When asked about his toddler and YouTube, Jack Clark, cofounder of the AI company Anthropic, admitted he doesn’t give her free rein. “It freaks me out,” he said. This is a man who spends his career thinking about how to build AI responsibly, and at home he draws a much simpler line: Not yet.
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He’s not the only one. Steve Jobs kept the iPad away from his own kids. Peter Thiel caps his children’s screen time at 90 minutes — not just for the day, but for the entire week. It turns out that the people who understand these products best are the most careful about handing them to a child.
That’s not a scandal. It’s a signal, and it’s one schools need to read loud and clear.
At Grandview Preparatory School in Boca Raton, we’ve already been following these signals and acting on the research. We’ve removed devices from several classrooms and limited phones during the school day. A few parents worried at first but soon realized that what we were actually doing was making room again for the parts of education that matter most: real conversation, real struggle, real thinking done without a shortcut sitting three inches from a student’s hand.
This isn’t nostalgia for chalkboards. No serious technologist or brain researcher thinks the answer is pretending AI doesn’t exist. It’s here, and it’s the future. But there’s a real difference between “AI is the future” and “AI belongs in every part of childhood, at every age, starting now.” The people building these tools seem to understand that difference instinctively with their own kids. Schools have been slower to catch on.
We’ve been here before. When Chromebooks and ed-tech platforms first swept into classrooms, most schools enthusiastically adopted them. We believed more technology would mean better outcomes. We’re far enough into that experiment now to see the results, and they’re not what anyone promised us: shorter attention spans, less reading stamina, less patience for anything that takes more than a few minutes to work through. That’s part of why we pulled back, and it’s why I want our field to consider AI carefully.
The stakes here are cognitive, not just academic. The earlier a young brain’s attention gets captured and redirected, the harder it is to build the endurance kids will need later. An attention span hijacked at two years old doesn’t come back easily at 12. You wouldn’t put a 3-year-old on the varsity football team to give him a head start, and a developing brain deserves the same caution against technology that’s built to capture attention.
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I ask myself the same question about new AI tools that a good parent asks about a new app: What is this actually appropriate for, and at what age? A tool that helps a 16-year-old research faster isn’t the same tool, developmentally, as one that writes a 10-year-old’s first paragraph for him. We need the judgment to treat a 5-year-old and a high school junior differently.
I know the counterargument: too much caution, and kids fall behind peers who use AI aggressively. I don’t think caution and fluency are opposites. Teaching 17-year-olds to use AI to improve their efficiency, to check their work, and to treat it as a starting point rather than a finished product, is a literacy we should be teaching. What I’m arguing against is the assumption that more exposure, earlier, is automatically better preparation. The people who built these tools don’t seem to believe that about their own kids, and I don’t think we should believe it about ours, either.
So here’s where we’ve landed: Pause before you adopt, not after. Ask what a tool does to a developing brain at a given age before you ask what it does for a lesson plan. Bring in brain researchers and child development experts, not just ed-tech vendors. And embrace human thinking and curiosity everywhere you can.
AI is moving into classrooms faster than the last wave of technology did. And it’s built by people who are visibly more careful with their own kids than their marketing suggests we should be with ours. That alone is worth considering before AI fully arrives in our classrooms.
Jacqueline R. Westerfield is the Head of School at Grandview Preparatory School, a PK-12 private school in Boca Raton.
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