What should a family AI agreement include?

By Jordan Urbs · Updated July 2026

Most family tech rules are about minutes. How much screen time, which apps, what hour the tablet goes in the drawer.

Those rules don't work on AI, because AI isn't a place your kid goes. It's a tool that shows up inside their homework, their games, their group chat, and the search box.

So the agreement has to be about judgment and dependency instead of minutes.

Why not just set a time limit?

The screen-time question is how much AI should my kid get access to? I think that's the smaller question.

The bigger one: how much dependency is AI creating in my child?

Take homework. A machine can now copy-paste most of what school calls "achievement" — the five-paragraph essay, the book report, the practice worksheet. A model produces all of it in seconds, virtually free.

Whatever a machine can copy is getting cheap fast.

But it can't copy judgment, taste, discipline, following through, or simply being the kind of person others trust.

AI has revealed the true purpose behind mundane homework assignments. As parents we now have to shift our focus to the traits and skills those tasks once helped develop... instead of the tasks themselves.

So the goal is a kid who can stand in front of infinite generated options and decide: what's true, what's good, what's worth his time. What makes sense based on the goal and intention of the task.

The machine generates.

The human decides.

I'm trying to raise a decider — which is the actual answer to the dependency question.

(I'm no authority on raising kids, just another parent like you. But in the face of all the disruption AI is causing, this is what makes the most sense to me... I'm running the experiment live, same as all of us.)

What is the one rule underneath all the others?

After 18 months of building non-stop with AI, I keep coming back to one framework:

AI generates options. It cannot decide what's best.

It will produce ten discipline strategies, five ways to explain death to a child, three bedtime stories. All the homework.

And even if it has a deep private knowledge base of your child's psychology, it still has no idea which one is right for your kid, because "right" isn't a computation. It's a judgment call.

The deciding is your job. It was always your job. AI makes it possible to hand the job away without noticing — and that's what's dangerous.

So the one value-oriented rule in our house: AI drafts, parents decide.

The machine can propose the chore chart. It doesn't rule on whether the chore chart is fair... or final.

It can summarize the school's reading list. What our family thinks about that list is our business.

And it can generate the apology letter after a sibling fight, but the kid has to rewrite it in his own words, because the point of an apology is that it costs you something.

What are the five questions to answer together?

Homework is one topic. The same mindset shift applies to the whole scope of your values — boundaries, critical thinking, creativity, how people treat each other. But first you have to know what those values are, which is what the page is for.

Write one page. Out loud, as a family, in one sitting.

Tape it somewhere visible. Rewrite it when it stops matching reality (ours hasn't needed it yet... which I'm choosing to read as a good sign).

What two lines are worth stating plainly?

AI is not a doctor and not a therapist. Serious health and mental-health questions should eventually go to professionals. But the machine is a way to gather perspective and prepare better questions for them.

(And practice good privacy hygiene for the medical second opinions — that's the sensitive pile.)

And nothing about your child goes public without thinking about the teenager or adult they'll become. That includes what we post. In everything I publish about building with my son, you'll see the projects, never his face. He can decide his own internet presence at 15.

That's his call to make... which is sort of the whole philosophy in one sentence.

How do I get my kid to agree to it?

Write it with them, not for them.

Make them argue for what they want. A kid who has to say out loud why AI should be allowed for something is doing the actual thinking.

The rule that lands easiest is usually double-checking the machine, because catching it being confidently wrong plays like a game rather than a rule. Let the kid pick a topic they know cold and quiz it — being the expert in the room is the whole appeal.

Let them win something, too. If a kid never wins a point during the writing, what you produced is a decree with your name on it.

And put yourself under the same rules. If AI drafts your work emails and the charter doesn't say so, the page is about controlling the kids rather than about how your family works.