What is a Family AI Charter?
A Family AI Charter is a one-page agreement a household writes together that says what the family uses AI for, what it never uses AI for, what always gets double-checked, what information stays out of it, and who decides the rules.
It takes about half an hour to write. It fits on one page on purpose, so a 9-year-old can read the whole thing and a parent can point at it without a lecture (the lecture was the old system, and it did not work).
I'm a dad who builds with AI for a living — my kids and I make bedtime books and video games with it. This is the page taped up in our house.
Why a charter instead of a screen-time rule?
Screen-time rules count minutes. That works for a tablet, because a tablet is a place your kid goes.
AI isn't a place. It's inside the homework help, the game, the search box, and the group chat. There's no drawer to put it in at 8pm... which is the whole problem.
So the useful agreement covers which decisions stay human. In your house, with your values, decided by you rather than by whichever company shipped the feature.
What goes in a Family AI Charter?
Five questions. Answer them out loud, together, in one sitting.
1. What do we use AI for?
Name the good uses specifically. Ours: making things, explaining things, keeping track of things, planning things.
2. What do we never use it for?
Ours: pretending its work is ours, settling family arguments, and anything about relationships or feelings that should be spoken to a human first.
3. What do we always double-check?
Anything that sounds like a fact. The machine states wrong things in a confident voice. Sometimes it flat out lies. Let the kid pick a topic they know cold and quiz it — being the expert in the room is the whole appeal.
4. What stays out of it?
Real names, faces, school, address, private family stories. Our test: if we wouldn't put it on a poster in town, it doesn't go in a prompt.
5. Who decides?
Parents decide the rules. Kids argue for changes at the table, not in the moment.
That's the whole document... five headings, a few lines each, taped somewhere visible.
Is five the right number of questions? I don't know. It's what fit on one page without anyone's eyes glazing over.
How do we write ours as a family?
We sat down for half an hour, with me typing.
We went question by question and said the answers out loud. Write down what the kids say in their words, not your cleaned-up version. A rule in a kid's own phrasing is a rule they remember.
Expect pushback, and let them win at least one point. Ours went calmer than I'd planned for, and I don't know whether that's typical... but if a kid never wins anything during the writing, you didn't write an agreement.
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.
Then print it and tape it up. Rewrite it when a rule keeps getting broken... or keeps being irrelevant. Ours hasn't needed it yet, which I read as the document being roughly right rather than as a finished job.
Get the template
One page, the five questions, blank lines to fill in at the kitchen table. Print it and write on it with a pen. The handwriting is the point — it's how you can tell the kids were actually there.
It comes with the full guide: private setup, keeping the judgment calls yours, and 3 projects to build with your kid this week.
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None of this is settled in my house either. Fellow parents, comparing notes.