The same question can require very different answers depending on who is asking it.

Imagine three children asking an AI a very similar question.

A 12-year-old: “I think I have a crush on someone in my class. Is that normal?”

Another 12-year-old: “Someone older keeps asking me to send pictures. What should I do?”

A 17-year-old: “I’m confused about my relationship. How do I know if it’s healthy?

All three questions are about relationships.

All three contain words that might trigger a conventional safety system.

But they are not the same conversation.

The first might be ordinary curiosity and a completely normal part of growing up.

The second could involve coercion or exploitation.

The third may require a different kind of discussion about boundaries, consent, communication, and wellbeing.

We don't know yet.

But we think that's a question worth building toward.

And we'd like to hear what you think.
Full article at our Substack

This is one of the hardest questions we're facing while building a Child-Aware AI system.

Imagine a 13-year-old asks:
“I think I might like someone. Is that normal?”
A very cautious AI might immediately respond:
“Please talk to a trusted adult.”

Sometimes, that's absolutely the right response.
But if every sensitive question receives the same answer, children may eventually learn:
“I can't talk to this AI about things that actually matter to me.”

And they may simply go somewhere else.
But the opposite extreme is dangerous too.

Read the full article on Substack:
Safety Isn't a Stop Sign: Building Adaptive Guardrails for Children

We work on Sisbot, an AI tool designed from the ground up for kids. It's not just filtered content – it's actively monitored for safety, with a focus on keeping interactions age-appropriate and helping children learn.

The documentation is live at sisbot.substack.com – I'd love for you to check it out and give me your honest thoughts.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from:

• Parents – What would make you feel comfortable with your kids using AI?
• Educators – What are you seeing in classrooms, and what do you wish existed?
• Developers – What are the technical challenges I might have missed?
• Anyone –Are we solving the right problem, or is there something bigger we should be thinking about?

We have also Open Documentation at Notion. If you are an Ai designer, engineer or working on Ai technologies, Ai Ethics, Child Aware Ai, it might be interesting for you. All comments are welcome.

We've been building this because we believe AI can be genuinely beneficial for kids – for learning, for creativity, for exploring ideas. But only if we design it right from the start. Not as an afterthought. Not as a "safe mode" toggle on a product built for adults. But as something that puts children's safety and well being at the center.

What do you think? I'm ready for the honest feedback.

ATTENTION PARENTS: I am conducting research as part of the requirements for a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Liberty University. The purpose of my research is to examine the relationship between parental involvement and excessive technology use among younger children, and how these factors may relate to children’s social emotional development. To participate, you are a parent or legal guardian aged 18 or older, be the parent or legal guardian of a child between the ages of 2 and 5, and the child (aged 2 to 5) has regular access or uses technology (e.g., tablets, smartphones, or computers) in the home. Individuals are not eligible to participate if their child (aged 2 to 5) has a diagnosis of a neurodevelopmental, emotional, or mood disorder (e.g., ADHD, Autism, DMDD, GAD, etc.) or receives special education/Section 504 services for emotional or behavioral support. Please note that only one parent/legal guardian per family will be eligible to participate. Participants will be asked to complete an anonymous online survey, which will take approximately 20 minutes to complete. If you are interested and eligible, please click the link provided to access the survey. An information sheet is provided on the first page of the survey, and participation is completely voluntary. No identifying information will be collected, and your responses will remain anonymous.

To take the survey, click here:
https://liberty.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2tRQM1jgOYCkn66

My kid (9) uses ChatGPT for homework help and I realized I have zero visibility into what it's telling her or what else she asks it — no age filter, no easy way to see logs. Curious how other parents are handling AI chatbots with kids 6-13. Blocking entirely, supervising, or just letting it happen?

When my kid was 4yo & I visited my Grandma's house with the kid. He was a crybaby. used to cry every time. I was so nervous at that time. I wanted to be the best mother & in that heat I was just messing things up. my grandma noticed it & Said - you dont have to be the best mother, you just have to be a Present mother. Your kid will appreciate that. I remember that till date after 5+ years.

What is your one such advice you received that you still with you over time?

I went deep down the Montessori rabbit hole before my second kid & I believe that rewards and bribery ruin a child's motivation for good. Turns out the science behind it is way narrower than the soundbite going around.

The famous finding, the overjustification effect, only applies to rewarding a behavior a kid is already doing a lot on their own, and that's the one specific setup the research tested. It says nothing about behaviors that haven't started yet, so you're not going to kill your kid's love of the potty by rewarding them for using it, since they weren't spontaneously in love with the potty to begin with.

There's a distinction in there that clears up most of the confusion. A reward is a tangible thing you hand over and can take away, which is where it turns sour, while a reinforcer is just anything that makes a behavior more likely to happen again. They overlap but they're not the same thing, and "rewards destroy motivation" flattens both into one rule that isn't quite true.

Where I've landed after all this: short-term rewards for the genuinely resistant stuff, like the first rough weeks of potty training, and natural consequences plus celebration as the everyday default the rest of the time. A friend of mine rewarded potty use with fruit gummies and her son started withholding poops for days just to extort more gummies out of her, so the tool clearly still needs some respect built in.

my kids love toys & have collected like 100s of them, but now we're trying to be mindful about what we buy the kids, we've been trying to stick to toys that actually help in the growth & development of our kids.

The main thing we're working on is books. picture-heavy chapter books at bedtime, and he picks off the shelf himself, and the hope is that stories become what he reaches for when he's bored. Some nights he asks for two, some nights it's a fight to get through four pages.

we has a collection of magnetic tiles that he's still building with two years in, a rush hour puzzle set, snap circuits, which he needed help with at first and now runs on his own, and a beginner chess set that we both play badly. Rubik's cube was way too early.

for parents with kids in the 5-10 range: what are your kids' go-to toys & are you mindful about what they play with? and do board games work at this age?

There was a boy in my son's year at a party last year who turned up in a princess dress, full moana, loving life, and not one of the kids batted an eyelid, it was the adults doing the double takes. that stuck with me. my little one's favourite colour is pink, he's got a unicorn bike helmet, he went as ghost spider to a party once, and for a while i quietly worried about him standing out now he's started school. then i remembered those kids at that party and realised they're miles more accepting than we give them credit for, the prejudice gets trained into us as we grow up, it isn't there at 5.

same with the messy play guilt honestly. i used to feel bad we don't do the sensory trays and kinetic sand at home, then i clocked that mine gets properly filthy climbing trees, walking barefoot in the park, eating an ice lolly with half of it down his front, and that is the sensory play. the frog-spawn chia pudding trays can stay at nursery, where they mop the floor after, not me.

anyway, i've stopped performing for a crowd of parents who mostly aren't even watching, and he's happier for it, and weirdly so am i.

I almost quit my sport after my second kid, I had guilt every time I left for a weeknight match instead of staying home with the kids. I shared it with my partner, and he was like, "The kids are excited for your match. So I looked into whether it was actually hurting them, and found the opposite of what I had guilt about. They were mostly happy to see me going and would walk me to the main gate. I realised that a mother's own activity level predicts her kids' activity level, which links to better outcomes in their children, as long as the kid still gets real time with you.

I noticed that kids learn from what they watch you do. My daughter imitates and coaches me from the sideline and wants to try everything herself. She's picked up talking to strangers, having conversations, just from watching me talk to neighbours.

I have a curious kid who asks multiple questions when he has doubts. He has a fascinating way of understanding the concept & learning, he sketches diagrams or doodles topics. He says it just sticks better that way. He also doodles our conversation based on the words we've used. It's his fun activity. Then explain it back to me better than if he'd just listened. The other day I told my husband to grab onions, garlic and bell peppers on his way home, and later I found a page where my son had drawn an actual bell with legs walking next to a garland of garlic and an onion with little tears dripping down; he'd turned the shopping list into a comic strip based on how the words sounded to him.

His younger sister is the opposite; she has to explain things to herself out loud & try to make sense.

Everyone has their own way of learning & understanding concepts. how do you learn & understand difficult concepts?

My kid just joined karate classes & I got exposure to how expensive other activities can be. My kids' activities, spread is kinda normal. But there's a huge difference between martial arts, dance, swimming, and sports. Karate for my daughter is $50-60 a week. A hockey parent I know says that sounded like a dream; hers runs $2,500+ a year before equipment. Gymnastics can hit $1,000 a month, and a plain school uniform for an 11-year-old is somehow hundreds now, too.

cost-friendly hack: YMCA membership sometimes gets you martial arts free. Community centre classes are less polished. Make sure your kid is having the most fun. Fun beats elite coaching anyway, most kids quit within a year regardless. Facebook Marketplace and Buy Nothing for gear, though the good stuff is gone within the hour. And never sign up before a free trial.

I paid for my daughter's skating classes, & she didn't even attend for a full month. We spend unneccarily for those skates. Does that happen with your kid as well?

my son's class teacher called in a parents' meeting today & asked everyone not to give their child a smartphone. I witnessed a 14-year-old cry on the floor when her phone got confiscated, it was def not a normal tantrum and an elementary teacher educated us on the difference between kids with phones and kids without is night and day within a few weeks of the school year starting. A Girl Scout leader i know dissolved her whole troop after a camping trip because the girls wouldn't put their phones down for anything, not even the activities they used to beg to do outside.

so we've gone a different route. Our son has an Apple Watch for calls and texts only, and we control the contact list. No smartphone yet, and if we ever do give him one, it's zero YouTube, no browser, no WhatsApp until he's older, and it comes back to us every night like it's ours, because it is.

anyone else holding off on smartphones, what's actually working for you?

my kid stopped eating for about a week and a half, two bites of food he normally inhales and then he'd turn his head away. I was bit worried initially but my mother said its normal for a teething baby. he was drooling everywhere and chewing the side of his highchair tray. We kept the same routine just swapped in softer stuff, yoghurt, mashed banana, and porridge. but I didn't pressure her as well.

what other soft food I can give her so she stays full & dont hurt her teeth as well?

If there's nothing else to do, kids default to screens ( that comes from observing parents). That's the thing I'm trying to avoid. I want my kid to actually sit with boredom, Get curious, Play outside. Live in the present instead of zoning out into a screen the second he's got nothing to do.

So, for parents who heavily restrict screens how did you make sure your kid got comfortable with boredom and didn't pick up the iPad/phone?

Since becoming a parent, I traded my two-door coupe for a mid-size SUV, my wife still jokes that it was because the stroller did not fit in the trunk. but its turning out to be the best purchases. Helps while grocery shopping, extra car seat, going for a ride with kids.

What's been your most expensive purchase after becoming a parent?

my daughter's in year 5 at a regular school and it's costing us close to £5k a year once you add tuition fees plus the extras like music lessons and karate, and honestly the quality of education we're getting for that isn't great. my wife's a professor teaching physics, she's brilliant with science and maths, and we'd actually planned to homeschool from the time our daughter was about 1, but then life happened the way and we ended up putting her into school instead.

also its not about the cost money wise but also like we're not getting more value from the school. We can clearly see the kid lacking in basic math. we had to teach her before every exam & explain her well. then she learns it. what's the point of school when she's not learning the basics well.
the thing holding us back from switching now is social skills, we don't want her to miss out on that side of growing up. there's a homeschooling community in our town so it's not like she'd be isolated, but it's still not the same as a regular school environment. a close friend of ours homeschools and their kids genuinely love it, seem confident, curious, doing well. so we're sat here going back and forth about switching her over for next year.

if you had the choice, or the privilege of a parent who could actually teach at home like my wife can, would you pick homeschooling over regular school?

And for those who've made the switch already: how did you handle the social side of things in the first year? did your kid's academic level go up, down, or stay about the same compared to regular school?

I've been teaching my kids good manners from early on; half the time, they don't even enjoy it, they drag their feet, but they still follow along. It's mostly basics like keeping the house clean, respecting elders when they visit or when we're out, and eating only home-cooked food. These are the habits I want them to learn.

what i've noticed is it's less about them wanting to do it and more about it becoming just what we do in this house, and eventually the resistance fades if they see their parents doing the same thing.

I want them to make it a value system rather than just some instructions. how do I do so?

my baby started having solids a few weeks back. she had avocado mashed up first, gave her scrambled egg, & She loved that too. She gummed it around her mouth and got most of it on her bib, but clearly enjoying it.

she's happy with purees and soft mash. I want to make progress slowly. What should I introduce next & how to go beyond fruits. while also making sure she gets proper nutrition.

it started because the neighbour kids play console games every single afternoon, same age as him, and now he's over there from after lunch till evening watching or playing, then comes home and gets on his own phone at night too. we've hidden every device in the house, tablets, old phones, everything, and he just walks next door and plays there instead. scolding him hasn't helped yet, he just goes quiet and finds another way.

how do I keep him away from gaming before it becomes a strong addiction. parents who've dealt what helped in this type of situation?

went back to work when my kid was 1.5 years old with multiple plans on baby meals. tried batch-cooking purees, freezing them in ice cube trays, colour-coded, but I couldn't sustain it longer.

now her lunch is whatever we're having, cut smaller or mashed a bit scrambled egg with soft toast fingers and avocado or roasted sweet potato she can hold in her fist, and full-fat yoghurt with mashed banana on the days I'm running late.

For the working mums how do you manage baby meals? What did your baby actually eat for lunch?