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's an idea that worked in my house, written up in case it works in yours.
I didn't find this in a book. My wife and I made it up because we needed it, and it stuck.
I'm a dad who builds with AI for a living — my kids and I make bedtime books and video games with it. The Family AI Charter is the page taped up in our house.
The part I didn't expect: the rules weren't the payoff. Writing the page forced my wife and I to figure out what we think, and those answers became our defaults. When the school asks about AI (or doesn't), or any time AI tries to insert itself into our family's life uninvited, we already wrote the answer down. We're not improvising anymore.
That might be worth half an hour of your time too. It fits on one page on purpose, so a 10-year-old can read the whole thing and a parent can point at it without a lecture each time (the lecture was the old system, and it did not work).
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 agreement that helped us 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?
If you try this, it's 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 (barely) without anyone's eyes glazing over.
How we wrote ours
We sat down for half an hour, with me typing.
We went question by question and said the answers out loud. What I'd suggest from that: 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 (I'd budgeted for a filibuster), 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. (You wrote a memo.)
And put yourself under the same rules. If AI drafts your work emails and the charter doesn't say so, the page is a leash for the kids, not a picture of 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: roughly right, not finished.
Steal ours as a starting point
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 in the room.
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.