How I’m Preparing My Kids for an AI Future

With AI taking over, what do my kids really need to learn to prepare for the uncertain future? Discovering how faith, values, and character prepare them to withstand anything.

As more and more information is poured onto the internet about what the future will look like with AI, we are always left with the question: what will our children’s careers and futures look like? You hear answers like guide them into learning a trade that is harder for robots to do, like plumbing, or teach them how to enjoy being creative, etc. But none of those answers are really hitting the heart of the issue. The career landscape will change in a way we cannot predict or imagine; our children will have to adapt constantly to those changes as they come.

About six years ago, the huge push was to learn to code for a great career safe from being pushed out by tech upgrades since the coders will always be needed. I know because I paid the big fee to join one of those academies for a rewarding career in coding. I also jumped on the wagon for learning to design applications. Another industry with promises of safety from tech advancement.

Well, now AI codes, and new AI companies like Replit can turn your conversations into applications and software right in front of your eyes far faster than any human can. Having our question focused around careers for our children is completely useless. When I was in junior high around 2004, we could take typing classes so we could type quickly, making us more desirable for administrative jobs. I took this class and proudly posted my typed words per minute on my resumes and had a wonderful career. Our children probably won’t even need to type at all. Technically, they can skip it all right now if they choose to utilize voice-to-text options. AI just won a prestigious competition in mathematics; it is the expert in nearly every field. We will never win this battle as it is already light years ahead of us as an AI infant. As I type this, a massive AI data center is being built not far from my house. More power equals smarter AI, and the speed at which it will advance is something I think most of us fail to grasp as the computing power - which equals learning speed power - explodes as more of these massive data centers come online .

So what do we teach our kids? What do we prepare them for? How do we help them become resilient in an ever-changing future landscape?

I’ve been a Mom for nearly 15 years to my own children, but really started being a Mom when I was 5 years old to my little sister. I tend to be a mother to everyone I encounter, it’s just the thing God put in the deep coding of my personality. I’ve had a lot of years to ponder, pray, and learn about what things are the most important to teach children. The last thing on the list is usually academics, as you can learn anything you need to at any time in your life, but building the character, morals, integrity, and loving nature of a child needs to happen while they’re young. That battle is very hard to win if you wait until they’re older to try and mold their hearts to love others more than themselves.

I homeschool my children and have for many years, so in a lot of beautiful ways I get to control the environment they grow in, what they’re exposed to at what ages, and how they first encounter certain topics and situations. It also allows me to catch stuff very early that may be concerning in their character or behavior, and then allows me to have those conversations and offer guidance while the issues are still small. Because we have a culture of communication and opinion sharing in our home, along with teaching my children from a young age that their opinion is valuable and their insight is unique and important, it’s always a productive and insightful conversation where their voice and ideas are respected. This has prevented a lot of issues in our child rearing and means my kids come to me about anything they’re struggling with since they know it’s a safe space to share and be heard, but they’ll also receive advice and guidance as needed. And yes, we discipline as necessary when more serious issues arise that we witness.

This approach has raised emotionally mature, well-adapted, confident, and brilliant young humans. If you teach your child their whole life that they’re brilliant in whatever area they love, and point that out in detailed specific ways, and make sure they know their intelligence is completely unrelated to grades on a test or a paper that just simply shows the ability to spew out information they were taught to spew out, you get a confident child who is a creative thinker and problem solver. Maybe not creative like art projects, but creative in how they tackle a problem they want to solve. I taught my kids how to find the information they needed to tackle their problems. I taught my kids how to learn. I taught them how to enjoy learning by letting them see how rewarding and exciting and interesting it is to learn new things. I did this by removing the genius-killing rigorous academics that focus on things no one ever retains or things very few ever utilize in life as an adult. Instead, we focus on what is truly needed to be a successful adult: basic reading, writing, and math. Then we show them everything beautiful and interesting about the world in a million different ways. I allow large amounts of screen-free time where their passions are found and grown. We have endless deep conversations that arise where I share my knowledge and then they share their thoughts. Everything from diet and exercise and the importance of getting sunshine, to religion, finance, entrepreneurship, culture, and politics (that are appropriate to share for their age range). They have been raised to be free thinkers, to not be easily led astray by authority figures, and made aware of the corruption (with evidence) of many organizations society was taught never to question. They’ve had deep insights on these topics since they were young, since I showed them with my questions and comments that their insights were valued, unique, and that they made me think about things in new ways. I share my failures and struggles and how I overcome them daily. They share theirs, and I help them develop tools to overcome theirs. All of these things create incredible, well-rounded adults who can handle the ups and downs of life. They will be able to adapt as the world changes; they will know they have an inherent value and intelligence and the humble confidence that goes along with it. They will be able to face whatever comes. The future has always been uncertain for every single generation throughout history. The difference is that in many previous generations, humans had an arrogance that they knew what was coming for their future since things seemed predictable. I’m sure if we could interview generations past, we’d hear that they were very wrong on most of their predictions.

All of this is helpful and interesting for raising healthy adults, but without a true relationship with Jesus, every single person will fall. They will have no true resilience, peace, joy, or contentment. They will crumble when the storms come. Their mind will be against them at every turn. They will be easily manipulated by any power that comes along through various propaganda. They will have no truth to stand on, no comfort in trials and certain death, no real reason for pushing through the hardest seasons of life and ignoring the voices that tell them to take the easy way out. Their morals and integrity will be flexible with no true grounds for why they do what they do. Their relationships will suffer as they only answer to themselves. They’ll be mentally weak when life gets hard because they have nothing truly solid to turn to that offers comfort, love, strength, guidance, and truth. When their closest allies and loved ones turn against them, as so often happens, how will they have any hope left? How will they remain good in the face of so much evil?

The only unbreakable, unchangeable hope is that which comes from hope in Jesus. To know that they’re deeply loved and wanted and valuable in the eyes of God, no matter how bad they mess up. Loved so much that Jesus died in order to spend eternity with them. That they have someone to turn to for every question, big or small, that cannot make a mistake in His guidance and advice. They need to know the incredible power they have through Christ when they pray. They will see every last difficulty through a lens of refining, and they will see it was always worth it to become better and healthier. They will know all of these trials are temporary, and that joy and peace for eternity is coming. Life cannot feel meaningless when the God of the universe sees you as His precious child and promises you a beautiful eternity once this life is over.

A God who never stops forgiving or loving you no matter what you do, as long as you come back to Him—that’s all He wants. Life without Jesus has no true meaning or purpose and is terrifying and chaotic. I wasn’t raised Christian; I had a whole lot of trauma to work through by the time I became an adult. I lived a really crappy life until I finally turned to Him. The hard stuff kept happening, but I had changed, so everything else did. Nothing you teach your kid matters if you aren’t teaching them how much Jesus loves them and how to live Godly lives of integrity, selflessness, love for others, and wanting His will for our lives—as it is always better than our plans. Teaching them the principles in the Bible for Godly living, but mostly the promises in the Bible that they can lean on when all of the storms and temptations come. I teach my kids by telling them my story, my mistakes, my flaws, my trauma (but in a non-detailed way, just enough of the story for the sake of teaching how to overcome trials), and mostly my testimony. I was New Age; I used to do occult practices with my children when they were young, thinking it protected them, thinking I was a Christian though I trusted sage, crystals, and angel cards (basically tarot cards masking as something not occult) more than the power of Jesus. My life suffered for these choices, and I put my children at serious risk of demonic activity with my dangerous practices. But God protected our home during my confusion in His boundless love. These are the stories I share with them. They will be ready for absolutely anything that could ever happen—an AI world or the opposite—as long as they build their house on the only unmovable rock, Jesus Christ.

How do we teach these fundamentals to our kids? Well, in my experience, prayer is the number one most important tool for that. It has been part of my prayer practice for many years that God would help me show and teach my kids how important faith is, how much He loves them, and that they would have a deeply embedded, unshakeable faith and relationship with Jesus every day of their lives. I ask for His help to be a good mother and teacher. This helps me not stress so much about how that teaching looks, and I trust that God is answering that prayer when I feel His promptings on what steps I should take for that day, whether through conversations, scripture memorizing, or whatever unique way God works that day. It will look different for every house and every family, which is why it is so important that God is making those choices about how that teaching needs to look for your unique children, for the best chances of fostering in them a lasting, strong faith. My history directly fuels how I approach teaching the love of Jesus to my family. I traveled from non-belief through serious New Age practice to my ultimate surrender to Christ after deeply researching the reasons why Christianity is the true religion using archaeological, historical, and even mathematical evidence. I have a lot of resources I turn to to help develop in my children a faith that cannot be shaken by the arguments of the culture. I present the arguments to them and the evidence I know of that refutes those arguments. But the biggest tool we use in our home is how my husband and I live out our faith daily and being vocal about that around the kids. The ups, the downs, the miracles, the temptations, the corrections, the comfort, strength, peace, and purpose our lives have because of Jesus. Sometimes that just means my husband and I are regularly talking to each other about the amazing thing God did that day and how he saved us, while our children are in the same room. I pray that in 30 years, when my children ultimately face serious trials of their own, they’ll remember hearing all the struggles their parents faced and how they only made it through because of Jesus, and how huge illogical miracles shifted everything because of Jesus, and how no matter how bad things were—it was always okay because of Jesus.

Our future is completely uncertain; we could have AI robots in every home (they just actually opened pre-order for the first in home AI robots) , flying cars, mass surveillance, a dystopian future of oppression—we have absolutely no idea! Careers will always be changing, the landscape of the economy always in flux. The only teaching that can prepare a child for absolutely every scenario that could come is the teachings of Jesus Christ and a relationship with Him.

💛Tej’a