Should my child use ChatGPT?

Yes. Your child's world will run on AI, and keeping them away from the most powerful tool they will ever have doesn't protect them. It just leaves them unpractised.

But how they use it matters more than whether they use it.

What the research says

AI is improving faster than any technology we have lived through. Very little attention goes to what it does to the person using it.

• In an MIT study in 2025, 83% of adults who wrote an essay with ChatGPT could not correctly quote a line of it afterwards. (An early study, not yet peer reviewed.)
• In a peer-reviewed study of nearly 1,000 high school students, published in PNAS, those who practised maths with plain ChatGPT scored 17% lower on their own than students who never used it.

The same PNAS study found the fix: an AI tutor built to make students work it out largely removed the harm.

Why 8 to 13 matters

These are the years a child builds the habit of thinking for themselves. AI makes it effortless to hand over the homework, the planning, the thinking, and a child won't notice the muscle they aren't building.

Three things to try at home

1. Ask what they asked it. Tonight, ask your child what they asked AI today. Vague questions get vague answers; the habit of saying exactly what you want starts here.
2. Ask what it got wrong. AI is often confidently wrong. A child who checks its answers is learning; a child who copies them isn't.
3. Ask what they decided. The AI can suggest. The choice should be theirs, and they should be able to tell you why.

Where Gradis fits

At Gradis, children aged 8 to 13 build real apps of their own with an AI coach that pushes back instead of handing over answers. One live hour a week, in a small group, with a live host.

Their first session is free. Book it