A friend reached out some time ago.
We used to work together, and over the years she'd come to me for the occasional tech question at work. But this one was different. This one hit closer to home. Her parental controls weren't working anymore. Her kids had figured out how to use AI chatbots to get around them. Not for homework. For explicit content the filters were supposed to keep out.
This is happening more often than most parents realize. Children are using AI chatbots to bypass traditional parental controls — not by hacking them, but by asking the AI for help getting around them. The protections most families rely on were not built for this.
We spent an evening on it. I walked her through what I'd been reading, as I have been diving deeper into the AI rabbit hole, and we ended up setting up a DNS-level filter called CleanBrowsing — a kind of invisible gatekeeper that sits between her family's devices and the open internet, quietly sorting what gets through. This isn't an endorsement; it's just the tool we landed on for her family. I'm still researching what the right setup looks like for mine — every family is different, and the space is changing quickly enough that what's best today may not be best tomorrow. We installed it across her home network and on each of her kids' devices, so the protection would travel with them whether they were at home, at a friend's house, or on a coffee shop's Wi-Fi. (I'll write about the setup itself in a separate post, because it deserves its own room.) When I left that night, we all felt much safer.
My daughter is here now. Recently born. So small it doesn't quite seem real until she's in your arms.
And the thing nobody really tells you — or maybe they tell you and you can't hear it until it's true — is that your mind rewires when you become a parent. Not metaphorically. Actually. Every room you walk into is read differently. Outlets. Stairs. Strangers. Screens. The world doesn't get more dangerous when your child arrives. It just stops letting you look away from the danger that was always there.
The question my friend brought to me a few months ago was a question I thought I was answering for her.
What parents need to know about AI chatbots and children
The children growing up right now are the first generation in human history whose most trusted listener might be a machine. Roughly two-thirds of teenagers already use AI chatbots. About a quarter use them every day. They're asking these tools about homework, yes — but also about whether their friends are mad at them, whether the feeling in their chest is normal, whether they're loved.
And the tools are answering. Patiently. Endlessly. In a voice tuned by engineers to keep the conversation going.
What my friend discovered is one face of the problem. Kids are clever, and AI is clever, and put them in the same room and the careful filters we set up start to look like suggestions. A determined child with a chatbot can find their way to almost anything — explicit content, dangerous ideas, conversations no parent would consent to — not because the chatbot hands it over, but because the chatbot, asked nicely, will help them find the back door we didn't know existed.
The other face of the problem is quieter, and in some ways harder. Some of these systems are designed — not accidentally, designed — with rewards and notifications and engagement loops borrowed from the same playbook that hooked us all on our phones. Except this time, the thing on the other end of the screen can talk back. It can remember. It can shape itself to whatever a lonely twelve-year-old needs it to be at two in the morning.
I am not anti-AI. I use these tools. I believe they can elevate a child's thinking, expand a child's curiosity, open doors I never had access to at their age. That is not nothing.
But a tool that can elevate a mind can also crowd one. And a tool that can teach a child can also teach a child how to slip past the people trying to protect them. The difference between those outcomes is almost entirely about the adults in the room.
How to protect children from AI: the tools that exist, and the ones that don't
The hard part, right now, is that the adults in the room don't have many tools of their own.
For the social media era, we built a whole ecosystem of parental controls — Screen Time, Family Link, Bark, Qustodio, a hundred others. Imperfect, but real. For AI, that ecosystem barely exists yet. And worse, the AI tools children already have access to are quietly eroding the controls we already trusted. The bills are moving — the CHATBOT Act, the Youth AI Privacy Act, the Parents Decide Act — and they're serious, bipartisan, and overdue. But none has passed. Even when they do, implementation will take time the way implementation always does.
Our kids are here now.
So we do what parents have always done in moments like this one. We learn what we need to learn. We share what we find. We pick up the phone when a friend calls, and we make the call when we need to. It takes a village to raise our children — and that has never been more true than it is now.
The setup I built for my friend — and the one I'm now building for my own home — isn't a magic shield. Nothing is. It's one layer of a few, and the other layers are conversations and curiosity and being the kind of parent your child actually wants to bring questions to. But it does something the app-by-app approach can't: it works at the level of the whole network and on each device, so it travels with your kids wherever they go. It's a fence at the property line, not a lock on each room. And critically, it isn't something a clever child can talk an AI into helping them disable.
I'll walk through how to set it up in the next post. It's more approachable than most parents expect.
The work of love, in a new century
What I want to leave you with is smaller than a how-to and bigger than a warning.
Our parents had to teach us how to cross the street. Their parents had to teach them how to handle fire. Every generation inherits a world with new edges, and the work of love is figuring out which edges are sharp, and standing between our children and the sharpest ones until they're ready.
The edge of this generation is a strange one. It doesn't look like fire. It looks like a friend who never sleeps, who remembers everything, who is always, always willing to help — even when "help" means showing a child how to get around the people who love them most.
Our children deserve real friends. Real teachers. Real boundaries. And parents who are willing to learn something new — a setting, a tool, a vocabulary — so that the small hands we are responsible for can grow into the big world without getting lost in it.