Teaching My Kids About Technology: Makers, Not Just Users
Andriel asked me what I do at work. “I work with computers” wasn’t cutting it anymore, so I tried to explain AI to a kid who thinks Siri is magic.
Archael got the ChatGPT version in explaining ChatGPT to my sons, and that post stayed on how AI works. This one is the wider picture I’d been avoiding writing down: what I actually want my kids to understand about technology, the rules and habits our house uses, and the tension of being a parent who builds the stuff I’m trying to keep in check.
The conversation
“Dad, do computers think?”
“Not like you think. They’re really good at patterns.”
“What’s a pattern?”
“You know how you can tell it’s going to rain by looking at the clouds? Computers do something similar, but with numbers.”
“That’s boring.”
Fair point. My explanation was accurate and completely uninteresting to him. That’s the first lesson I keep relearning: kids don’t need the correct abstraction, they need one that connects to something they care about. Patterns in numbers mean nothing. “How does the tablet know which video you want next?” means a lot.
What I actually want them to learn
Learning a programming language can wait. The fundamentals come first, because they’ll outlast any language or app:
Critical thinking. Not everything online is true. Question sources. Check information against something else before believing it.
Privacy awareness. What you share online stays online, often for good. A photo, a name, a school uniform in the background: all of it can travel further than you meant it to.
Healthy boundaries. Technology is a tool. You control it, not the other way around.
Creation over consumption. Make things with technology. Don’t just scroll.
If I had to rank them, creation comes first. A kid who has made something on a computer understands, in their gut, that every app and game was made by people who made choices. That one idea makes the other three easier to teach.
How we’re doing it
Screen time rules
Not zero screens. That’s unrealistic and, I’d argue, unnecessary. But intentional screens.
- No screens during meals.
- No screens in bedrooms.
- Screen time comes after outdoor time.
- Creating things (drawing, coding games) counts differently from watching.
These aren’t original. Australia’s 24-hour movement guidelines for children and young people aged 5 to 17 recommend limiting sedentary recreational screen time to no more than two hours a day, and the tips published alongside the guidelines include avoiding screens in the hour before sleep and keeping screens out of the bedroom. The two-hour figure covers recreational screen time, not schoolwork. The guidelines don’t separate making from watching. That distinction is my own house rule, because building a Scratch game means planning, testing and fixing, while an autoplay queue asks for nothing but attention.
The bedroom rule is the one I’d defend hardest. Meals and outdoor time are about habits. Bedrooms are about sleep, and a device in the room at night is a fight you lose every evening.
We’ve also started a monthly day with no screens at all for the whole family. The first one is written up in our first no-tech Sunday, and the first hour was the hardest part, for me as much as the kids.
Age-appropriate coding
My daughter tried Scratch last month. Made a cat dance. She was thrilled.
Scratch is free, block-based, and built by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, now run by the Scratch Foundation. You snap blocks together instead of typing syntax, so the frustration is about logic rather than missing semicolons. For younger children there’s ScratchJr, a free tablet app that uses picture blocks, so kids can start before they read well.
It’s not about becoming a programmer. It’s about understanding that technology is made by people, not magic. When the cat danced, she’d made a computer do something on purpose. That’s a different relationship with a screen than tapping “next video”.
When not to push it: if a child isn’t interested, forcing coding turns it into homework. I’d rather leave Scratch open as an option next to the drawing app and let curiosity do the work.
Conversations about AI
“Alexa, play my favourite song.”
“How does Alexa know your favourite song?”
I’m teaching them to ask these questions now, before they stop being curious. Voice assistants and recommendation feeds are the AI my kids actually meet every day, far more than chatbots. “Why does YouTube know what I want to watch?” is a great question. The honest answer, that it keeps track of what you watched and how long you watched it and shows you more of whatever kept you there, is also the most useful one. It explains why “one more video” never ends at one.
That’s also where privacy awareness stops being abstract. The voice assistant and the video app are both keeping a record, and a parent can look at it. My advice is to open the Alexa app’s privacy settings with your kids and look at what voice history it keeps and for how long, then check whether the video app on their profile lets you pause watch history so recommendations stop feeding on everything they watch. Seeing their own requests listed back to them is likely to land harder than any warning about “what you share stays somewhere”.
The tension
I build AI systems. I know what these technologies can do: the engagement loops designed to keep you scrolling, the data collection, the recommendations that reward whatever keeps you watching.
And I hand my kid a tablet.
The tension is real. I can’t protect them from technology. They’ll live in a world soaked in it, and a kid who never touched a device until 16 would hit all of this at once, without practice. So I teach them to swim instead of building walls.
That doesn’t mean no walls at all. Some products aren’t built for children, and age limits exist for reasons. In Australia, since 10 December 2025, major social media platforms have had to take reasonable steps to stop under-16s holding accounts under the social media minimum age rules. It stops accounts, not viewing: a seven-year-old can still watch YouTube logged out, and YouTube Kids is outside the rule, so the recommendation conversation is still mine to have. I see the law as a backstop, not a parenting plan. The habits still have to be built at home.
What I’ve learned so far
Model the behaviour. If I’m always on my phone, no rule I set matters. Kids copy what you do, not what you say. That’s why I started putting my phone down when my kids talk.
Make it a conversation. Questions and discussions, not lectures. Start from something already happening in the room, like a kid asking Alexa for a song, rather than sitting them down for a talk.
Draw the making line by activity, not by app. “Creating counts differently” sounds tidy until Scratch has a gallery of other people’s projects one tap away. If you use the guidelines’ two hours as a budget, my rule of thumb is that time spent building, testing and fixing a project sits outside it, and time spent clicking through other people’s games counts inside it, because that’s still watching, just with clicking. The guidelines would still count building as sedentary screen time, so I keep build sessions short and follow them with something active. The cost is that I have to look at the screen to know which one is happening, so the rule only works while screens stay in shared rooms. That’s another reason the bedroom rule matters.
Respect their curiosity. When they ask how something works, answer honestly, even if the honest answer is “it’s designed to keep you watching”.
Be honest about my own struggles. “Dad checks his phone too much too. We’re both working on it.” Admitting it costs me nothing and makes the rules feel shared rather than imposed.
The goal
Raise kids who use technology intentionally. Who create more than they consume. Who question what they see online. Kids who control their devices, not the other way around.
We’re not there yet, but the conversations are happening, and they’re the right ones. If you’re a tech parent working through the same thing, my one suggestion is to start with making, not restricting. Rules hold the line, but a child who has built something understands why the line is there.