Educator, author and trusted guide to families navigating AI
Dan Fitzpatrick writes about AI in education for Forbes and is the author of The Educators' AI Guide 2026, The AI Classroom and Infinite Education. He founded aieducator.tools after working as a teacher, school leader and education strategist.
He also hosts the AI for Educators Daily podcast and advises schools and education bodies in the UK and abroad.
Chatbots built for children exist, and for under-13s they are the right place to start. But a filter is a fence around one app, not around your child. What the safe ones fix, what no setting can guarantee, and the question worth asking tonight.
School districts are switching AI off while national governments fund it. A former school leader explains why the policy is not what decides how well your child ends up using AI, and the one question to ask your school this term.
A short, honest guide to using AI for the admin around family life without letting it do the parenting: the jobs worth handing over, the ones to keep, and the test to tell them apart.
Some AI tutors help and most of what you can buy has never been tested. The two trials that exist point at the same thing: whether the tutor will refuse to give the answer. Here is how to check before you pay, and what a tutor still cannot do.
California signed thirteen child safety laws on September 10, 2026, covering AI chatbots, social media feeds and AI toys. Here is what actually changes for your child, when it starts, and the one setting most of it depends on.
Most parents have no general right to opt a child out of AI at school, but you can ask which tools are switched on, see your child's records, and request an alternative to one named tool. What changed since August, and how to word the request.
At 9 to 12, AI arrives as a toy rather than as homework, and for nearly half of the 9 to 12 year olds who use it, it arrives on a school device. Here is which AI is allowed at this age, what to set up tonight, and what the platform rules really say.
Schools are buying AI chatbots to sit alongside overstretched counseling teams. What the school version is, how it differs from the apps in the headlines, and the one question to ask before you consent.
Most of what is sold to parents as teaching kids about AI is prompting. The research says the skill children are missing is judgment: they cannot reliably tell a machine's work from a person's. Here is what to teach at each age, the words to say, and what school has not reached yet.
Three independent tests of AI toys, a four-year California moratorium now signed into law but not starting until 2027, and the question none of them asks: what a toy that answers everything does to the conversations your child would otherwise be having with you.
The research says teenagers use AI mostly for looking things up, schoolwork and fun, and that parents underestimate how many are using it at all. Here is what the numbers show, what changes between 13 and 18, and the one question that gets you a real answer tonight.
Most teenagers who use AI for emotional support never tell anyone. How to tell the ordinary from the worrying, what a chatbot cannot do, what to say at each age, and when to take it to a person instead.
