When I was growing up, my dad and I dreamed up a story we wanted to write together called “The Day Nobody Went to Disneyland.” The premise was simple: the weather is so perfect that everyone assumes the park will be unbearably crowded, so nobody goes.
My dad and I decide to risk it and end up with the entire place to ourselves. We never actually wrote it down. Life simply got in the way.
Thirty years later, sitting with my own three children, I remembered that lost idea. I told my oldest daughter about it, and she immediately wanted to hear the full tale. Instead of taking weeks to draft it, we turned to ChatGPT.
We fed it the vague outline and asked for the story in the style of Dr. Seuss. Seconds later, we had it. It was not flawless there were a few clunky lines and out-of-place Americanisms but tweaking the prompts and refining the scenes together became a profound creative exercise.
For 15 years, I have researched the impact of artificial intelligence on work and society. But raising young children makes this technological shift deeply personal. It is overwhelmingly clear that the world they will inhabit will look nothing like the one I grew up in.
Recently, on a gruelling family road trip, we discovered a brilliant educational podcast narrated by two children. My wife, a documentary maker, was captivated by the high-quality production. When we checked the website, we discovered the child hosts did not exist; the entire series was entirely AI-generated.
This revelation is unsettling for parents, teachers, and employers. We are floundering, watching our children use generative tools to solve complex problems and wondering what they genuinely know.
Instinctively, many adults want to throw up barriers and ban the technology. But this is the environment our children will swim in. We fail them if we educate them for a past era rather than their actual future.
Forget “Future-Proofing” Skills
Our traditional response to technological disruption has always been to “future-proof” the workforce. In 2013, the UK government mandated that all school children learn to code, claiming this would equip them with the ultimate 21st-century survival skill. It felt bold, and advanced nations quickly followed suit.
Fast-forward to today, and writing code is precisely what systems like ChatGPT and Claude do best. By early 2026, Anthropic reported that 90% of the code for its AI coding assistant, Claude Code, was written by AI itself.
The very skill designed to insulate children from automation became largely redundant before they even finished school.
We must abandon the myth that we can accurately predict and teach a specific set of future-proof technical abilities. The only certainty we have is that tomorrow’s technology will be vastly more capable. Instead of trying to outguess the job market, we need to shift our focus entirely.
Get Back to Basics
To prepare children for an unpredictable future, the first step is paradoxically to get back to absolute basics. Global literacy and numeracy rates have been steadily declining since 2009.
In an AI-driven world, this is a disaster. Whatever advanced competencies our children will need whether that involves creative judgment, critical analysis, or complex problem-solving will rely heavily on these foundational pillars.
Furthermore, AI models are infamous for hallucinating and acting as “idiot savants”. They provide highly confident answers that are sometimes entirely fabricated. Children need razor-sharp basic skills to evaluate AI outputs critically rather than trusting them blindly.
This does not mean returning to rote memorisation. AI can actually be the greatest ally in mastering the basics. When my eight-year-old grew bored with traditional times tables, we used AI to build custom math games featuring unicorns.
When my five-year-old lost interest in standard phonics books, we generated custom reading material tailored to his exact reading level, featuring his favourite topics like TNT explosives and HMS Belfast.
Experimentation is critical. We should be testing and embracing these innovations to stretch our children further, leveraging AI as a creative partner rather than treating it as a classroom adversary.
Source: The Guardian, "I’m a Father of Three Who Studies the Impact of Artificial Intelligence: This Is What Parents Need to Know About AI"
