Hello ,
In late 2010 a reporter asked Steve Jobs whether his children loved the new iPad.
They hadn't used it, Jobs told him. The family limited technology at home.
The reporter sat in stunned silence. He had imagined that household as a temple of screens. It wasn't. Dinner happened at a long kitchen table, every evening, talking about books and history, with nobody holding a device.
I have been carrying that story for years. But something happened recently that made me stop carrying it quietly.
Bill Gates gave his children no phones until fourteen. Google's chief executive did not give his eleven-year-old a phone. TikTok's chief executive keeps his own children off TikTok. And a school a few miles from Google's headquarters, charging over thirty-five thousand dollars a year, keeps screens out of the classroom until seventh grade, and Silicon Valley families queue for the seats.
They are not confused. They are reading their own product roadmap.
Meanwhile, our children are being handed AI as an act of generosity. And I am now watching something in my coaching practice that I want to name for you plainly.
Teenagers have stopped struggling with a hard question. They no longer sit with confusion for thirty seconds. Confusion is now a thing you route around in nine seconds, and it comes back looking like a finished answer.
Confusion was never the enemy of learning. Confusion is the sound learning makes.
So over the next two weeks I am running a series. Not a panic. Not a ban. A clear-eyed look at four things:
- What the brain research actually shows about AI and children's thinking - What Africa and the diaspora stand to lose that others don't - Why a teenager migrating to a machine is a connection problem, not a technology problem - What must be built in a child before the tool is handed over, and in what order?
I should say: I work in data analytics. I use these tools every single working day. I am not asking you to fear them.
I am asking you to sequence them.
The first article is live now.
👉 [Read: The People Who Built It Are the Most Careful With
Reply and tell me one thing – how old is your child, and do they use AI for schoolwork? I read every reply, and what you send shapes what I write next week.
Warmly, Latifah
Latifah Ajetunmobi | Parent & Teen Coach | Author, The Phone-Free Teenager
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