Your teen wants to start a business. Can AI help?

Lisa, I want to ask you, what’s the number one thing when it comes to raising good humans? I would say it’s to raise adaptable, healthy, connected kids. Now, the same question, but what’s most important for parents in the age of AI?

Like, are we at the point where we need to update parenting manuals? It’s all the same. It’s just that there are so many questions that come with raising kids in an age of AI.

Like, how do you stay connected? How should they approach education? How do we keep them safe?

I mean, just a lot more questions about exercising these really important muscles. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. And I’ll say answering these questions is what we work on every day at aiEDU.

Since 2019, we’ve been working with schools across the country and and we help them adapt their curriculum and their teaching practices and and we’re focused on two things. One, basic knowledge about AI, and two, what we call the human advantage, which is all that stuff you were talking about, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, problem solving. We also know that parents have a huge role to play in guiding the next generation through some of these big challenges and opportunities to come from this new era of technology and change.

And that’s why we’re making this show. So, welcome to Raising Kids in the Age of AI. It’s a podcast from aiEDU Studios in collaboration with Google.

We want to help parents understand AI and how their kids are going to encounter it in school and throughout the world. We want them to be empowered in their journey with AI. I’m Alex Kotran.

I’m the founder and CEO of aiEDU. We’re a nonprofit that helps students get ready to live, work, and thrive in a world where AI is everywhere. And I’m Dr. Aliza Pressman, a developmental psychologist, professor, podcaster, mother of teenagers, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Five Principles of Parenting: Your Essential Guide to Raising Good Humans.

And in each episode, Alex and I will introduce you to parents, educators, and AI experts who can share insights and best practices for young people using these powerful tools. Today, we want to start close to home and take a look at how kids today are exploring the world through hobbies and interests with AI in the loop. We’re going to hear from a very intrepid 13-year-old who’s using AI to help her build her own kind of lemonade stand.

And then we’re going to go to the experts. We’re going to hear from the VP of learning at Google, Maureen Heymans, and she’s going to share how her own kids are deepening their interests with the help of AI. And she’s also going to talk about the best practices that she uses to keep AI in its lane.

A helpful tool, but with families staying in the driver’s seat. And I’m curious, what does it look like to bring AI into something as fun and freewheeling as a kid practicing a hobby or developing an interest? When does it help and when does it get in the way?

Because this is such precious and important work and the AI part is new to me and I really want to make sure we get this right. Yeah, I wonder a lot about that too. You know, I actually went to our summer camp when I was 10.

I remember that moment this this you know being able to show my work to my parents and it was special not just because of what I had painted. It actually wasn’t a very good painting. But it represented all of this hard work.

It was this embodiment of the productive struggle and and my own learning process. So you know this worry that productive struggle and and sort of this core component of creativity could be skipped over is I think a legitimate one and it’s something that we’re going to delve into. Yeah.

And the reality is we don’t know. So we’re kind of moving right alongside all of this technology. We know that these productive struggles are hugely important for raising creative, adaptive, functioning kids.

And so paying close attention to how we can harness that creativity and maintain the the aspect of it that’s kind of like hard. It’s the hard stuff while also enjoying the benefits of this technology is going to be really important, right? And it’s not just the productive struggle that’s so vital to preserve.

It’s also the other intangible stuff that is part of being human. And that includes sometimes you just have to be bored. We can’t have creativity without boredom.

Like how kids choose to make use of time that is unstructured, that is not accounted for, and where there’s like nothing to do except use your own mind to figure out a solution. So, the classic example in the summertime is the lemonade stand, right? And you know, I think there’s so much learning that comes from that.

I mean, for me, it wasn’t a lemonade stand. It was Boy Scout popcorn tins. And you know, cuz I it turns out it’s really hard to go door-to-door selling, you know, well, selling anything and but but certainly selling popcorn that wasn’t actually that good.

But I learned about how to just have conversations with strangers and and and how to close the deal and and so the question I had was what does that process look like in the age of AI? Where is that productive struggle? Where are kids going to just sort of figure out some of this stuff that they aren’t necessarily learning in class but that we know is really critical to their development.

And that’s where we want to start today with 13-year-old Isabell who has a business selling at craft fairs. And we’re also going to talk to her mom, Tiffany. We’re going to hear how Isabelle uses AI to build and run her own business exactly how she wants it to be while also learning about being an entrepreneur along the way.

Hi, I’m Isabell. I’m 13 years old and I’m the founder of my own business, Shimmer Handmade. So, it all started when Isabelle wanted to sell handmade goods at the local arts and crafts fair.

It was something fun to do with friends and it was that, but she also wanted to make sure her products sold. So, she took things to the next level. Isabelle built a super professional website and she started shipping her products across the continent.

Her business, Shimmer Handmade, sells homemade bath bombs. They sell candles, lip balms, and building all of that has been its own learning process. Not just about business, but about artificial intelligence.

I personally think I’ve learned more by just like doing, cuz that’s like how I learn specifically. I learn more by doing than from instructions, you know. I’ve used AI for a lot of things.

I used it obviously for my website. So, the first website wasn’t like good and it wasn’t like really designed well. I didn’t like it either that much.

I was very proud of myself, but I didn’t love it. Isabelle definitely wants to kind of get into the thick of it and start doing the trial and error, the testing. Some of that is kids haven’t learned like, oh, don’t try that or here’s the one way to do it.

They don’t have that in place yet. So they’re just like anything is possible. And I think that that’s one thing that’s really interesting about AI.

Isabelle goes through a lot of like testing and iterations when she’s building something like that. And so she sort of gets into a groove where I don’t pay a lot of attention except for when she’s showing me because she thinks like it’s interesting or it’s cool or maybe there’s something that’s like slightly wrong and she wants somebody to talk through it with her. Like when you finished your logo that you uploaded it and asked Oh yeah.

So I just used it for feedback on my logo instead of asking it to just generate my logo because I like to have like a lot of control over everything I do. So like I’ll only use AI when like I can change something. I think using AI tools to like build anything, you kind of just have to like do a lot of trial and testing and stuff because it can’t get it right on its first try.

It’s like you have to describe in detail what you’re like what what you’re wanting to make. We like to focus on the fact that if you don’t know how to do something, you won’t know if it’s being done incorrectly. When you’re using AI.

So it’s really important to not just have AI do something for you. It’s really meant to almost enhance your work or make it faster or make it better in some way, but it’s not meant to do the work for you. Part of the reason that I use AI is because I thought of like my great-grandmother when I was little and she like didn’t know how to use a VCR and, you know, I was probably like eight and I was like, "This is ludicrous.

It’s literally one triangle button. You’d press it. How do you not know how this works?

And I’m sure that there are lots of teenagers like Isabelle right now who will have that same feeling about their parents or the adults in their lives who maybe aren’t willing to like invest in the technology. So, I think for me it’s just about being curious and being, you know, careful and then just honestly just being part of the conversation. Tiffany said two very important words, curiosity and careful.

So, I loved that. And she’s clearly having conversations with her daughter very specifically, letting her know like this is a tool to use once you’ve learned a skill so that it can help you kind of problem solve and troubleshoot and enhance, but it’s not something to use to do the thinking instead of you. And I I think Isabelle made it very clear.

She too, you know, she’s like, "I’m going to design a logo, but I would like feedback, and this is another way to get feedback." So, I liked how they’re exploring. I think it’s cool that she really is fluent sounding in like how to direct AI, so she really has to be clear on what her vision is because otherwise AI is going to give her something that she’s not looking for. You know, you have to know what you want if you really are going to be in the driver’s seat.

And and that’s sort of what I’m hearing from from Isabelle where she’s not just using AI to generate the logo and then slapping that on her website. She’s using it to get feedback and and to iterate almost like a brainstorming partner. Yeah.

It’s also really important that Tiffany is, you know, having this conversation with her daughter about, you know, the experience of actually using AI to help create this logo and this this idea of, you know, having a vision for what good looks like, you know, I think that’s actually really empowering. It’s so relevant for kids. You know providing them with the agency to know that you know the AI may be able to come up with something really polished that looks you know professional but it might not be what you are envisioning and and your vision you know has to be at the center of of what you create and I think what we saw and what we have to keep emphasizing is parents need to collaborate with their kids and it’s kind of cool because they’re going to be on this journey together they’re learning at the same time I mean the kids are going to and faster.

But when we’re open and we’re sort of collaborating and keeping the conversation going, it keeps us connected and we know that the parent child connection is like the biggest protective factor out there. And this is why I want to hear from people who are actually building AI and who know it and live it and do it all day long. And I want to gain from their insider knowledge so that I can make sense of all this.

And that’s why we’re bringing you this conversation we had with Maureen Heymans. She’s the VP of Learning at Google. And she oversees AI integration into tools like search, YouTube, and Google Classroom to democratize access to quality education.

Maureen is also a parent to two teenage sons. So we know she thinks about AI through the lens of a parent and has thoughtful conversations about it with her own kids. Let’s listen.

AI is really a curiosity engine which can really help you develop your interest and hobbies and really understand the different concept. So you can create something amazing. You can ask clarifying question.

You can brainstorm. You can even access different type of formats like a diagrams to really grasp the deep meaning of a concept and then you can even bring that to the next level by using what’s called vibe coding. So that you can just write code and and create application a website just by using prompt just by explaining what you are trying to to create.

One example is actually one of my son used it to to create a website. And he has a little business to sell honey and and eggs and so he wanted to create a website but doesn’t know how to use HTML or never got really interested in coding and so I kind of put him on some of those vibe coding tools and then a few hours later he had that website and my other son wanted to do something more related to climate change. He wanted to help people bike more and he decided to create a tool that would let you take a picture of your bike that has a problem that is broken and then he would actually tell you what’s broken about your bike, what tools you might need and even connect you to like local shop.

Okay, so I I want to jump in here for a minute. Vibe coding is has become a term of art in the AI community. You’ve probably heard of it, but you might not know exactly what it is, so I’m simplifying a bit.

Basically, AI now allows you to write software code through like natural conversation. So, instead of typing lines of like Python or JavaScript, you literally write something in English. So, what’s cool about VIP coding is you you no longer need to be an expert in specific coding languages to do simple things like build websites, apps, and other stuff.

And and if you are a coding expert, it can help you work a lot faster and more creatively. And and in vibe coding, if you talk to folks in Silicon Valley, what they’ll tell you is vibe coding is now becoming the primary way that software engineers write code. So it’s not only making it possible for nearly anyone to build stuff that previously required months or even years of training, but it’s also, you know, expanding the the repertoire of people who are at the front lines of actually building some of the more cutting edge software tools that we use every day.

That was such a good explanation. Okay, back to Maureen. My kids are a big fan of board games.

As a family, we always love to play board games. And so I think, you know, if they want to bring it to the next level, I think it’s a great example where you can use AI, you know, upload some of the rule books of existing games. So like write some some characters that you want to include and then you can ask the tool to like based on all of those thing, right?

Helped me brainstorm how I can build a new game, you know, with those themes that would be super fun to play with, right? And and again, you know, like the benefit with AI that you can ingest a lot of content from different sources and then start brainstorming with you to to kind of create something new. So I think you know I think that’s a big concern people have that AI can feel lonely but actually I think you can really use it as an amazing collaborative tool and use it as a way to create together.

One of the key element is to have an open communication of how you are going to use AI like encourage open discussion on how they want to use it. Does it have a positive impact? Is it going to be fair and consider bias because those tools are built on data that can be biased, right?

And and so and they can also hallucinate and and generate data that is incorrect, right? And it can be really convincing. So, I think it’s important to to keep that critical mind, right, of always double-checking the facts and the information, check the sources and and make sure that this is actually correct, right?

I think it’s also important to encourage you know independent thinking first, right? Not jump too quickly to AI, but start thinking and brainstorming independently. You know, maybe start writing your ideas first on a piece of paper before you turn to AI.

It should be an extension not a replacement and then it’s also important to keep agency on on your journey right like make sure you set your own goals you know you express your own ideas and then last but not least I would say that most importantly when you use those tools is is to to use it a lot right the more you use it the more you learn like anything else and and I think it’s important to play with AI see what works understand the pitfall you know, experiment with it and build intuition. I love any opportunity for words like collaboration and creating things together. And I think it’s even better when it comes from our kids’ own interests because it gives us another way in to connection.

And again, it’s all about having conversations with your kids. This there’s no trick like have real conversations with your kids. Stay connected and check in constantly affirming your family’s values about how and when to use AI.

We have talked a lot and we will talk a lot about the importance of like cultivating curiosity among our kids. But I I actually think curiosity is so important for parents as well. I think this is an opportunity, you know, you don’t have to have all the answers, but I think you need to be sort of showing up as a co-passenger in in this exploration.

And so, sort of like authentic curiosity is going to go a long way as you sort of have this, you know, embark on this journey together with your kids. For sure. And if we are like operating from a total fear-based place, we can’t be curious.

It doesn’t give space in our frontal lobe to be curious. As I look back to, you know, my own interactions with technology, whether it was video games or crazy internet forums that I was like role-playing on, there was always this barrier between me and my parents. Like, they didn’t really understand the games that I was playing or what I was doing online.

That barrier, I think, is is something that a lot of parents face. I mean, not every parent has, you know, been able to roll up their sleeves and really figure out Minecraft or Fortnite. AI is actually giving us the opportunity to have this bridge.

You don’t have to literally learn how to code to be able to, you know, sit down next to them and and and do the one thing, you know, your one role is to be encourager. That’s a really good point. And I think what it sounds like AI can do is for those of us who are technologically a little bit inexperienced just like with when you were explaining vibe coding like you can understand things including how these video games work and kind of get payoff pretty quickly so that you can connect over it instead of just again rejecting everything.

And so the key is parents just need to know a little bit about AI so that they can actually you know get the gears turning and you know join their kids in in broadening their world. Thank you so much for listening. We have so many enlightening episodes coming up this season including our next episode where we dig into the basics of AI and get to the heart of what AI is and how it works.

We’ll hear from Maya Kulycky VP of Strategy & Operations for Google Research. When I think about the future and the largest impact AI can have, I think about the fact that the world has a tremendous number of problems that people need to solve and now they have a really remarkable wonderful tool to help do that. We’re also going to hear from Lila Ibrahim, the COO of Google DeepMind.

That’s the AI research lab within Google that’s been at the frontiers of some of the most cutting edge developments in the space over the last few years. At the center of everything was this belief that we had to do this responsibly. It’s because we thought this could be such transformational technology and transformational technology requires exceptional care.

So find out where AI is going to take us and future generations next on Raising Kids in the Age of AI. Until then, don’t forget to follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or wherever you listen so you don’t miss an episode. And we really want to hear from you.

So, take a minute to leave us a rating and a review on your podcast player of choice. Your feedback is important to us. Raising Kids in the Age of AI is a podcast by aiEDU in collaboration with Google.

It’s produced by Kaleidoscope. For Kaleidoscope, the executive producers are Kate Osborne and Lizzie Jacobs. Our lead producer is Molly Sosa with production assistance by Irene Bantigay.

Our video editor is Ilia Magazan and our theme song and music were composed by Kyle Murdoch who also mixed the episode for us.