Everything you need to hold your own in the AI conversation at home — the 60-second explanation, the dinner-table questions, the house rules, and six prompts worth doing with your teen instead of policing.
AI tools like ChatGPT have read an enormous amount of text and learned what word plausibly comes next. That's the whole trick. It makes them brilliant at explaining, rewriting, and structuring — and unreliable at facts, quotes, and anything that has to be exactly right. Plausible and true are different things. A kid who understands that one sentence is ahead of most adults.
Not interrogations — conversations. Any one of these tells you more than checking their history ever will.
Sit next to them. Type these together. Fill the [brackets] with their real stuff.
Hours of private chatting with AI companions late at night · treating the AI as their main confidant · distress when access is removed · quoting it as an authority on personal decisions. None of these mean panic — they mean it's time for more open use and real conversation. Rule 4 exists for exactly this.
See what's actually happening, the questions worth asking your child's school, and how to get your school to run an information evening for its parent community.