question. And if you’re not sure, ask your kid. “How is this helping you do the work?” You’d be amazed how often a teenager will give you the honest answer if you simply ask.
There’s one more thing the Common Sense Media research uncovered which goes beyond AI and education.
Kids are not just using AI for homework. Fifty-seven percent of kids who use AI have used it to get advice about their health or body. Thirty-seven percent have used it to talk about their feelings. In fact, one in four (25%) of the kids who talk to AI about their feelings say they sometimes feel that AI understands them better than most people do. Yikes!
That number is not abstract. That might be your kid. And the fix is not better AI. The fix is more of you. More of the trusted adults in their real life. A chatbot will never love your child. Make sure they know that.
Now let’s take the theoretical and make it specific. Here are three things you can put in place this week.
You do not need to be a tech expert to parent your kid through artificial intelligence and education. You do not need to know how the algorithms work. You need to know what your child can do unaided, what they need support for, and what tools helping them grow stronger. Most kids in the study said they wanted to try to answer questions themselves first.
Do you want help building a plan for your child? Head over to our Contact Page and book a free 15-minute consult.
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