A question parents ask

How should children use AI to learn?

The short answer

As a tutor that gives hints, not a machine that gives answers. In one study, students who practiced with a plain chatbot did worse once it was taken away, and a hint-giving version removed most of the harm.

The reasoning

The same tool can help or hurt. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania gave high school math students in Turkey an AI chatbot to practice with. Those with a plain chatbot did much better on practice problems. Then the AI was taken away for the exam, and they scored 17 percent worse than students who never had it. They'd let it do the thinking. A second group used a version set up to act like a tutor, giving hints instead of answers, and most of the damage disappeared.

A Harvard team found the other side. Students using a carefully built AI tutor learned more than twice as much as students in active-learning classes, in less time.

What separates the two? Whether the AI did the work or helped the student do it. That's the Sui Learning idea of trial and error again: let them guess before you tell them. Effort is what makes memory.

So set the rules before your child starts. A hint comes before an answer. Your child guesses first. The tutor checks understanding before moving on. Each lesson ties to a real task. The AI never does the work for them.

Then check the result the old way. Have your child teach you what they learned, with the screen off.

The research behind it

Students using a carefully built AI tutor learned more than twice as much as in active-learning classes, in less time. Gregory Kestin and others, Scientific Reports (June 2025).
Students who practiced with a plain chatbot scored 17 percent worse once it was taken away; a tutor-style version that gave hints removed most of the harm. Hamsa Bastani and others, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025).
Retrieval, effort, and spacing are what make learning last. Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick (2014), as cited in Sui Learning.

Try this

Paste this into the first message of a session: "Act as my tutor. Give a hint before an answer. Ask me to guess first. Check that I understand before we move on. Tie each lesson to something real. Never do the work for me." Then ask your child to explain the lesson back to you afterward.

Where this falls short

Each study looked at one subject in one setting, high school math in one case and a university physics course in the other, so treat the results as strong hints and not as rules. AI tutors can also be wrong, and a young child shouldn't use one alone. A parent in the room is still the best tutor available.

Also asked as

Should my child use ChatGPT for homework?
Is AI good or bad for learning?
How do I teach my child to use AI well?

The ideas behind this answer

AI means evolve faster, not give up
AI takes the scripted busywork first and leaves the work of people who know a field deeply, so the answer is to learn faster and deeper, not to stop learning.
Trial and error
Let them guess before you tell them. Wrong guesses are the tuition, and a little frustration is the receipt.
Two Sigma: you are the advantage
One on one beats the classroom by two standard deviations. You are the advantage. Act like it.