AI is 'addictive' — a teacher's warning parents actually need to hear

A teacher made a comparison recently that is hard to set aside. Writing in the Hechinger Report, she argued that for a lot of young people, the most seductive kind of AI behaves less like a calculator and more like a drug. A friend that never says no, never gets tired, and never pushes back. She had watched students bond with character chatbots, and the word she kept reaching for was addictive.

It is a strong word, and it would be easy to file it under the usual panic about screens. We would ask you not to. There is something true in it that most of the conversation about AI in schools keeps missing.

The word that matters is “designed”

Here is the part worth slowing down on. The teacher’s worry was not really about AI in general. It was about one specific kind: the companion bot, built to keep you talking.

That distinction is everything, and it tends to get lost. A chatbot designed as a friend is optimized for engagement. For the next message, the next session, the warm feeling of being agreed with. It is, in that sense, built to hook. A tool that helps a child draft an argument, check their reasoning, or pull apart a hard problem is optimized for something else entirely. Same underlying technology. Opposite intent.

So when people ask whether AI is good or bad for children, the honest answer is that the question is aimed at the wrong target. AI is not neutral, but it is not one thing either. The meaningful question is what a particular tool was built to do, and whom it was built to serve: the child, or the company counting minutes.

This is the tension we have always sat inside at Globeskool. We are not optimists who think every chatbot is a tutor in disguise. We are also not in the camp that says keep all of it away from children until they turn eighteen. Both positions skip the actual work.

The same teacher found the other half of the story

What makes that piece worth reading is where it lands. The teacher did not just warn. She ran an experiment. Instead of letting students drift into chatbots on their own, she put one in front of them as an object to interrogate. Something to question, test, and take apart as part of a real assignment.

Months later, when she offered them more of the same, the response was a shrug. Old news. The fascination had worn off, not because anyone lectured them about addiction, but because they had been handed the tool in a frame where they were the ones in charge of it.

Her way of putting the lesson stays with you. A structured encounter with AI can act less like an addiction and more like a vaccine. A small, supervised dose that builds resistance instead of dependence.

We would put it almost the same way. The difference between a child who is hooked and a child who is capable is not how much AI they touch. It is whether they meet it passively, or with a job to do.

Make the child the one in charge

This is the whole of our position, and it is simpler than the debate around it. The goal is not to keep technology away from your child. The goal is to make sure your child is the one holding it, directing it, doubting it, deciding when it is wrong, rather than the one being held by it.

That only happens with structure. A child alone with an open-ended companion bot is in a contest they did not agree to enter, against a product engineered to win their attention. The same child working on a real project, using AI as one tool among several, with someone nearby asking how do you know that answer is right, is in a completely different situation. The technology is identical. The child’s standing in front of it is not.

That is what we mean when we talk about working with technology as a skill rather than a threat. It is judgment. Knowing what these tools are for, where they quietly fail, and how to stay the one doing the thinking. It is teachable, and it may be one of the most important things we can teach a child right now.

If you are wondering where your own child sits on that, closer to in charge or closer to hooked, that is worth looking at honestly while it is still easy to shift.

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