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In the Room #12 | ~6–7-min read

Happy Saturday. And forgive me for going quiet last weekend, we were away on a family vacation.

This post comes courtesy of a stranger on our flight home. My husband and my oldest, who just finished her freshman year, spent the flight seated next to a rising senior hunched over his Common App essay. Over a few hours, the three of them got into it: what college is even for anymore (especially in an AI world), what makes an application actually land, and how any of that connects to what a kid does in high school.

That conversation stuck with me. I’ve spent years inside schools watching the admissions machine run, and a few more running a national college-access and persistence program. And it landed right on top of something I’d been chewing on since I wrote, a few weeks back, about how AI is quietly rewriting the job market your kid is walking toward.

Here’s where my head went. If the job market is changing this fast, then the calculus on which college, or whether the four-year path is even right for your kid, is changing too. And if that’s changing, then how we help them get ready has to change with it. Preparing for college was never a separate track from preparing for an AI world. It’s the same preparation, just wrapped differently.

Which brings me to the report that kept nagging at me the whole flight. In the same stretch of weeks, two arms of Harvard sent parents flatly opposite messages. Harvard’s education school put out a major report arguing we have to ease the achievement pressure that’s crushing teenagers, and raise kids of character and purpose instead. Meanwhile Harvard College, like nearly every school in the Ivy League, just brought back the required SAT. Ease up on your kid. Also, make sure they score higher. Pick one.

That contradiction isn’t really about Harvard. It’s the exact bind you’re standing in as a parent right now, made visible. The culture keeps telling your kid to be more relentless and more relaxed, more accomplished and more whole, all at once. And nobody hands you the instructions for holding both.

So here are three reads, and one thing to do with each.

Harvard’s other message: raise kids of character, not résumés
Making Caring Common (Harvard Graduate School of Education) · June 17, 2026 · ~5-min read

Every few years, a group at Harvard’s ed school called Making Caring Common publishes something titled Turning the Tide, essentially a letter to colleges, schools, and parents about what we should actually be valuing in kids. The 2026 edition, written with the national association of admissions counselors, lands on two findings that stuck with me.

First, a hard number. 34% of teens and 51% of young adults say they experience little or no meaning or purpose in their lives. That should stop all of us cold. Half of the young adults just past the finish line of all this striving are telling researchers they can’t feel the point of any of it.

Second, the part that surprised me, because it cuts against the advice most of us absorbed. The report says we should stop expecting teens to have a single defining “passion.” The pressure to package yourself into one neat story for an application is a big part of what’s hollowing kids out. The goal isn’t a settled passion by age 18. It’s helping a kid figure out what they actually care about, and how that connects to the choices in front of them. Those are different projects, and we’ve been quietly running the wrong one.

For you: Have the purpose conversation in a way that takes pressure off instead of adding it. The trap is turning “what do you care about?” into one more thing your kid has to have an impressive answer for. So name that out loud. Try this, genuinely, no follow-up quiz attached:

“I don’t need you to have your whole life figured out. I honestly don’t. I just want to know what’s felt worth your time lately, and why.”

Then let it be a small, real answer. Not a mission statement. You’re listening for one flicker of a thing they’d do even if it never went on a form. And keep collecting those flickers. Over time, they’re how your kid figures out what actually matters to them, so when the moment comes, you can help connect those values to the paths in front of them.

Meanwhile, the SAT is back (at almost every school that dropped it)
Inside Higher Ed · Oct 13, 2025 · ~4-min read

Here’s the counter-current. The test-optional era that started in the pandemic is basically over at the top schools. With Princeton’s announcement, seven of the eight Ivy League schools have brought back a testing requirement (Columbia is the lone holdout). Stanford, MIT, Georgetown, a long list of big public flagships, same move. Their stated reasons: grade inflation has made an “A” meaningless as a signal, and their own data shows test scores predict how students actually do once they arrive.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read this as “so the pressure’s real, better start prepping in eighth grade.” That’s the wrong lesson. Notice what several of these schools said in their own announcements: a clear requirement actually reduces stress, because it ends the exhausting guessing game of “is my score good enough to send?” The test is one contained, knowable thing. The danger isn’t the test. It’s letting the test metastasize, until it colonizes freshman year and every summer and the dinner table, and quietly crowds out everything the first read said matters.

For you: Put the test in a box, on purpose. It’s a real requirement now, so treat it like one: a defined stretch of prep, mostly junior year, with a start and an end. What it is not allowed to become is the weather your kid lives in for four years. When the anxiety tries to expand (”should we start prepping now?” in ninth grade), that’s your cue to shrink it back down, not feed it.

What selective colleges actually reward (from someone who’s been inside the room)
U.S. News, featuring Jeff Selingo · Feb 5, 2026 · ~5-min read

If you only follow one voice on how admissions really works, make it Jeff Selingo. He spent a year embedded inside admissions offices for his book Who Gets In and Why, and his newer book Dream School is the most level-headed thing I’ve read for parents. His core message is the antidote to the panic.

Two things stuck with me. One: depth beats breadth, every time. Admissions officers are not counting your kid’s eleven activities. They’re looking for the two or three where a kid went deep enough to have something real to show, or say. A padded résumé reads as busy, not committed.

Two: he tells families to drop the “Top 25 or bust” mindset entirely, because it’s both bad for kids’ mental health and, frankly, bad strategy. What actually predicts a good outcome, he argues, is fit: strong job prospects out of that specific school, hands-on learning, and whether a kid can find a place they belong. None of that is on the rankings list.

Put his advice next to the first two reads and the whole thing finally makes sense. The purpose the Harvard report wants, the depth Selingo describes, the character that no test can measure, those aren’t three separate assignments. They’re the same kid, built slowly, doing a few things they care about for real.

For you: This summer, run one quiet reflection with your kid, and ask nothing else of it. Selingo’s version is my favorite: “When this year, did you lose track of time in a good way?” A class, a project, a job, a person, a problem. That’s the thread. You don’t have to turn it into a plan or a program or a college essay. You just have to notice it, and protect it, and let it grow on its own clock.

Three reads, one argument the whole college-admissions world is having with itself. It will keep sending your kid contradictory messages: work harder and also find yourself, be exceptional and also be well. You can’t resolve that contradiction for the whole country. But you can decide which message runs your own house. And I’d put my money, every time, on the boring, durable stuff: a couple of things they love, a character you can point to, a kid who knows what’s worth their time. That outlasts any score.

On Tuesday I’ll get concrete, and personal. My oldest just finished her freshman year, and I’ve been using AI, the same tools everyone’s nervous about, to help her start thinking through her college options and how to actually prepare for them. I’ll walk you through exactly what we did, and what I’d do differently. If you’ve found something that’s working in your own house, hit reply and tell me. The best stuff in this newsletter comes from you.

See you Tuesday.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

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~6–7-min read

On Saturday I wrote about the whole world trying to log our kids off social media at once: the UK’s new under-16 ban, Australia six months in, a dozen countries and counting. And I ended the post on the thing I actually believe, which is that no law reaches into your living room. What actually shapes your kid’s day-to-day reality are the rules you set and explain... and refine as a family.

Several of you hit reply with a fair question: okay, so what’s yours?

So today I’ll get specific. The lines we’ve drawn in our own house, by age, and (the part that matters more than the lines) the conversations that made them stick. I’ve spent twenty years watching device rules roll out across schools and districts, and I’ll tell you the same thing I told a room of parents last year: the rule on paper is the easy part. What happens after is where the real outcome lives.

One thing before the ages, because it’s the whole frame.

You’re not setting a “one-time” rule; you’re slowly passing the baton.

The mistake I made early (and watched a hundred schools make) is treating this like a single yes-or-no decision you decide once. It isn’t; it’s a slow handoff of responsibility. When they’re little, you decide for them. In the middle years, you decide with them. By high school, they’re deciding, and you’re advising. Same kid, three different jobs that you’re performing.

Get the job wrong for the age and everything gets harder. Hand a nine-year-old “your choice” and you’ve abandoned them. Hand a sixteen-year-old a rule with no reason and you’ve handed them a thing to get around. So the lines below aren’t really about social media apps; they’re about which job you’re doing right now.

Elementary (roughly 6–11): “not yet, and here’s why” is a complete answer

In our house, our girls did not have any access to social media (or a phone) while they were in elementary school. What they did have was the reason behind those decisions, said out loud, more than once. Because “no” without a “why” just becomes a countdown to the day they’re old enough to argue you out of it.

This is the age where you decide for them, and that’s not mean, it’s the job. The line is simple: not yet. The work is making “not yet” mean something other than “I’m in charge.”

Try this the next time “but everyone has it” comes up:

“You’re right that a lot of kids have it. Here’s why we’re waiting: these apps are built to be really hard to put down, even for grown-ups, and I want your brain to get a little more set first. It’s not a no forever. It’s a not-yet, and I’ll tell you when that changes.”

The thing that makes it stick isn’t the firmness. It’s that you told them the truth about why, so the rule belongs to a reason instead of to your mood.

Middle school (roughly 11–13): this is the age you write it down, together

If there’s one bracket to get right, it’s this one. There’s a well-known 2022 Oxford and Cambridge study that found specific windows when social media use most predicts a dip in wellbeing a year later: roughly ages 11 to 13 for girls and 14 to 15 for boys. That’s not a reason to panic; it’s a reason to be most awake right when the first account usually opens.

So this is where you should stop deciding for and start deciding with your kiddos. Why? Because this is a perfect time to help them learn and practice the skills and boundaries that are important to you.

So what are we actually practicing for? There are a handful of durable skills I want to see coming online before the apps do.

• Self-control is first: can your kid put the phone down when they said they would, without it turning into a fight? These apps are built by very smart adults to beat that exact muscle, so it has to be the stronger of the two.

• Emotional regulation is next: the text left on read, the party they watched on a screen and weren’t invited to. Can they feel that and not come apart?

• After that, judgment: spotting what’s fake, what’s a setup, what isn’t theirs to share.

• And the quiet one that matters most, coming to you when something goes sideways instead of hiding it, because something will.
  None of these show up on a birthday. You build them in low-stakes reps first, which is the whole reason we add access slowly instead of all at once. They happen to be the same durable skills that hold up no matter what technology shows up next, so I’d rather build them on purpose than hope they appear.

For our house, this period became the time where we provided our girls more access - slowly - as they learned the skills they needed to. For our youngest, who’s entering into sixth grade this Fall, our goal is to give her a basic phone (just camera + texts + phone) for the year. We’ll use texts & phone access to practice the durable skills I noted above. Then, when she’s ready, we’ll add in a social media app with very limited guardrails so that we can practice together the same skills, but in a different context, before high school.

And to make sure we are ALL very clear on the what and why, we’re writing it all down and revisiting our phone agreement about it 2-3 times a year. Why? Because I want her to feel like it’s not set in stone... and I want her to know the WHY behind each aspect of the boundaries and freedoms that she’s operating under.

Try this to make it a contract instead of a decree:

“We’re going to write the social media rules together, and you get a real say. But every rule has to come with a reason we both actually believe. And we’ll revisit it every few months so that we can check in to make sure it still makes sense for both of us.”

A rule your kid helped write, and can explain back to you, is one they’ll follow when you’re not in the room. That’s the whole game. (If you want the long version, our family’s phone agreement is one of the free guides on the site.)

High school (roughly 14–17): hand over the judgment on purpose

By now the job has changed again. You’re not the rule-maker anymore, you’re the advisor, and the goal is a kid who can run the decision without you, because in about five minutes they’ll have to.

With my older daughter, heading into tenth, the rules have gotten fewer and the conversations have gotten realer. We’re probably still much stricter than most as we still have a long list of non-negotiables (i.e, strict time limits, no access during bedtime, no public posting).

But as she heads into eleventh and twelfth grade, I’ll be handing her more and more of the actual call and then talking through how it went. And my hope is that our ongoing check-ins will do more work than any restriction:

“Show me one thing you saw today that was actually good, and one that annoyed you.”

At that point, I’ll be listening for whether the good half comes easily. If it’s always comparison, or who’s mad at whom, and never anything they liked, that’s your signal the feed is costing more than it’s giving, and your opening to talk about it as a teammate, not a warden.

The move at this age, especially at the latter high school years, is to let them feel the consequences of their own judgment while the stakes are still small and you’re still close enough to help. Better they learn it now, with you, than at nineteen, alone.

The durable skill you’re building in these years is self-governance: running the rule when no one is checking, setting their own limit and actually keeping it. That’s the one that has to be working before they leave, because once they’re gone, you’re not in the room to enforce anything. Everything earlier (the self-control, the regulation, the judgment) was the warm-up for this.

The conversation is the thing. The rule is just where it’s written down.

Here’s what twenty years and two kids have taught me. Every family I’ve watched do this well had different rules. What they had in common wasn’t the rules. It was that the kid knew the reason, and the reason got talked about more than once. The rule was just the conversation, written down.

That’s why a line you chose and can explain outlasts any law, or any ban, or any other family’s setup. The law moves the default for a country. The conversation moves the default in your house.

And it’s about to matter more, not less. The same UK bill that’s banning social media for under-16s also set a minimum age of 18 for AI “companion” chatbots, in the very same breath. The decision you’re practicing right now, the by-age judgment, the reason that beats the rule, is the exact muscle you’ll need when your kid’s first AI friend shows up. And it’s coming faster than the social media one did. The reps you’re putting in this summer aren’t only about social media. They’re the dress rehearsal.

You don’t need the perfect rule. You need the next conversation. Pick the one line that fits your kid’s age, say the why out loud tonight, and let them push back on it. That’s not the rule failing. That’s the rule working.

Then hit reply and tell me one line that’s actually held in your house, and how you explained it. I read every one, and the best stuff in this newsletter comes from you.

See you Saturday,
Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

Subscribe now

If this resonated, you’ll also like:

• The world is trying to log your kid off: Saturday’s roundup on the global under-16 ban wave, the post this one answers

• Call Me Maybe (With Some Ground Rules First): the family phone agreement, what a phone can build and not just restrict

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In the Room #11 | ~6–7-min read

Happy Saturday.

As a mom of a rising middle schooler, the topic of when to introduce phones (and by extension, social media) has been on my mind a lot these days. And while we’re figuring out the answers community by community, I saw countries across the globe tackle this more systematically.

Within a few days this week, the United Kingdom announced it will ban social media for kids under 16, Australia’s six-month-old version of the same ban landed back in the headlines, and the running list of countries doing some version of this crossed a dozen. So, if you’ve ever wondered whether the thing you’re managing in your own house is just you, it’s not. The whole world is having this fight at once.

And before we dive into this topic, you might be wondering why a newsletter usually about AI is spending a Saturday on social media. It’s because they’re the same story, one chapter apart. Social media was the first technology built to capture a developing brain’s attention and tie it to a kid’s sense of worth. AI is the next one, trained on everything those platforms learned. And the line between them is already dissolving: the UK’s new bill doesn’t only ban social media for under-16s, it also sets a minimum age of 18 for AI “companion” chatbots, in the very same breath. If you want to see the fight we’re about to have over AI and kids, watch the one over social media right now. It’s the dress rehearsal.

So here are three reads on it, and one thing to do with each.

The UK becomes the biggest Western country to pull the plug
NPR · June 15, 2026 · ~4-min read

On Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the UK will bar under-16s from the major platforms, with extra blocks on things like livestreaming and stranger contact. What got my attention wasn’t the politician, it was the parents: the government’s consultation drew about 116,000 responses, and more than 90% wanted a minimum age of 16.

The most interesting part of this story? The actual “why” under the policy. The clearest version of it comes from a widely cited 2022 study by Oxford and Cambridge researchers, which found there are specific developmental windows when social media use most predicts a drop in a kid’s wellbeing a year later: roughly ages 11 to 13 for girls and 14 to 15 for boys. That’s not a random range. That’s the exact middle-school stretch so many of your kids are moving through right now. The developmental science is fairly blunt about the rationale as well: the adolescent brain is wired to be unusually sensitive to social reward and rejection, so the likes, the read receipts, and the silence after a post all land harder than they ever would on an adult. And that’s why a lopsided majority of the people who weighed in want this treated as a public-health issue, the way we eventually treated seatbelts, instead of leaving each family to fight it alone.

For you: Use it as a conversation opener, not a lecture. Ask, genuinely curious: “A whole country just voted to ban this for people your age. What did they get right, and what are they missing?” Then let them talk first. You’re listening for one thing: whether they describe these apps as connection, as entertainment, as pressure, or as a place they already feel a little stuck. That answer tells you which conversation you actually need to have next.

Australia banned it six months ago. Most kids are still on.
Australia eSafety Commissioner (background + enforcement) · 2026 · ~3-min read

Australia was first, with its under-16 ban taking effect in December 2025. And this is the read I’d actually sit with...because it’s the reality check to the UK story. Platforms removed something like 4.7 million under-16 accounts, and yet, by parents’ own reports, roughly 70% of under-16s were still getting onto social media anyway. The regulator wasn’t satisfied that the companies had taken “reasonable steps,” and in March it opened formal investigations into five major platforms, with fines that can run into the tens of millions.

I find this clarifying, not discouraging. A ban can change the official default, and that matters. But it doesn’t change a determined 14-year-old’s afternoon by itself because as we all know, kids can find ways to get around blunt rules if they’re motivated enough. The honest lesson from Australia is the same one I learned watching district policies roll out: the rule on paper is the easy part. What happens after, the enforcement, the workarounds, the conversations at home, is where the actual outcome gets decided.

For you: Don’t outsource the result to a rule, anyone’s rule. The default that matters most is the boring one in your own house: where the phone charges at night (not the bedroom), and a standing, no-drama check-in. Make the check-in a real question, not an interrogation: “Show me one thing you saw today that was actually good, and one that annoyed you.” You’re listening for whether the good half comes easily. If the answer is always complaints, comparison, or who’s mad at whom, and never anything they liked, that’s your signal the feed is costing more than it’s giving.

A dozen countries, and a US map that’s all over the place
TechCrunch · June 15, 2026 · ~4-min read

Zoom out and the wave is real: Malaysia’s under-16 ban took effect this month, Indonesia’s in March, and Norway and Canada have legislation moving, at least a dozen countries in all. The United States, notably, is not one of them at the national level. We have a state-by-state patchwork instead, much of it tangled up in court over privacy and age-verification fights.

So if you’re an American parent waiting for one clean, national rule to make this decision for you, I wouldn’t hold your breath. It’s going to stay a patchwork, and a contested one, for a while. Which means the question lands back where it started, on your kitchen table, probably sooner than any statehouse will answer it.

For you: Make the social-media call deliberately, before it gets made for you. The default is that your kid ends up with an account because everyone else has one. So decide it on your terms instead, and let the answer change as they grow. Before the next account opens, talk through three things out loud together: “What’s it for, which app, and what age feels right, and why?” You’re listening for whether your kid can give a real reason beyond “everyone has it.”

Roughly: for 6–11s the answer is “not yet, and here’s why”; the 12–13 stretch is when you write the actual rule down; by high school you’re handing more of the judgment to them on purpose. A line you chose and can explain will outlast any law.

Three reads, one big argument the entire planet is having at the same time. Governments are rewriting the rules in real time, and that’s worth watching. But not one of these laws reaches into your living room. A ban can move the default for a whole country. The rule that actually shapes your kid’s week is still the one you set, and explain, and live by yourself.

On Tuesday I’ll get specific, what I’d actually do about social media by age, the lines we’ve drawn in our own house, and the conversations that made them stick better than any rule ever did. If you’ve found a version of this that works for your family, hit reply and tell me. The best stuff in this newsletter comes from you.

See you Tuesday.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

Subscribe now

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~8-min read

I recently spoke with a rising college senior about his fears for the job market. He talked about submitting 300 applications for a summer internship and being lucky enough to land 3 offers. The secret to his success? A track record of summer jobs he’s held since he was sixteen.

“I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have those summer jobs,” he told me. “It seems like all employers want right now are kids with at least a year of experience.”

I’ve spent twenty years inside schools, and his worry is one I’ve watched take shape from the other side: the things that actually set a kid up for the world are rarely the ones that show up on a transcript.

So in an economy where employers keep raising the experience bar, what does it mean now that we’re in the worst teen summer job market since 1948?

Here’s my take on what our kids are actually losing… and what we, as parents, can do about it.

What we’re really losing (it isn’t only the money)

The first job was never mostly about the money. It was the first place a kid had to show up on time when they’d rather sleep in. Get told they did it wrong and try again without falling apart. Handle a stranger having a bad day and not take it home. Be the reason a shift ran or didn’t.

You cannot lecture those things into a kid. I’ve tried. It does not work. They get built one way: by real reps, with real stakes, accountable to someone who isn’t you.

And there’s a second loss, the one that college senior named without quite naming it: those reps don’t just build character, they compound into a real edge in the exact market he’s scared of.

Early work experience is one of the most reliable predictors of how a kid does later. In an OECD review of 47 long-term studies, 40 found that kids who worked while still in school had better employment as adults, with a 5–10% earnings bump common. That’s the cruel loop of this job market: employers are screening harder than ever for experience, right as the first rung that used to provide it gets pulled up.

That’s the muscle (and the head start) the disappearing summer job used to build for free. When the job market won’t do it, the job becomes ours to build on purpose. The good news: you don’t need an employer to do it. You need a real responsibility, a real other person, and the discipline not to rescue.

Here’s what that looks like, by age.

Elementary (roughly 6–10): one real job the family actually depends on

Not a sticker chart. Not “help out around the house.” One specific job that has a real consequence if it doesn’t happen, handed over completely. The trash and recycling. Feeding the dog. Setting the table every night.

Here’s what makes this more than busywork. A job your kid owns end to end (remembering it’s trash night, breaking it into steps, doing it when no one’s reminding them) runs on exactly the part of the brain that’s still under construction at this age: executive function. The planning, the holding-it-in-mind, the follow-through. It’s the same machinery they’ll lean on for homework, for a first boss, for all of it. A 2022 study in the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal found that kids who did regular chores scored higher on executive-function measures like working memory and self-control, even after accounting for age. The dishes aren’t the point. The wiring underneath them is.

And one design detail matters more than you’d guess: make it count for someone besides the kid. The version that builds the most isn’t tidying their own room. It’s the job the whole family actually relies on, where someone else feels it when the work doesn’t happen.

So pick one, give it away for real, and then (this is the hard part) stop managing it.

Try this when you hand it over:

“Starting this week, the recycling is your job. Not mine. I’m not going to remind you. If it doesn’t make it to the curb, it piles up in the garage until next week. That part’s on you now.”

And then the rep that actually builds the muscle is the one most of us blow: the week they forget and it piles up. Don’t lecture, and don’t quietly do it yourself at 10pm.

“Yeah, that’s annoying. It’s still your job. Next week’s another shot.”

The pile in the garage teaches more than you can. Let it.

Middle school (roughly 11–13): someone outside the family who counts on them

This is the age to get your kid under the authority of an adult who isn’t you, on a schedule, with someone real depending on them showing up.

A mother’s helper gig for a family down the street. Dog-walking on set days for a neighbor. A counselor-in-training. A standing volunteer shift at the library, the food pantry, a community garden. It doesn’t have to pay. It has to be real, recurring, and supervised by someone who isn’t you.

That “someone who isn’t you” part matters more than you’d think. Kids this age who have an important non-parental adult in their corner (a coach, a boss, a neighbor, a youth leader) consistently do better: a 2018 meta-analysis found these natural-mentoring relationships linked to better academic, social-emotional, and behavioral outcomes, and other longitudinal work ties them to higher self-esteem and lower risk-taking. A standing responsibility is one of the most natural ways that relationship forms. The competency underneath isn’t really “dog-walking.” It’s learning to be reliable for someone outside your own family, and discovering you matter to them.

There’s a payoff here that loops back to that college senior’s worry: prosocial habits in early adolescence (volunteering, helping, being counted on) predict more than warm feelings. A 2025 study found that prosocial behavior between ages 12 and 17 was associated with better economic outcomes (employment, income, financial independence) in young adulthood. Being useful to other people is, it turns out, also how a kid becomes employable.

And where you can, make them do the asking. The ask is half the rep, and it’s its own skill: self-advocacy, the thing that’s miserable to teach and priceless to have.

Try this (standing next to them, not for them):

“Go knock on Ms. Rivera’s door and ask if she still needs help with the dogs this summer. I’ll be right here on the sidewalk. But you do the asking, and you tell her which days you can commit to.”

The point isn’t the dogs. It’s that a kid who learns “another adult is counting on me, and I said I’d be there” at twelve walks into everything that comes next already knowing how to be reliable.

High school (roughly 14–17): manufacture the equivalent of the job

If the paid job doesn’t land (and this year, for a lot of kids, it won’t), build the thing the job would have been. A volunteer role or internship with a real supervisor, set hours, and actual stakes. Reffing or coaching younger kids. A recurring gig people pay for and rely on, mowing, tutoring, babysitting on a schedule.

Here, what you build matters more than how many hours it eats. The competency this stage grows is self-efficacy: the earned belief “I can handle a hard thing and follow through,” the engine of perseverance everywhere else. Jeylan Mortimer’s decades-long Youth Development Study found that it’s the quality of a teen’s work, the learning, the clear expectations, the real responsibility, that builds self-efficacy and lasting work values, not the number of hours clocked. So you’re not after a grind. You’re after a role with a real boss, a real task, and enough stakes that doing it badly has a consequence.

The non-negotiables: a boss who isn’t you, a schedule they can’t quietly skip, and a real consequence when they no-show.

And when they hit a wall (the email no one answered, the rejection), resist the call you could make. Hand them the follow-up instead. The follow-up is its own muscle: the hardest, most adult skill in the bunch, which is staying in a thing after the first no.

Try this:

“I could probably make a call here. But the version of this that actually helps you is the one where you follow up yourself. Want to sit down and draft the email together? You send it.”

That conversation is worth more than the shift you could have engineered for them.

The part that makes this matter more, not less

Here’s the bigger picture. As AI gets better at the cognitive busywork (the essay, the cover letter, the first draft of nearly everything), the things it can’t hand your kid become the whole ballgame. A chatbot can write the job application. It cannot show up for the shift. It cannot be corrected and try again. It cannot be the person someone else is depending on.

You don’t need a hiring manager to start. Pick one thing someone other than you genuinely depends on, hand it all the way over, and do the hard part: don’t rescue it.

Then hit reply and tell me what you handed over (and how hard it was not to step in). I read every one.

Here’s to raising kids who know how to be counted on.
Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

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In the Room #10 | ~5–6-min read

Happy Saturday.

I write a lot about AI here, because it’s the thing changing fastest and the thing parents have the least solidified map for. But I want this “In The Room” series to be about sharing a weekly roundup of the three most relevant things happening in the K-12 sector that you should know about. Why? Because they’ll give you context and hopefully help you directly or indirectly support your kiddo, engage with your school, or understand the world our kids are growing up in.

So, this week the news that actually stopped me has nothing to do with chatbots. Rather, they’re three separate pieces about national test scores, teen sleep, and teen summer jobs, that together are a quiet reminder of something I learned a long time ago in schools: the things that most determine how a kid’s year goes are rarely the things making headlines.

So here are three reads, zero of them about AI.

The new Nation’s Report Card: younger kids recover, teens stall
NAEP / National Center for Education Statistics, released June 10, 2026 · reporting via Chalkbeat and NBC News

The country’s long-running national test came out Wednesday, and the headline is genuinely split. Nine-year-olds are climbing back — up four points in both reading and math since 2022, with the lowest-performing kids making the biggest gains. That’s real, and it’s good news. But thirteen-year-olds didn’t move at all, and they’re still sitting below where they were before the pandemic. The recovery is happening for the little ones and stalling out right at the middle-school line.

But there’s another part I want to highlight...because it came from the same release and it explains a lot. They also asked kids how often they read for fun. The share of thirteen-year-olds who read for pleasure almost every day has fallen to about 14% — down by nearly half since 2012. For nine-year-olds it dropped from 53% to 37%. And kids who read for fun score meaningfully higher on the test. The commissioner’s own framing was that this decline started back in 2012, so “this isn’t just a pandemic story.”

I’ve sat in enough data meetings to tell you how this gets interpreted on the inside: the stall and the reading collapse are the same finding wearing two hats. Reading for pleasure is where reading muscle actually gets built — quietly, by choice, for no grade. The kids who stop doing it around middle school are the kids whose scores flatlined at that point.

For you: Protect reading for pleasure as its own thing this summer — unassigned, untracked, not for points. Let them read “junk.” Graphic novels, the same series five times, the cereal box. A kid reading for fun is building the thing the test measures, sideways, without either of you trying. That’s the rare win that feels like nothing BUT counts as everything.

Teen sleep just hit a record low
Education Week · May 19, 2026 · on a new American Academy of Pediatrics report

A new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that the share of teens getting at least seven hours of sleep a night is now the lowest it’s been in three decades of tracking. Not a little low. Lowest on record. And the researchers are blunt about the cost: short sleep hits how teens hold onto what they learn, how much they can actually get done, and how they manage their own emotions and stress.

If you’ve read me for a while, you know I’m always going on about “durable skills” — focus, self-regulation, judgment, coachability. Here’s the unglamorous truth underneath all of it: every one of those capabilities runs on sleep. A tired teen isn’t a less-capable teen by nature; they’re a capable teen running on a dead battery. Sleep is upstream of nearly everything we say we want for them.

For you: Summer is when sleep either gets repaid or gets wrecked. The highest-leverage move I know costs nothing — a roughly consistent bedtime window, and the phone charging somewhere that isn’t the bedroom. (Yours too, honestly. I recently committed to a “no phone in bed” promise and it’s already paying dividends!)

The worst teen summer job market since 1948
Fortune · June 2, 2026 (corroborated by CBS News and ABC News)

Teens are walking into the toughest summer hiring market since the government started tracking it in 1948. Retail hiring of teenagers is down about 30% from last year. Kids are applying to twenty places and hearing back from none. The classic first job — bagging groceries, scooping ice cream, lifeguarding — is getting squeezed by automation, by tariffs and costs, and by older workers staying in roles teens used to fill.

Quick note so this doesn’t read like a repeat: a couple of weeks ago I wrote about the college graduate’s entry-level job disappearing. This is the rung below that — the sixteen-year-old’s first job. And I think it’s the bigger loss, honestly, because that first job is where a whole generation built the durable skills no class teaches. Showing up on time when you’d rather not, being told you did it wrong and trying again, and handling a stranger having a bad day. You can’t lecture those into a kid. They get built by experience, with someone other than you depending on them.

For you: If the paid job doesn’t come through, build the reps another way. A standing responsibility a neighbor relies on, a volunteer shift with a real supervisor, watching younger kids for a family down the street.

Three reads, and not a chatbot among them. That’s the reminder I needed this week, and maybe you do too: underneath all the noise about the technology, the things that decide how your kid’s year goes are still the oldest ones. Sleep. Reading. Real responsibility. You have more say over those than over almost anything in the news.

On Tuesday I’ll take the summer-job read further — what I’d actually do to build that “accountable to someone else” muscle at home, by age, when the job market won’t do it for you. If you’ve found a good version of this for your kid, hit reply and tell me. The best ideas in this newsletter come from you.

See you Tuesday.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

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~8-min read

As my youngest gets ready to start middle school, I keep finding myself telling other moms of incoming sixth-graders the same thing about what it was like with my oldest. “Middle school was hard. There were stretches where I didn’t recognize her, and I couldn’t tell if I was failing her or she was just being twelve.”

I spent years inside middle schools (including a short stint as a middle school math teacher), and one line came up in almost every planning meeting I sat in: the kid who walks in the door in sixth grade is not the kid who walks out in eighth. We built whole systems around that fact, and we still got it wrong, because the change isn’t just behavioral. It’s structural… and so much of it is happening in the adolescent brain, on a timeline your kid didn’t choose and can’t speed up.

And this is the first generation going through that exact window with a chatbot in their pocket.

So let me walk through what’s actually shifting, where AI lands on top of it, and the one move that changes how you parent both.

Shift 1: The brakes aren’t installed yet (and that’s normal)

Here’s the part the brain science has actually settled.

Two parts of your kid’s brain grow up on different schedules, and in early adolescence they fall out of sync.

The first is the wanting part: the reward system, run by a structure that’s deep in your brain called the ventral striatum and the dopamine that fuels it. Think of it as the engine of motivation, the part that lights up when something feels good or exciting. At puberty, a wave of hormones retunes this engine so it runs hotter than it ever will again, and it gets especially tuned to social rewards: being liked, being noticed, being in on the thing, not being the one left out. (This is also when the amygdala, the brain’s emotion-and-alarm center, gets louder, which is part of why feelings at this age land so big and so fast.)

The second part is the brakes: the prefrontal cortex, right behind the forehead. It’s the part that pauses, thinks a step ahead, weighs the consequences, and says “maybe not.” And it’s the one that’s slow to develop, wiring and strengthening itself all the way into the mid-twenties.

Laurence Steinberg’s dual-systems research describes the gap between these two as widest from about age twelve to seventeen. In plain terms: the gas pedal works… but the brakes aren’t done being built yet.

That’s why the kid who could stop herself from a bad idea at ten suddenly can’t at twelve. It isn’t a character flaw or your parenting falling apart. It’s a brain still under construction. So for a few years, your job isn’t to assume the brakes are there. It’s to be the brakes, out loud, until hers catch up.

Try this (when she’s worked up and about to react):

“You don’t have to decide anything right now. Let’s just sit with it for ten minutes. Then you can tell me what you want to do.”

You’re not fixing the problem; you’re simply showing her the pause her brain can’t make on its own yet.

Shift 2: AI landed exactly where the wiring is rawest

Now put a chatbot into that construction zone.

A 2026 Common Sense Media report found that 81% of nine-to-twelve-year-olds are already using generative AI, and nearly a quarter use it every day. More than a third of the tweens and teens who use it have talked to a chatbot about their feelings or a personal problem. And only about a third of them understood that AI can’t reliably tell fact from fiction.

(Side note: if you want to actually keep up with this as the research lands, check out Jacqueline Nesi, a Brown psychologist who helped write the APA’s guidance on adolescents and tech. She writes Techno Sapiens here on Substack, and it’s the clearest running translation of the kids-and-AI data I’ve found. Worth a subscribe.)

AI is frictionless, always awake, endlessly patient, and built to keep you engaged. It drops straight onto the emotional system that’s running hot and the judgment system that isn’t finished. The real risk at this age was never that your kid copies a homework answer. Rather, it was that a tool which can do the hard cognitive and emotional work for her arrives at the precise moment her brain is supposed to be building the muscles to do that work herself.

So the parent move here isn’t to ban the tool; it’s to make the line visible. Why? A ban barely works at this age, for one simple reason: the tool isn’t only at your house. It’s on her friends’ phones, baked into the apps she already has, and waiting for her at school. Forbidding it at home doesn’t take AI out of her life. It just moves her use somewhere you can’t see, which is the one place you can’t help her think it through.

But the deeper reason goes back to the brain. The whole job of these years is to build her judgment, the brake, the inner voice that asks “wait, is this a good idea?” A rule you enforce from the outside does that thinking for her, so the brake never gets built in her. Then the day the rule isn’t there (a friend’s house, age sixteen, a college dorm), she has nothing of her own to reach for. This is NOT an argument against limits. Set whatever limits fit your family. It’s that limits by themselves don’t grow anything. The thing that actually builds the brake is the small, repeated, out-loud question: which side of the line is this? That’s slower than a ban. It’s also the part that stays with her.

Try this (when you see her reach for it):

“Before you ask it, one quick question: do you want the AI to help you do this, or to do it for you? Both are okay sometimes. I just want to know which one this is.”

You’re not policing. You’re handing her the one question her own brain isn’t reliably asking yet.

Shift 3: The flip that changes everything

Here’s where most of the advice goes wrong.

Before I say it, one thing I want to name out loud, because it gets missed: where you set the dial on AI is yours to set. Some of you are keeping it on a short leash for a good while longer. Some of you are already handing over more rope. Some of you have one kid in each camp under the same roof. I’m not here to hand you the right number. Families are different, kids are different, and the same kid needs a different answer at eleven than she will at fourteen. (Anyone who tells you there’s one correct setting hasn’t met enough actual kids.)

So this isn’t an argument about how much access to allow. It’s an argument about timing. And timing is where the advice usually goes sideways.

The instinct, once the brain part clicks, is to defer the whole thing. Keep it away, don’t teach it yet, wait until she’s older and the brakes are in and it all feels “safe.” I understand the pull. But it gets the timing exactly backwards.

The window where the brain is most plastic, most actively wiring judgment and self-control, is the same window the tool is showing up in. You don’t get to run those on separate tracks. And here’s the part that resolves the dial question: you can hold a firm line on access and still be teaching judgment the whole time. Restricting when she drives and teaching her how to drive are not the same axis. A tight-leash family and a loose-leash family can be doing the identical thing that actually matters, which is building the judgment now, out loud, while the wiring is still soft enough to shape. You just don’t wait for the brakes to finish before the driving lessons start.

That’s the through-line under everything I write here, and it lands hardest at this exact age: durable skills and AI fluency aren’t two separate parenting projects. They’re one bet. A kid who can use AI but never built her own judgment is fragile. A kid with great judgment who’s scared of the tool is unprepared. The kids who’ll be fine are the ones who build both at once, in the same years, with the same conversations.

Try this (the line that teaches the test, not the rule):

“The question I want you carrying isn’t ‘am I allowed to use this.’ It’s ‘is this building something in me, or doing it for me?’ If you can answer that honestly, you mostly don’t need me to make the rule.”

That single distinction (building vs. doing-for) is the durable skill. Not knowing how to prompt a chatbot. Knowing what it’s for in a given moment, and being honest with yourself about which side of the line you’re on. If she’s fluent in that by the time the stakes are real, you’ve done the actual work.

The honest bottom line

You don’t need to be a neuroscientist, and you definitely don’t need to white-knuckle the next three years. Middle school feels like the floor falling out partly because it’s invisible. Once you can see it (the brakes still building, the tool landing right on the soft spot, the chance to build both at once), it stops being a crisis and starts being a window. A short one, but a real one.

Pick one of the three shifts. Just one. Be the pause this week, or make the line visible once, or say the building-vs.-doing-for sentence at dinner. You don’t have to run all three. You have to start one.

Here’s to raising kids whose brakes, and whose judgment, come in right on time.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

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In the Room #9 | ~6-min read

I’ve sat in a number of rooms where a district tried to write its “Portrait of a Graduate.” It’s the document that’s supposed to name what a kid should walk across the stage already knowing how to do. And it’s almost never about content. The lists I helped argue over had words like critical thinking, communication, collaboration, adaptability, self-direction. Not one of them was a fact you could look up. They were the things we hoped 13 years had built into a kid by the time we handed them a diploma.

I keep thinking about those lists this month, because it’s graduation season, and the class of 2026 is walking into a job market that’s testing exactly those words in real time.

Three reads this week. First, the fear, named honestly (because pretending it’s nothing doesn’t help anyone). Second, what’s actually happening to the first job, which is more specific and more workable than the panic suggests. And last, the part that’s squarely in your hands, even if your kid is in sixth grade and graduation feels like someone else’s problem.

Parents Fear AI, But the Risk to Families Is Not Evenly Distributed
Capita · December 12, 2025 · ~7-min read

Start with the fear, because you’re probably carrying some version of it. An October 2025 survey from Capita and YouGov found that only 19% of parents with kids under 12 believe AI will improve their family’s long-term economic security. Nearly half, 44%, think it’ll make things worse.

There’s a line in the article that I want to highlight for the moms specifically... only 13% of mothers think AI will help their family’s economic future, and 45% see it as a threat to their financial well-being. Capita doesn’t read that as moms being alarmist. They read it as informed. Women are over-represented in exactly the office and administrative roles most exposed to AI, so a mother looking at this and feeling uneasy isn’t catastrophizing; she’s doing the math.

What I appreciate about this piece is that it treats parent worry as a form of knowledge, not a problem to be talked out of. You’re allowed to be concerned. The question is what you do with the concern, and the next two reads are about that.

For you: Read this one when you have a quiet ten minutes, not at 11pm. It names a fear a lot of us carry silently and rarely say out loud to one another. Naming it is the first step to doing something useful with it instead of just absorbing it.

How AI Broke the Entry-Level Job
Nate Weisberg, Washington Monthly · May 29, 2026 · ~6-min read

This is the read that turned my own worry into something I could actually act on. Its argument is careful: AI is not erasing white-collar work. Since ChatGPT arrived in 2022, the economy added about 3 million white-collar jobs. The thing that’s breaking is narrower and more specific. It’s the first rung.

Here’s what’s happening. The easy part of an entry-level job (i.e., the first-pass research, the formatting, the summarizing, the grunt work a 22-year-old used to cut their teeth on) is the part AI does best, and so that work is getting absorbed by AI. And what’s left is the harder part: judgment, analysis, knowing when the machine is wrong. Employers now want entry-level applicants who already have experience.

The Strada Institute also asked nearly 1,500 executives what skills they want most in new graduates (for these entry-level roles). The top of the list? Critical thinking, then communication, collaboration, workplace readiness, and self-management…but they want more than just a transcript, they want evidence of these skills in practice (in internships or other industry experiences).

So, what does this all mean? It means that AI is impacting entry level jobs. And what matters more than ever are the durable skills (i.e., critical thinking, communications, collaboration) that AI can’t ever replace.

For you: This is the read I’d hand a parent who’s spiraling about AI and jobs. It reframes the whole thing. The bet isn’t “pick an AI-proof major.” The bet is the judgment, the communication, and the ability to do something real with what you know. Those don’t show up on a report card, and they don’t get built the week before a job interview. They get built over years.

Tips for parents: Raising resilient learners in an AI world
Rebecca Winthrop and Emma Venetis, Brookings Institution · Updated April 27, 2026 · ~5-min read

So if the skills that hold their value are the human ones, and they take years to build, where does a parent actually start? Rebecca Winthrop’s team at Brookings built the most concrete answer I’ve seen.

It’s a set of free tip sheets for parents of kids ages 10 to 14, organized around ten skills they’re calling the core of a resilient learner: critical thinking, persistence through challenges, human judgment, creativity, social skills, active engagement, and a few more. Each one comes with a short explainer, what to watch for as your kid uses AI, and conversation starters you can actually use at the dinner table. Not theory. Practices.

Two of the sheets are doing the heaviest lifting for me. One is persistence through challenges, which they frame as “the power of productive struggle,” the thing that quietly erodes when a kid can offload every hard moment to a chatbot. The other is human judgment, keeping the kid in the driver’s seat instead of the tool. Read those two next to the Washington Monthly piece and you’ll see it: the muscle employers want at 22 is the muscle Winthrop is asking you to protect at 11.

The reason this lands for me is that 10 to 14 is the window. It’s early enough that the habits are still forming and late enough that the AI is already in the house. You’re not preparing your kid for a far-off job market. You’re building the thing the job market, and frankly the rest of their life, is going to ask for.

For you: Pick one tip sheet, the skill you’re most worried about, and download it this weekend. Try one conversation starter. You won’t build a durable skill in one sit-down lecture. In truth, you’ll build it in a hundred small moments, and this gives you the words for a few of them.

A note on what these three add up to. The fear in the first read is real, and the second read tells you why: the bottom rung is genuinely harder to reach. But the same read tells you what’s holding its value, and the third tells you how to build it, starting now, at home, in the years before any of this is urgent.

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. None of this is really new. Schools have been writing those durable skills onto Portrait-of-a-Graduate posters for a decade. We’ve always known these were the things that mattered most. What AI did was call the bluff. It got good enough at the easy, lookup-able, fill-in-the-worksheet stuff that the only things left with real value are the human ones we always said we cared about and didn’t always prioritize. The institutions are catching up to that now. You don’t have to wait for them. The afternoons where your kid has to think something through without a shortcut, finish something hard, make a real decision: that’s the work. It’s been the work the whole time.

Hit reply and tell me one durable skill you’re trying to build in your kid this summer, or one you wish someone had built in you. I read every reply.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

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A few earlier pieces if this one landed:

• The skill your kid learns at practice that school never teaches · the durable-skills foundation underneath this whole post

• The homework AI can’t do for your kid · building vs. bypassing, the version that shows up in schoolwork

• Before you fill in the summer calendar... · where the building actually happens

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~5-min read

I used AI twice as a parent last week. Here’s exactly how.

Last Tuesday I was sitting at the kitchen island with my ninth grader’s course-selection sheet for tenth grade. AP this, accelerated that, the one elective that conflicts with the other one she wants, so many choices to consider.

And here’s the part that’s a little embarrassing to admit: I’ve sat in master-schedule meetings. I’ve helped build the very documents she was handing me. And I still felt the fog roll in.

The doctrine I keep preaching, pointed back at myself

I write a lot of words here about not waiting for your kid’s school to make your kid AI-literate. Don’t wait for the policy. Don’t wait for the permission slip. Get in there yourself.

It would be a little ridiculous of me to say all that and then wait around for someone to make me AI-fluent. Nobody’s coming to do that either. So I’ve stopped treating AI as the thing I’m warning you about and started treating it as a tool on my side of the table.

Not for my kids to use. For me to use, on behalf of my kids.

Here’s what that actually looked like last week.

Use #1: Making sense of the tenth-grade course selections

I didn’t ask AI to pick her classes. I asked it to help me understand the trade-offs so I could ask her better questions and give her better advice.

So, I opened up Claude and typed something close to this:

“My 9th grader is choosing 10th-grade courses. Her model school is a University of California school, and she’s taken these courses as a 9th grader. Research the state graduation requirements, her high school’s graduation requirements, and what she needs to be a competitive candidate as an out-of-state applicant for the University of California schools. Review her current 10th-grade course selections and recommend changes, including implications for junior and senior year. Feel free to provide me pathways to consider, questions to ask, and/or tradeoffs to consider.”

What came back wasn’t a fixed map. It was a back-and-forth that gave me a better understanding of the options available to her, the trade-offs to consider, and the questions I should ask her.

I started out using it by myself (in preparation for our conversation), and then I pulled it up as we started talking so that as she shared more information (like the fields that she was beginning to narrow in on or the program she wanted to potentially complete in junior year), we could use Claude together to see how that changed the different pathways open to her.

The conversation was still fully between my daughter and myself. But I was able to use AI to bring a more useful version of myself. Not the fogged-out version. The one who’d fully done her research.

Use #2: A study guide that builds understanding, not just answers

The second one was for my fifth grader, who is in that stretch of math where the concepts (not the arithmetic, the concepts) start to matter more than the right number at the bottom of the page. And I’ve started to notice that while she’s able to memorize the formulas long enough to pass the test, she doesn’t fully grasp ALL the mathematical concepts like she used to.

So, I asked AI to help me build a study guide for this summer. But I was specific about the kind I wanted... because I wanted a guide that asked her to explain the why behind the key concepts vs. just solving the problems. I wanted a guide that outlined the questions and pointed to the supplemental materials I needed at the table so that I could create the opportunity for her to share her thinking and if needed, help build her understanding.

What I got was something I could sit down and use with her that night. And the quiet win underneath it: I understood the concepts a little better myself, which meant I could follow her reasoning instead of just checking her work.

The line that runs under both uses

Notice what I’m not doing in either of these. I’m NOT having AI do the thing for my kid. Instead, I’m using it to deepen the thinking... for both me and them.

That’s the whole game, and it’s the same line I want my kids to learn about AI: is this tool building something in me, or bypassing something in me?

When I use AI to understand the course sequence so I can ask my daughter sharper questions, it’s building. If I’d used it to just tell her what to take and shut the conversation down, it’d be bypassing. Same tool. Opposite posture.

That posture is the actual durable skill here. Not “knowing how to use AI.” Knowing what it’s for in a given moment, and being honest with yourself about which side of that line you’re on. If I want my kids fluent in that distinction by the time they’re making real decisions with these tools, I’d better be able to model it at my own kitchen table first.

And the AI my kid is using

For the record: my kids use it too. My ninth grader has asked to use Gemini to help her build a study guide for a test. My fifth grader is on supervised, curated use only.

The reason I can have a real conversation with either of them about how to use it well is that I’m not standing outside the thing they’re using. I’m in it. I know what it does because I use it. (You cannot referee a game you’ve never played. I’ve tried. It does not go well.)

The honest bottom line

You don’t need to become a power user. You don’t need a single tutorial. You need to open one of these tools (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, whichever) the next time you’re stuck on something for your kid, and ask it the way you’d ask a sharp friend who’d done the homework.

That’s it. That’s the whole on-ramp. Your fluency is the foundation for theirs, and it starts with one real question.

The experiment to run this week

Pick one parenting-logistics thing you’re a little fogged out on right now. The course sheet. The reading list. The thing the school sent home that you’ve read four times. Open a chat and ask it to help you understand, not decide.

Try this:

“Here’s [the thing]. Help me understand the real trade-offs so I can ask better questions. I’m not trying to optimize. I’m trying to understand what this actually asks of my kid.”

Then go have the conversation as the version of yourself who did the reading.

Reply and tell me what you asked it, and what surprised you. I’m building a short guide on exactly this (the actual tools, the actual prompts, the actual workflows, organized by what you’re trying to do), and the things you’re stuck on are what I want it to answer.

Here’s to being fluent enough to sit at the table.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

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If this resonated, you’ll also like:

• You already drew the line. — the diagnostic question to run in the moment your kid reaches for AI

• What I’d Actually Do #2: Ask your kid’s school about AI before summer ends — the four questions that put you upstream of next year’s policy

• Cheating is the door. This is the room. — three reads on how kids are actually using AI for school

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In the Room #8 | ~5-min read

I’ve sat in countless faculty meetings where teachers have been saying a version of the same thing for ten years. Kids are reading less. Kids who used to finish the book aren’t finishing the book. The seventh grader who would have torn through The Outsiders in 2013 needs scaffolds and check-ins to get through it in 2024. They don’t have a dataset, but they’re in the classrooms… and they know what they’re talking about.

This month, three universities put a name on what teachers have been talking about for the past decade: The reading recession. A team at Stanford, Harvard, and Dartmouth released a report on May 13 showing that reading test scores have been declining steadily since 2013 for eighth graders and 2015 for fourth graders, with only five states plus DC seeing meaningful growth coming out of the pandemic.

The pandemic didn’t cause it. The pandemic, in Harvard professor Thomas Kane’s words, was “the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion.”

Today’s three reads. First, an overview of the report. Second, one clinical psychologist’s case for the summer that builds the reading brain back. And last, the parenting move that turns out to be an important supplement.

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Kids are in a ‘reading recession,’ as test scores continue to decline CNN / Associated Press · May 13, 2026 · ~6-min read

This is the piece every parent will see a headline of this week. AP analyzed the new report from researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and Dartmouth covering test scores from third to eighth grade across 5,000+ districts in 38 states. Only five states plus DC saw meaningful reading growth from 2022 to 2025. Reading scores have been falling since 2013 for eighth graders and 2015 for fourth graders. Nationally, students are still nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic reading.

The line I want you to hold onto is from Thomas Kane (Harvard): “The pandemic was the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion.” The decline predates lockdown by seven years. One of the possible factors the researchers name in the AP piece is the rise of social media on smartphones and the corresponding drop in kids’ recreational reading.

The piece does name something hopeful. The states that turned it around (Louisiana, Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana) did one specific thing: they ordered schools to teach reading with phonics-based “science of reading” methods PLUS screen for dyslexia and coach teachers on it. Louisiana is the only state in the country whose reading scores beat pre-pandemic. So, what does that tell us? That it’s possible and we’ve know a general formula on how to do it. (It’s also worth nothing that, from from early 1990s through 2013, public school reading and math scores rose by more than two grade levels…. so there’s also alot of lessons that we can learn from those decades as well).

For you: Read the article and ask your team one question (if you haven’t yet): Is my kid reading on grade level? Not “how are they doing.” You may be surprised by what your teacher says when asked the specific question.

The Summer of Boredom Debbie Sorensen, “A Place To Loiter” · Updated June 11, 2025 · ~6-min read

Debbie Sorensen is a clinical psychologist, and co-host of Psychologists Off the Clock. She wrote this essay first in 2020 and updated it last June because the lesson outlasted the moment. The essay is about a year her family didn’t sign their kids up for anything. Seventy-nine unstructured days without camps, a schedule, or a theme… with two parents working from home and two kids ages 4 and 7 all on a small experiment in doing less.

The line worth pinning on the fridge is buried mid-essay: “My 7-year-old read chapter books in our hammock, learning the joy of reading to herself for pleasure.” That sentence is doing the work the CNN piece noted we needed more of. The kid who learns to want to read on a Tuesday afternoon in July is the kid the reading recession can’t touch.

Sorensen also says the harder thing out loud: the Summer of Boredom is hard. Her kids trashed the house, begged for TV, etc. And yet, looking back six years later, she says it was worth it anyway, and notes the through-line — her kids, now 10 and 13, can entertain themselves at home, ask for unstructured time when they’re over-scheduled, and know how to settle in with a book. The boredom did the building.

For you: Read it before you sign your kid up for one more thing this week. It’s not anti-camp. Sorensen ended up landing on a middle ground (two weeks of camp plus weeks of unstructured time). The piece is permission to leave gaps in the calendar that produce something nothing on the calendar can produce.

How ‘America’s worst mom’ redefined child independence Lois M. Collins, Deseret News · May 8, 2026 · ~9-min read

This one may be the most quietly important read of the three. Lois Collins traces the arc of the free-range parenting movement Lenore Skenazy started in 2008 (the year she let her 9-year-old ride the New York subway alone) up through where it sits now in 2026. Skenazy is one of the co-founders of Let Grow, the nonprofit she runs with Peter Gray (Boston College psychologist) and Jonathan Haidt. Their core claim, backed by Gray’s Journal of Pediatrics review, is that as kids’ opportunities for independence and free play have shrunk over decades, anxiety and depression have grown. Independence-building isn’t just nice. It’s a mental-health intervention.

Two interesting finds from the article. One, a University of Michigan Health poll found that more than 4 in 5 parents say independence is important for kids, and half of those same parents won’t let a 9- to 11-year-old visit a different aisle in a grocery store. Two-thirds won’t let them walk or bike to a friend’s house. Only 15% will let them go trick-or-treating with friends. The gap between what parents say they value and what parents actually allow is the actual problem.

Second, a Let Grow pilot study found that independence worked faster than cognitive behavioral therapy on childhood anxiety. Faster than the gold-standard clinical intervention. Just from being trusted with real-world tasks alone.

The phrase Skenazy uses for what’s gotten in our way is worst-first thinking. We assume the worst, so we say no to everything. Something happened at a library once, no library. Something happened at a park, no park. Read the piece for the phrase alone. It’s sharper than most parenting language out there.

For you: This is the read I’d hand you if I could only hand you one. The reading recession and the summer of boredom both run on the same precondition: stretches of time your kid spends choosing what to do, without you in the room. That’s the muscle Skenazy is asking you to let grow. So, read this one… and consider whether there’s an area or two you’d be willing to give your kid more independence in this summer.

A small note on what these three add up to. The reading recession started in 2013. The independence recession (my phrase, not theirs) probably started earlier and runs underneath it. The two are connected. Reading takes the same conditions independence takes: stretches of unsupervised time long enough that a kid has to choose what to do, and quiet enough that a book is one of the options. That isn’t summer camp. That’s the afternoon after camp ends, when nothing’s planned, and your kid is annoyed about it.

This is one of those weeks where the news names a thing teachers have been telling parents for ten years. The work now is parent-side. Most of what your kid needs from this summer isn’t on any list a school is sending home in the next two weeks. It’s in the long afternoons.

Hit reply if any of these landed, or with one place you’re going to leave a gap in the calendar this summer. I read every reply.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday. [Subscribe here.]

A few other things if you’re BORED :)

• Your kid needs a boring summer · the foundational summer piece this one extends

• Before you fill in the summer calendar... · the substantive companion to today’s roundup

• The skill your kid learns at practice that school never teaches · the durable-skills foundation underneath all of this

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~3-min read

I’ve sat in enough end-of-year meetings to know how the script goes. Reading levels. Math placements. The summer reading list. AI? Not on the script. That’s not your fault. Nobody updated it.

But the new script matters, and it has a window. This conversation belongs in May or June, not August. Teachers still have inboxes open. The fall schedule isn’t locked yet. Administrators are answering email instead of running an opening week.

Here’s why the window matters. And here’s what to actually say.

Why now and not in August

I’ve sat through a number of district meetings about AI in classrooms this past spring. The thing that struck me wasn’t the disagreement in the room. It was how much of the next school year’s AI approach was still being drafted in real time across these rooms. Not because these district leaders don’t care (because they do!), but because there are a thousand other things to do... AND the technology keeps moving... AND the policy cycle hasn’t caught up.

That’s not unique to any specific district. It’s simply the truth about the moment that we’re in together.

The institutions designed to figure this out for you, schools, regulators, researchers, textbook publishers, are all running years behind your 12-year-old. That’s not a moral failure. It’s a speed mismatch. AND it means that since schools are still drafting, the parents who ask questions this spring may be able to shape what gets built before August.

What I’d actually do: four questions to ask before summer ends

So, here’s what to actually do. Before school lets out, reach out to a teacher or a principal. Ask one or two of the following questions (not all four). You don’t need to schedule a meeting. You need a short email or one ten-minute hallway conversation at the end-of-year event you’re already going to.

Here are the questions. Pick the 1 or 2 that really speaks to you.

1. “What’s your school telling teachers right now about students using AI for schoolwork? Is there a policy in place yet, or are decisions being made teacher by teacher?”

This is the foundation question. The answer will tell you whether your kid is going into next year inside a coherent system or a patchwork one. Either answer is fine. Just know which one you’re walking into.

2. “If my kid uses AI for an assignment in the fall, how will they know whether it’s allowed for that specific assignment?”

This is the operational question. The hardest place for a kid to land is they didn’t know it wasn’t allowed. Schools are still working out how to communicate this clearly. Asking lets the school know that families need a signal a kid can actually use in the moment.

3. “Who’s drafting your AI approach for next year, and is there a way for parents to give input?”

This is the upstream question. It signals you want to be in the conversation, not just informed afterward. You may not get invited in. You’re not asking to be invited in. You’re putting a marker down that says the parents are paying attention to this one. That marker matters.

4. “Are there any AI tools or platforms my kid might be exposed to at school next year that you’d want me to be aware of as a parent?”

This is the line-of-sight question. You don’t need a list of every product. You need the school to know that you’d rather hear about it from them than discover it from your kid.

A word about how to send these

Email is fine. Hallway is fine. Don’t lead with a list of four. Lead with one, the one that matters most for your specific kid, and let the answer steer the next question.

If the answer to any of them is “I don’t know yet” or “we’re still figuring that out,” please know that’s likely a real answer (not a dodge).... and that’s ok! The honest answer this spring is that... a lot of schools genuinely don’t have it all figured out.... and as parents, we’re not trying to corner them. You’re just trying to be one of the parents whose questions push them to incorporate AI planning into the already loaded list of things to do this summer.

Reply to this email and tell me which question you asked, or which one you can’t quite bring yourself to send yet. I read every one of these, and the patterns are showing me something I want to write about.

Here’s to being one of the parents in the room.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

Subscribe now

If this resonated, you’ll also like:

• Cheating is the door. This is the room. — three reads on how kids are actually using AI for school

• You already drew the line. — the diagnostic question to run in the moment

• Before you fill in the summer calendar… — the summer planning post that started this thread

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In the Room #7 | ~4-min read

A mom I chatted with a few weeks ago told me what she’s actually worried about when it comes to AI and her daughter. It wasn’t cheating or homework. It was something that the school district AI conversations haven’t even started to discuss. Her daughter had started talking to an AI chatbot the way she’d talk to a friend, and this mom was worried about where the behavior may lead.

Today’s post is three reads that are starting, quietly, to back that up. A research report on what teens are actually doing with AI companions. A risk assessment of the AI chatbots already on your kid’s phone, co-authored by Common Sense and Stanford Medicine last fall. And one parenting voice I trust on this exact question. I want you to know what these three say before I come back to it on a Tuesday in a few weeks and write a longer piece.

Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions
Common Sense Media · July 16, 2025 · ~10-min read

This is the report most parents haven’t been handed yet, and it should be. Common Sense surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,060 U.S. teens ages 13–17 in spring 2025 about their use of “AI companions,” meaning chatbots designed for friendship or relationships (Character.AI, Replika, and the conversational mode of general tools like ChatGPT and Snapchat’s My AI). 72% had used one. 52% are regular users, meaning a few times a month or more. 34% are using one daily or multiple times a week. That alone is more than most of us assumed.

The numbers that stop me, though, are these. 33% of teens said they’ve discussed serious and important issues with an AI companion instead of with another person. 12% said they share things with AI they wouldn’t tell friends or family. And 31% said their conversations with AI companions were as satisfying or more satisfying than talking with real friends. Sit with the second one for a second. One in eight teens has built a confidant in their phone they wouldn’t trade for a human one.

For you: Read the toplines (the linked PDF on the report page is ~10 pages, very skimmable). Then ask your kid what they know about AI companions, and what their friends are using. You’re not asking to police; you’re asking to find out what’s happening in the rooms they’re in.

AI Chatbots for Mental Health Support: A Risk Assessment
Common Sense Media + Stanford Medicine Brainstorm Lab · November 14, 2025 · ~10-min read

If the first report is the kid-side picture, this one is the chatbot-side picture, and it was published four months after it. Common Sense partnered with Stanford Medicine’s Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation to test the four AI tools your kid is most likely to actually have access to: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Meta AI. The question they asked is the one that matters: when a teen comes to one of these tools in real emotional distress, does the tool know what it’s looking at, and does it respond safely? The headline finding is that the risk is “unacceptable.” None of the four passed.

The most important specific finding is the one buried under that headline. The chatbots performed somewhat better when researchers ran single, explicit prompts (”I’m thinking about hurting myself”). They performed dramatically worse in extended back-and-forth conversations, which is exactly the way teens actually use them. Safety guardrails degrade as the conversation gets longer. The chatbots missed signs of distress, gave sycophantic responses that reinforced harmful thinking, and built what the researchers called a “false sense of trust.” The recommendation is plain: teens should not use these tools for mental health advice or emotional support. Not a moral judgment. A safety finding.

For you: You don’t need to read the whole assessment. Read the executive summary on the linked page (two pages, three minutes) and look at the four-tool grid. If your kid has any of those four apps on their phone, the grid tells you what’s been tested and what failed.

Kids are already thinking critically about AI
Devorah Heitner, Mentoring Kids in a Connected World · October 1, 2025 · ~6-min read

Devorah is one of the parent voices I trust most on the inside-the-home version of this conversation. She has a PhD from Northwestern, wrote Growing Up in Public, and has been working with families on tech and adolescence for years. Her piece sits next to the CSM data in an interesting way. The data tells us a lot of teens are turning to AI for serious conversations. Devorah’s reporting from her own work with kids tells us that those same teens are often more skeptical of AI than the adults around them assume.

Both of those things are true. The kids using AI most are also the kids most worried about it; we already saw that in last week’s RAND read on critical thinking. Devorah’s piece is the parent-side companion. Her core move is mentor, not monitor. The kid is not going to be saved by a content filter. They are going to be saved by an adult in their life who has spent ten unhurried minutes asking what they actually use AI for and what’s weird about it. That adult is you. The job is not to forbid the chatbot; the job is to be the more interesting conversation.

For you: Read this one before Tuesday. It’s the warmth you need after the first two reads. And it’s the bridge into the way I want to write about this topic in Raise Ready going forward, which is: protective without being panicked, clear without being preachy, and always pointing back to what your kid actually needs from you in the room.

A small note on what these three add up to. We’ve heard a lot about cheating and a lot about screen time. The quieter pattern moving underneath both of those is the one most of us haven’t been told about yet: AI is starting to step into the emotional places our kids used to go to other people for. The research is naming it. The medical institutions are starting to formally weigh in. The parenting voices worth trusting are circling it. Almost no one is saying it to parents in plain language.

I’ll come back to this on a Tuesday in June and write the substantive piece. What to actually watch for at your house. What to actually say. What to do about the apps already on your kid’s phone that are quietly doing this work. For now, today’s three reads are the heads-up.

Hit reply if any of these landed, or if you have a question you want me to take into the June Tuesday piece. I read every reply.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

Subscribe now

If this resonated, you’ll also like:

• What I’d Actually Do #1: Drawing the line in the moment · four AI moments to be ready for before summer hits

• Five conversations are happening about your kid and AI. You’re probably only in one. · the parent-fluency conversation no one’s having with you

• What my daughter asked about AI, and what I actually said · the version of this conversation that started it all

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~5-min read

The “just talk to your kid about it” advice you grew up on wasn’t built for the conversation where your kid is already using AI when you walk into the room. It’s not your fault. Nobody handed you a script for that one.

I’ve sat in enough classrooms and family rooms to know that the AI moments don’t happen the way the policy debates think they will. They don’t happen at a family meeting. They happen at 9pm when your kid is finishing a thank-you note. They happen on the way home from a friend’s house when your kid is struggling to repair a broken friendship. They happen in the seat next to you in the car when your kid asks a question you didn’t expect them to ask.

Last Tuesday I wrote about drawing the line on AI. The companion workbook gave you a way to do that on paper, before any AI moment hit. This week is about what happens when the AI moment hits anyway.

One mom’s worry: What to say when the AI moment hits

A mom I talked to last week, who knows AI better than almost anyone I know, named one specific AI app that she was worried about for her kid. Not because the app is obviously bad. Because her kid hadn’t found it yet, and she didn’t know what she was going to say in the moment if her kid did.

“I know where to draw the line,” she said. “But I don’t know what to say to her when she finds it.”

She knows where her line is, but she doesn’t have the words to enforce the line. That’s the gap this post is trying to close.

That AI moment with your kid will be one or two seconds long. What you say in those two seconds is the parenting move, and you don’t get to figure it out after. The line, the values, the actual words have to live in your head before the moment hits.

So here are four of the moments that are coming this summer, with the script I’d actually use.

1. The “Use AI to offload thinking” moment.

Your kid uses AI to write a quick thank-you note to a grandparent or a quick email to a coach. Something seemingly small and low-stakes.

Run the practice-vs-pass test in your head. (Quick reminder: practice = your kid is building a skill; pass = AI is doing the work for them.) AI writing the thank-you note is a pass. What did they bypass? In the case of the thank-you note, sitting down to think about what they appreciated about their grandparent and then figuring out how to put it into their own words.

It’s a small pass, not a five-alarm one. But it’s still worth thirty seconds to name what got skipped, because thank-you notes are where kids practice the muscle they’ll need for the bigger moments of showing gratitude... and expressing what they mean.

So, try a version of this:
“That note was for Grandma. She’s going to be more excited to hear something you actually came up with, even if it’s two sentences. Can you give it one try yourself before letting AI do it?”

Two things land at once. You’re not banning the tool. You’re naming what the moment was actually about. That’s a much more durable lesson than put down the phone.

2. The “Use AI to offload feelings” moment.

Your kid is in a fight with a friend, a sibling, or you... and you catch them asking AI what to say.

This is the clearest pass in the rulebook. Why? Because the work that needs to happen is your kid feeling what they feel, figuring out what they want to say, and being willing to say it to the actual person. Asking AI for the right words and the right moves strips them of the practice they need to build those skills themselves.

So, try a version of this:
“I get that this feels easier to do with the screen, but part of being a good friend is actually learning how to have these conversations, even if they aren’t perfect. I’d rather you mess up the words yourself than have AI get them right for you.”

If your kid pushes back, “but my message will be better with AI,” the answer is yes, and that’s why this matters. The “better” version isn’t theirs. Your friend won’t hear from your kid; they’ll hear from the screen. That’s the part that breaks the thing the message was for.

3. The “Another kid showed me an app” moment.

Your kid comes home and tells you about an AI tool a friend uses. Specific cases that are out there right now: Character.ai (AI companions you can talk to like a therapist or a friend), Snapchat’s MyAI (the always-there AI built into the app most kids already have), or any of the AI girlfriend / boyfriend apps that are aggressively marketed to teens.

This is the moment a lot of parents brace for, but fight against that urge. Stay in the moment and learn what your kid already saw before you decide what to say about it.

So, try a version of this:
“I want to hear what they showed you. I’m not going to be mad about you having seen it. Tell me what felt fun or interesting about it, and then I want to tell you the part I’d want you to know before you used it yourself.”

You’re not closing the door. You’re keeping the door open so the next conversation happens with you too. Which is the only way you stay in the next moment, and the one after.

And if the app is one of the emotional-companion ones, that’s where the line gets quieter and firmer. “The thing this app does is the thing I want you to be able to do with a person. Not because the app is bad, but because that skill is one I want you to have for the rest of your life. The skill is feeling something, being uncomfortable, and getting through it with a person who can actually be there. AI can’t do that part.”

4. The “AI was wrong” moment.

Your kid uses AI for something, homework, a question, a story, and the AI is confidently wrong. Catch this one early. It’s the cheapest AI literacy lesson available and you don’t even have to engineer it. It happens on its own, all the time.

So, try a version of this:
“This is the most important part of using AI well. It sounds confident whether it’s right or wrong. Your job is to use your brain to check it, every time. That’s not optional.”

What makes this moment so useful is that the lesson isn’t about AI. It’s about your kid’s relationship to their own thinking. Once they see that AI can sound completely sure and be completely wrong, the question stops being what did the AI say and starts being what do I think. That’s a skill they need with or without AI in the room.

The advice you keep hearing misses the moment

The two pieces of advice you’re hearing right now, ban it and embrace it, both miss the moment your kid is actually in. The moment doesn’t have a policy in it. The moment has your kid in it, looking at you, with two seconds before someone says something.

No by itself is an exit. Fine, do what you want is the same exit going the other direction. Neither one is a parent. The parent move is staying in the moment, asking the practice-vs-pass question out loud, and giving your kid the one or two sentences they can take into the next moment without you.

That’s not a louder argument. It’s a sharper one. You don’t have to win the AI debate. You have to stay in your kid’s specific moment with them.

The honest bottom line

You won’t have a script for every moment. The school won’t. The AI company definitely won’t. What you have is the values you’ve already named, your kid in front of you, and a couple of sentences that fit in two seconds. That’s enough.

The summer is going to give you more of these moments than the school year did. Your kid will be home, the friend group will be different, the supervision will be lighter, and AI will be in more of the in-between moments than it’s been all year. Pre-loading three or four scripts now is the cheapest preparation move on the table.

Reply to this email with the moment you’re most worried about. I’ll write the script for it if I haven’t already, and the answer will probably show up in a future Tuesday post.

Here’s to staying in the moment with them.

Monica

P.S. — If you missed last Tuesday, the practice-vs-pass diagnostic is the underlying move all four scripts above run on. The companion workbook is the 20-minute version of doing it on paper before any of these moments hit.

If the AI piece of this is what’s sitting with you for the longer haul, that’s exactly why I’m building the Raise Ready AI tool. The version of “what do I say when my kid does X with AI” that’s specific to your kid, the year they’re in, and the tools that are showing up in their life. The waitlist is open at raisereadymoms.com.

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

If this resonated, you’ll also like:

• You already drew the line. — the practice-vs-pass diagnostic this post runs on

• Drawing the Line — the companion workbook — 20 minutes, two doors, one line on paper

• The homework AI can’t do for your kid — when AI is doing the work vs. when it’s helping your kid think

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In the Room #6 | ~4-min read

When I talk with moms about AI and their kids, the first worry they mention is almost always the same one: cheating. The district AI conversations I sit in on also start in the same place, for the same reason. A Pew survey of U.S. teens last fall found that 59% of teens think AI cheating is a regular occurrence at their school. About a third say it happens extremely or very often. The kids themselves are telling us this is normal now.

Cheating is the door almost everyone starts with... when talking about AI for schools.

Today’s post is what’s behind that door. It’s meant to help you see how kids are actually using AI for school, from both the student and the teacher sides. Please know that the data below is a snapshot... and that usage has been shifting fast. But these three reads should give you a sense of what’s happening right now, so you can make an informed decision about what you’re comfortable with and where your line is... when it comes to your kiddo.

More Students Use AI for Homework, and More Believe It Harms Critical Thinking
RAND · March 17, 2026 · ~12-min read

This report shares findings from a survey of 1,214 kids ages 12 to 29 in December 2025. The headline finding is simple; almost two-thirds of students are now using AI for homework, a big increase from the last survey in May. Students also increasingly believe “the more students use AI for their schoolwork, the more it will harm their critical thinking skills” with two-thirds of kids now believe AI is bad for their thinking.

Sit with that for a minute. The kids using AI more than ever are also telling adults that it’s hurting them more than ever. There’s no confusion there.

For you: Ask your kid if they use AI for homework, and if so, how. Compare that to what you’re comfortable with. (Not sure about your line? Use the workbook from Tuesday’s post.)

Majority of High School Students Use Generative AI for Schoolwork
College Board Research · October 6, 2025 · ~5-min read

If RAND is the wide-angle lens (middle school through college), College Board is the close-up on high schoolers. Their research shows the percent of high schoolers using AI for schoolwork at 84%. That isn’t “kids who’ve tried it,” it’s kids using it for assignments. The use cases split roughly into four areas: brainstorming ideas, editing or revising essays, conducting research and finding sources, and getting explanations of things they got stuck on. Half of high schoolers say they’re doing the first three. ChatGPT is the tool for about two thirds of them.

The most interesting finding in the piece is students’ mixed perceptions about AI use. On the one hand, 85% agree that students can benefit from using AI to enhance their learning. On the other hand, two-thirds agree or strongly agree that using AI too much will make them dependent and less intelligent (BigFuture AI Student Survey, October 2024).

For you: Ask your kid which of the four buckets they’ve used AI for in the last month. Don’t grade the answer. Then ask them if they’re worried about anything related to AI. Again, just listen.

Phase II: What Needs to Come Next in the AI in Education Conversation
Stephen Fitzpatrick, Teaching in the Age of AI · January 11, 2026 · ~7-min read

Fitzy is a high school history teacher writing one of the most thoughtful teacher-voice Substacks in this space. His argument: Phase I of the AI-in-schools conversation, the part dominated by detection panic, cheating headlines, and reactive policy, is starting to wind down. The detection arms race is futile. Phase II has to be about the conditions for learning. The question that actually matters isn’t was AI involved. It’s were the conditions for learning met? Same question good teachers have always asked. Different specifics under it now.

The skills he names as the ones that matter most going forward: evaluation, synthesis, and judgment. Read that list slowly. Those are durable skills. They’re the same ones I’ve been writing about here for two months. He’s looking at them from inside the schoolhouse; we’re looking at them from inside our own homes. The conversation is the same conversation.

For you: Read this one before Tuesday. It’s the teacher voice you almost never hear at school parent night. And it’s the bridge into what I’m writing Tuesday: what to ask your kid’s school about AI before the year ends.

A small note on what these three add up to. Kids are using AI for school in more ways than most of us have mapped, and faster than most of the policy conversation can keep up with. The gap between what students think AI is doing for them and what their teachers think it’s doing is wide, and starting to close, mostly because the kids are catching on faster than the institutions are. And the teachers paying closest attention are pivoting from “how do we catch the cheating” to “what are the actual conditions for learning under AI.” That’s the conversation your kid’s school should be having. Whether or not it is, is what I want to give you the language to ask about this week.

Tuesday I’m writing about exactly that. What to ask your kid’s school about AI before summer starts, and why now is the moment to ask, since the school still has the summer to actually build something for next year.

Hit reply if any of these landed, or if you read one and want to talk about it. I read every reply.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

Subscribe now

If this resonated, you’ll also like:

• You already drew the line. · the practice-vs-pass diagnostic for your kid

• Before you fill in the summer calendar... · the AI POV that opened this thread

• Five conversations are happening about your kid and AI. · three free guides on what to do about it this weekend

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Share Raise Ready Moms: The Substack

You already drew the line.

~5-min read

Last Tuesday I wrote about the awareness gap: 64% of teens are using AI chatbots, only 51% of parents think they are. If you read it, the question I keep getting back is some version of okay, so now what?

This is now what.

I sit in school meetings where smart people argue about AI, and I watch the same thing happen every time. One side wants to ban it. The other side wants to embrace it. Both sides talk past each other while the kids in the building are using it anyway. The conversation that would actually help parents almost never gets had.

Here’s a number from the same Common Sense Media research most of us have been quoting that did not make it into last Tuesday’s post.

That’s not a small gap. That’s a chasm. And it’s telling you something the policy debates are missing entirely: moms already have a line. They’ve been drawing it inside their own heads, one use at a time, mostly without saying it out loud.You’re already drawing the line. The question is whether you can see it clearly enough to talk about it with your kid.

The reframe that makes this easier

You are not raising the abstract teenager in the AI policy debate. You’re raising your kid. The kid who’s about to start a grade you have feelings about. The kid with a friend group you have actual opinions on. The kid who handles being told no in a very specific way that you happen to know cold.

Pro-your-kid means: given everything happening in the world right now, AND given who your specific kid is at this specific moment, what’s actually best for them?

And the answer is allowed to change. Pro-your-kid in 5th grade is different from pro-your-kid in 9th grade. Pro-your-kid for a child who’s already a perfectionist is different from pro-your-kid for a child who needs more reps with making mistakes. Pro-your-kid this October is different from pro-your-kid next April. You’re not committing to a position. You’re paying attention.

You don’t have to settle the AI debate. You just have to know your kid.

Naming the line

Once you frame it that way, the line gets simpler to see.

Last Tuesday I gave you the curiosity-tool vs. shortcut-tool diagnostic, which is one way to draw it. Here’s the sharper, faster version of the same idea, short enough to actually run in the moment you see your kid with a screen:

Is this practice, or is this a pass?

That’s the test. Apply it case by case, not as a policy. The fuller version, when you have a second to think it through:

Who’s doing the work, my kid or AI?

Practice looks like a kid asking AI to explain a concept they got stuck on, then trying the next problem themselves. A kid using AI to brainstorm ideas for a project, then sorting through which ones are actually theirs. A kid asking AI questions about something they’re curious about that has nothing to do with school. The work is happening in the kid. AI is the scaffolding.

A pass looks like a kid asking AI to write their paragraph and turning it in. A kid asking AI to handle a hard conversation with a friend instead of having it. A kid using AI as the place they go when they feel sad or anxious because it’s easier than talking to a human. The work is happening in the machine. The kid is downstream of it.

The same kid will do both. Often in the same week. Sometimes in the same hour. The job isn’t to catch them only at practice. The job is to notice the pass soon enough to have a conversation about it.

That’s what the 77%/19% gap is telling us. Moms instinctively know that “look up something” is mostly practice (your kid wanted to know a thing, AI helped them know it, your kid is still doing the work of integrating it). And they know that “lean on AI for emotional support” is mostly a pass (your kid needed a human, AI was easier, the work of being a person got skipped). The instinct is right. It just hasn’t been named.

Three questions to ask your kid this week

You don’t have to sit them down. Pick the moment when you’re already near each other and neither of you is on a clock. Car rides, dinner, folding laundry, walking the dog.

1. “Tell me one way you’ve been using AI lately that you feel good about. I’m not testing you, I’m just trying to learn.”

Start with the affirmative. You need to know what they’re doing that’s working before you can have any useful conversation about what isn’t. Listen for whether it’s a curiosity move or a shortcut move. Don’t react in the moment if the answer is a shortcut. Just file it away.

2. “Is there anything you’ve used AI for that you wouldn’t tell a teacher about, or that you don’t want me to know about?”

This is the diagnostic question. The point isn’t to extract a confession. The point is to find out whether your kid already has a private sense that some uses are off-limits, even if no one has named them out loud. Most kids do. If they say no, you’ve learned something. If they say yes and tell you, you’ve learned more.

3. “What’s one thing about AI that worries you?”

The answer might surprise you. The Common Sense Media finding that 33% of teens prefer AI to humans for serious conversations is unsettling enough on its own. The number of kids who themselves have a quiet, articulated worry about AI is higher than most parents realize. Open the door. Let them tell you.

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If you want to go deeper this week

I made a companion workbook for this post. It’s called Drawing the Line, and it’s the version of this exercise you do before you bring your kid in.

It’s 20 minutes. Two doors. The first door asks what you actually know about your kid’s AI use right now (and what you’d have to ask to find out). The second door asks where you land on each of those uses, one row at a time. By the end you have a line, written down in your own handwriting, that you can actually say out loud.

It's free. If you got this from a friend, the workbook is yours and the Tuesday newsletter is free if you want it next week too.

Grab the workbook here!

The honest bottom line

You’re not going to draw a perfect line. You’re not going to get this right every time. Neither is your kid. Neither am I.

But the line is being drawn somewhere, by you or by default. The 77%/19% gap isn’t moms being inconsistent. It’s moms doing the same case-by-case work I’m describing, and arriving at a real distinction (information good, emotional companion not okay) without ever quite saying it out loud.

Say it out loud. To yourself first. Then to your kid. The line doesn’t have to be sharp to matter. It just has to be visible.

Comment below about one place you’ve drawn a line with your kid and AI. I read every one of these, and the patterns are starting to show me something I want to write about.

Here’s to keeping the conversation going.

Monica

P.S. — The companion workbook is here. 20 minutes, two doors, one line on paper. If a 20-minute exercise isn’t what this week looks like, the three questions above are the lighter version. Both work.

If you know a mom who’s quietly trying to figure out where her line is, forward this to her. That’s the whole distribution plan, and it’s working.

And if the AI piece of this is what’s sitting with you for the longer haul, that’s exactly why I’m building the Raise Ready AI tool. It’s the resource I wish I’d had when my older one started using AI: how to read what your kid is actually doing with it, what to say in the moments you’re worried, and what schools haven’t told you. The waitlist is open at raisereadymoms.com.

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

If this resonated, you’ll also like:

• Before you fill in the summer calendar... — the summer planning post that started this thread

• What my daughter asked about AI — and what I actually said — conversation starters by age

• The homework AI can’t do for your kid — when AI is doing the work vs. when it’s helping your kid think

Leave a comment

If you got here from Tuesday’s post, welcome. The workbook is right below.

If you got here from somewhere else, the short version: a Common Sense Media study found that 77% of moms are okay with their kid using AI to look up information, and only 19% are okay with AI for emotional support. That’s not moms being inconsistent. That’s moms drawing a line, case by case, mostly without saying it out loud. This workbook is the 20 minutes it takes to name yours.

How to use it: block 20 minutes, print it or fill it on screen, and do both doors before bringing your kid in. By the end you’ll have one paragraph in your own words you can actually say out loud.

The line doesn’t have to be sharp to matter. It just has to be visible.

Monica

Drawing The Line

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In the Room #5 | ~4-min read

A few weeks ago, a mom at my kid’s school stopped me at a school event and asked, almost apologetically, if I knew of “anything” she could read about AI and her kid. Not a book. Not a course. Just something. She wasn’t asking for permission to be informed. She was asking because she’d looked, and what she’d found was either trying to sell her a webinar or trying to scare her into one.

I went home and made a list. Then, because I’ve sat in enough district AI meetings to know how this works, I made a different kind of list, too.

What are they?

• Schools are having the literacy conversation: what should we teach kids about AI, and when.

• Pediatricians and researchers are having the development conversation: what does this do to a young brain, and what’s the right age.

• Lawmakers are having the regulation conversation: COPPA, parental consent, age verification.

• And then there’s the safety conversation. That one is the loudest. It’s the one most parent-facing media is having: limit, monitor, control. It’s the one that fills your feed.

There’s a fifth conversation. The one almost no one is having with you. I think it’s the one that actually matters most. It’s the one where you become fluent enough in AI to guide your kid through this yourself, no matter what your school does or doesn’t do.

That conversation barely has any voices in it yet. Which is part of why I started writing here. And it’s why the three free guides below are worth your weekend, even though they’re not new, and even though your kid’s school almost certainly hasn’t sent them to you.

Parent and Teen Guide to Generative AI
ConnectSafely · Feb 1, 2026 · ~10-min read

If you only read one of these, read this one. ConnectSafely is the small, practical nonprofit that quietly writes the parent guides districts hand out for everything from TikTok to Snapchat. Their AI guide is the cleanest primer I’ve found: what generative AI actually is, where your kid is most likely running into it (school assignments, image and video tools, search, homework help), and the kinds of conversations worth having at home. No fearmongering. No hot takes. The explanation a thoughtful aunt would give you over coffee.

The line that stuck with me: the best way to learn about this is to actually try it. Open ChatGPT or Gemini, ask it something you’d ask a friend, and see what comes back. Your fluency is the foundation for theirs.

For you: Send this link to one other mom this weekend. The conversation gets easier when you’re not the only one who read it.

Talking to Kids About AI: Privacy, Fairness, and Responsibility
Day of AI + Common Sense Media · Nov 17, 2025 · ~15-min read

This is the rare resource where the AI literacy world (the people quietly building what gets taught about AI in schools) actually turns toward parents. Day of AI is an MIT-incubated program that now reaches more than two million students globally. Their family toolkit, built with Common Sense Media, walks through three of the trickiest pieces of the AI conversation: data privacy, algorithmic fairness, and the line between AI helping your kid think and AI doing the thinking for them.

What makes this one different from most of what you’ll find: it doesn’t start from “what should you stop your kid from doing.” It starts from “here’s what your kid actually needs to understand, and here’s how to talk about it.” Closer to what your kid would hear in a good AI literacy classroom than to what’s filling your social feed.

For you: Pick one of the three sections (privacy, fairness, or responsibility) and dive into just that one this weekend. The rest will be there next week.

Health Advisory on AI and Adolescent Well-Being
American Psychological Association · ~12-min read

If the first two are about your kid’s relationship with AI, this one is about your relationship with your kid. The APA’s 2025 advisory is the most parent-actionable framing I’ve come across from any major institution. Three lines from it I keep returning to.

• Build trust early, so your teen turns to you before they turn to AI when something’s hard.

• Use AI side-by-side with your kid when you can, the way you used to read picture books together.

• Watch for the moments where AI is starting to replace something real (a friend, sleep, an in-person conversation) instead of adding to it.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ll recognize this stance. It’s the closest thing to my POV that a major institution has put on paper. Worth knowing it has the APA’s name behind it.

For you: Read this one with your partner if you have one, or with a friend raising kids the same age. Pick one of the three lines above and try it next week.

A small note on what these three add up to.

• The first builds your AI fluency.

• The second hands you the conversation your kid would have in a good AI literacy classroom.

• The third gives you the language for your relationship with them through it.

Read together, they’re not a checklist. They’re three doors into that fifth conversation, the one almost no one is having with you.

Tuesday I’m writing about the gap between what your kid is actually doing with AI right now and what most parents think they’re doing. The Pew data is striking. So is the line worth drawing.

Hit reply if any of these landed, or if you read one and want to talk about it. I read every reply.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

Subscribe now

If this resonated, you’ll also like:

• Are you there AI? It’s me, Monica. · the AI fear most of us don’t want to admit, and what shifted when I stopped running from it

• What my daughter asked about AI, and what I actually said · conversation starters by age group

• Before you fill in the summer calendar... · where my position on AI finally landed

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Share Raise Ready Moms: The Substack

~5-min read

Every spring, around the time the school calendar starts winding down, I do this thing where I open a blank document, type “Summer,” and stare at it.

I’ve spent the last twenty years inside school systems, including a few of those years thinking about summer programming for districts. I know what the research says about summer learning loss. I know what teachers are quietly hoping their students will and won’t do over the break. And I still type “Summer” and stare at it, like every other parent.

This year there’s something new on the page nobody’s putting on the summer list yet.

In February, Pew published the number that’s been sitting with me since: 64% of teens are using AI chatbots. Only 51% of parents think their teens are. Your kid is using AI more than you know.

AND your school is mostly not telling you about it. It’s typically not deliberate, but it’s true nevertheless. (Common Sense Media, 2025: 83% of parents say their school hasn’t communicated with them about generative AI. That’s not a typo. Eighty-three percent.)

Summer is the twelve-week stretch where it’s all yours.

Two weeks ago, in the Saturday post about why your kid needs a boring summer, I promised this Tuesday’s piece would give you the framework: what to protect, what’s actually worth paying for, and the one conversation worth having with your kid before school lets out. Here it is, with the AI question where it belongs.

What to protect

The research on adolescent development is consistent: unstructured time is not wasted time. A decade of developmental psychology points to the same thing. Kids who have space to be bored, to make up their own plan, to figure out what they actually want to do, are building something real. Self-direction. Creativity. The internal compass that tells you what you want and how to go after it.

This doesn’t get built in a scheduled activity. It gets built in the gaps.

It also doesn’t get easier with age. A 9th grader needs this more than a 4th grader, not less. By the time your kid is heading into high school, every hour on their calendar is starting to feel like it counts. If you don’t carve out space that doesn’t count, no one else is going to.

So before you add anything to the summer, protect at least a few unstructured hours each week. Not “free time with a screen.” Actually open time where your kiddo has to figure it out.

And here’s what I’d add for 2026 specifically: protect those hours from AI too. The boredom research is about the kid figuring out what to do. If their first reach when bored is a chatbot, to entertain them, to plan their afternoon, to tell them a story, to keep them company, they are not building the muscle the research is about. AI is more interesting than boredom, every time. If you don’t carve out boredom-shaped space, your kid will not build the muscle that boredom builds.

(The “keep them company” piece is the part of the research that’s rising fastest and getting talked about least. Common Sense Media reported this year that 33% of teens prefer AI to humans for serious conversations. If you take nothing else from this post, take that one.)

What’s actually worth paying for

Three things parents over-invest in during summer, and one thing most parents under-invest in.

Educational catch-up of the drill-work variety. If your kid’s teacher flagged a specific, identified gap, by all means, do the targeted thing. But a summer of generic worksheet practice in a subject your kid already feels bad at? Not what the research supports. Kids who are behind usually need confidence and engagement more than more practice of the thing that already feels hard. (This is one of those insider things where principals and teachers all know it.... but the summer tutoring industry is not set up to say it.)

The fantasy that a “productive” summer looks like a fully scheduled summer. Camps, classes, enrichment, the whole drop-off circuit. They’re not nothing, especially for working parents. But they’re not the whole picture, and a calendar full of pickups is not the same thing as a kid who’s getting better at being themselves.

The fantasy that you can keep AI out of their summer. Trying to ban AI for the summer is a strategy with a near-zero success rate, especially if your kid is in middle or high school. They’re already using it. Banning it doesn’t teach them how to use it well. It just teaches them not to tell you about it. AI is here. Your kid is going to grow up using it. The question isn’t whether they’ll engage with it. It’s whether they’ll engage with it on your terms or in the dark.

The thing most parents under-invest in: time with you that isn’t logistics. Not a trip. Not an outing. Not a “quality time activity.” Just a recurring, low-pressure, low-stakes pocket of time where you’re together and not coordinating anything. A morning walk twice a week. A Saturday breakfast. Driving the long way home. The thing summer actually lets you do that the school year doesn’t is be near each other without either of you on a clock. That’s where the conversations you actually want to have happen.

The one conversation worth having before school lets out

I do this with my older daughter every year. She’s in 9th grade right now. It takes about twenty minutes, and it changes every summer.

Try opening with: “I want to ask you a few things I’ve been thinking about. Not for school. Just for you.”

Then ask, in this order:

1. What’s something you’ve been using AI for lately, even if it’s small?

This is the new lead question for 2026. Notice I’m not asking whether she’s using AI. The Pew data already answered that. I’m asking her to tell me about it.

What you’re listening for: is she using it as a curiosity tool (something she’s exploring, a question she got obsessed with, an idea she wanted to see worked out) or as a shortcut tool (something she didn’t want to do herself)? That’s the most important distinction parents can make about AI right now, and the answer to this question tells you. You don’t have to react in the moment. You just need to know which one your kid is doing more of, because they’re two very different parenting situations. One is your kid’s intellectual life expanding. The other is your kid’s intellectual life quietly atrophying.

2. What’s one thing you want to get better at this summer? Not for school. For you.
Give her time. The first answer is usually “nothing” or something performative. Wait for the real one.

3. What’s one thing you didn’t have enough time for this year that you want more of?
This surfaces what matters to her that the schedule might be crowding out.

4. What’s one thing you want to try that you’ve never done before?
You don’t have to make it happen. Just knowing what she’s curious about tells you something important.

You’re not making commitments. You’re not policing. You’re gathering information. And you’re sending three signals: that her internal compass matters, that AI is something the two of you talk about together (not silently in her phone while you don’t ask), and that what she wants is part of the plan.

The honest bottom line

You’re going to schedule things this summer. That’s fine. Camps are real, childcare is real, and working parents don’t have the luxury of leaving twelve weeks completely open.

But before you finalize, look at the calendar and ask yourself two questions. How many hours per week will your kiddo have to figure out what to do on their own? And how many of those hours are phone-free? If either answer is close to zero, consider carving out a few. It doesn’t have to be a big structural change. Just a protected pocket of time where nothing is scheduled, no one is telling them what to do, and the AI is in the other room. (Or, more honestly, in the other backpack. You know what I mean.)

That space might be the most valuable thing on the list.

Here’s to a summer with a little more room in it.

Monica

.

If the AI piece of this is the part still sitting with you, that’s exactly why I’m building a Raise Ready AI tool. It’s the resource I wish I’d had when my older one started using AI: how to understand what your kid is actually doing with it, what to say in the moments you’re worried, and what the school isn’t going to tell you. The waitlist is open at raisereadymoms.com, and early access goes to subscribers first.

If you know a mom who’s quietly worried about AI this summer, forward this to her. That’s the whole distribution plan, and it’s working.

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

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Share Raise Ready Moms: The Substack

~3 min read.

My younger daughter came home last week upset about something I hadn’t asked about in a while. A friendship that had quietly shifted over the month, and suddenly, with six weeks left of school, was all she could see.

I sat with her for a while. And then I went and looked at what the research actually says about this moment, specifically, and what it means for kids’ friendships going into summer.

What I found was different from what I expected…and more important than most of the summer planning conversation I’ve been having.

Here are three things worth reading.

The Summer Scaries: Survey Reveals Concerns About Kids’ Mental Health Don’t Disappear When School Lets Out Kids Mental Health Foundation · May 2025 · ~3-min read

A national survey of more than 1,000 parents found that isolation is one of the top summer risk factors for kids, right alongside screen time and disrupted routines. The clinical director’s framing is worth sitting with: without the structure and social connection that school provides, some kids are at higher risk for mood concerns, especially if they’re already experiencing mental health challenges.

The part most of us aren’t talking about: it’s not just the structure that disappears in June. It’s the daily, unplanned contact with the people your kiddo has spent nine months building something with.

For you: This week, notice who your kiddo gravitates toward at pickup or dismissal. That small observation is actually data.

How to Help Kids Navigate Friendships and Peer Relationships American Psychological Association · ~5-min read

The APA makes a distinction here that I find useful: making friends and keeping friends are different skills. Kids who are good at making friends in a structured environment — like school — often struggle to maintain them without the natural proximity that school provides. The research is pretty consistent on what actually helps: shared activity, not just keeping in touch. A text chain doesn’t do what showing up to the same place does.

The finding I keep coming back to: kids who come back in September with strong social footing are usually the ones who had at least one relationship that got some intentional tending over the summer. Not a full social calendar. Just one.

For you: Before school lets out, have your kiddo name one friend they want to stay in actual contact with this summer. Not “I’ll see who I see.” A name.

Parents and Kids Agree: Loneliness Is Today’s Biggest Mental Health Challenge Child Mind Institute · October 2025 · ~2-min read

A national survey from last fall found that 8 in 10 parents and kids rank loneliness and social isolation in their top three mental health concerns. What struck me: this is one of the few issues where parents and kids are actually aligned on the severity. And what loneliness looks like in kids is often not a kid saying “I’m lonely.” It’s irritability. Withdrawal. Clingy behavior. Things that read as attitude or mood until you understand what’s underneath.

For you: If your kiddo seems off in the next few weeks and you can’t place why, ask about their friendships. Not their schedule.

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Tuesday I’m writing about how to think through the summer calendar before you finalize it: what to protect, what to let go of, and the one conversation worth having with your kid before school lets out.

Hit reply if this landed. I read every one.

Monica

Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.

Leave a comment

That gap — between what the people inside schools know and what families actually hear — is what I kept running into, in every role I’ve had. Teacher. School executive. Board member. Mom.

I built Raise Ready Moms to close it.

I’m Monica Milligan. I have an MBA from Harvard and spent years at McKinsey, but more relevant to this newsletter: I’ve been in the rooms where decisions about kids get made. I know what the research actually says, what educators are actually seeing, and what most parent newsletters leave out.

Every Tuesday I publish a substantive post — research-backed, practical, written for a mother who doesn’t have time for vague advice. Every Saturday I share three things worth reading, with my take on what they mean for your kid.

If you’re new, start with one of these:

• Your kiddo’s first phone — how to leverage your kiddo’s first phone to build durable skills… as well as to build the right protections for screen time, social media, etc.

• Before you fill in the summer calendar — what to protect, what to let go of, and one conversation worth having with your kid

• Are you there AI? It’s me, Monica. — what I actually learned when I stopped being afraid of it

Hit reply anytime. I read every one.
Monica

PS - You can also fine me at raisereadymoms.com or at @raisereadymoms on Instagram.

Share Raise Ready Moms: The Substack

~5 min read.

My younger daughter has been counting down to summer.

Not because of the break. Not because of pool days or sleeping in. Because her older sister got her phone the summer before middle school and she has been, with the precision of a child who has been paying very close attention, keeping track.

She knows the timeline. She knows the precedent. She’s made her case by simply existing and watching and waiting.

And honestly? That’s fair. Because we set the precedent. And this summer, we’re going to try to do it better.

Here’s what we got mostly right with our older daughter: the basics. The safety rules. The parental controls. The don’t-talk-to-strangers and charge-it-outside-your-room stuff. We figured that out.

Here’s what we wish we’d done differently: we never thought of the phone as a tool for building something. We thought of it as a risk to manage. And those two framings lead you to very different places.

One gives you a restriction document. The other gives you a growth plan.

Most phone contracts are restriction documents. They tell kids what they can’t do, where the phone can’t go, when it has to be put away.

Some of those rules matter — we’ll cover them.

But restrictions alone aren’t a strategy. They’re just rules. And kids who only ever get rules don’t learn judgment. They learn compliance (when you’re watching) and workarounds (when you’re not).

The contract I want to talk about today starts from a different question: What if giving your kid a phone was actually an opportunity to build some of the skills they’re going to need most?

First, the honest stakes.

I’m not here to scare you. But the numbers are worth knowing.

Kids 8–12 average almost five hours of screen exposure per day. Teenagers are closer to seven and a half. Daily screen time over six hours has been linked in recent research to suicidal ideation — not for everyone, not inevitably, but that’s a real finding, and I think we owe it to our kids to take it seriously.

Heavy social media use during early adolescence is linked to slower vocabulary and reading development over time. Kids who charge their phones in their bedrooms lose about fifty minutes of sleep per week compared to kids who don’t. (Fifty minutes. Per week. That adds up.)

And then there’s AI. Seventy-three percent of teenagers have already used an AI chatbot. Only thirty percent of parents have talked to their kids about it. I wrote about this earlier this year — Are you there, AI? It’s me, Monica.— and I’m still thinking about it. Because if you haven’t had that conversation yet, the phone is about to make it a lot more urgent.

The phone isn’t neutral. It can pull kids toward things that aren’t good for them, or it can be a tool that — with the right structure — builds something that lasts.

The structure is the contract.

What the contract needs to cover

I’ll go through the basics quickly, then we’ll get to the part I think actually changes things.

Tech safety — lock screen always on, password shared with parents, location sharing on, no public wifi without checking first. And the single most impactful rule in this category: the phone charges in a common area at night, not in their bedroom. This one rule touches sleep, late-night scrolling, and a whole category of conversations they shouldn’t be having at 1am.

Also in this category: set up downtime scheduling before you hand it over. Both iPhone (Settings → Screen Time → Downtime) and Android (Digital Wellbeing → Bedtime Mode) let you set specific windows when most apps shut down automatically — no willpower required. Agree on the hours together: school nights, the phone goes dark at 9pm and comes back at 7am. Weekends, maybe 10pm to 8am. You can customize by day of the week, manage it remotely through Family Sharing, and tweak it as needed. Do this in advance. It removes an entire category of nightly negotiation.

Privacy and the digital footprint — your kid is building a record right now, whether they know it or not. Every account, every photo, every platform collects data and creates a trail. The principle to teach early: nothing goes online you wouldn’t say out loud in front of your principal. And nothing with their full name, school, or location on a public account. This stuff compounds in ways a twelve-year-old genuinely can’t picture yet.

Social media — let’s be honest about this one.

I know that for a lot of families, the phone conversation and the social media conversation feel like the same conversation. So let me be direct about what the research actually says — and then what to do about it.

Kids who use social media for more than three hours a day face twice the risk of depression and anxiety compared to kids who use it less. Not slightly elevated risk — double. Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have all been linked specifically to increased anxiety, depression, loneliness, and poor body image, particularly because these platforms are built around visual comparison. Algorithms serve content that triggers the strongest emotional reactions, which for adolescents often means content that makes them feel behind, left out, or not enough.

This isn’t a reason to panic. It’s a reason to be thoughtful.

If you’re going to say yes to social media — and many of us will — here’s what makes a difference:

Start conservative. This is the single most important principle in this whole piece: it is easy to get more lax. It is very hard to get more restrictive. If you start with tight limits and loosen them as trust is built, you’re working with the relationship. If you start loose and then try to pull back, you’re working against it. Every time. Start with one platform, not all of them at once.

Use app limits to make the limits automatic. On iPhone: Settings → Screen Time → App Limits → Social Networking. Set a daily time cap for the whole category, or for individual apps. When the limit is up, the app locks — and you hold the passcode, not them. On Android: Digital Wellbeing → Dashboard → tap the app → set a timer. Most platforms also have built-in tools: TikTok’s Family Pairing lets you link your account to your kid’s and manage content, screen time, and direct messages. Instagram has built-in supervision features. Snapchat has a Family Center that shows you who they’re talking to, though it can’t limit their time on the app — which is worth knowing before you say yes to Snapchat.

Agree in advance: no posting. At least to start. Social media as a consumption tool first — not a broadcasting one. No photos of themselves, no location-tagged content, no posts. This protects their privacy, protects their digital footprint, and removes a whole category of risk while they’re still figuring out the basics. The posting conversation can happen later, once there’s more trust and more judgment built up. Starting there isn’t punitive — it’s just honest about what they’re ready for.

Agree in advance: one account per platform, and you know the username. This is more real than it sounds. There’s a well-documented phenomenon of kids maintaining secondary “finsta” accounts — fake Instagrams, Snapchat alts — that parents don’t know about. Agree upfront: one account per platform, parent knows the handle. Not because you’ll audit every post, but because the principle matters, and setting the expectation now is so much easier than discovering the second account later.

Now, the thing I wish someone had told us when our older daughter got her phone.

Have the conversation with the other parents first.

If your kid’s friend group is all getting their phones around the same time, you have a brief window where you can actually coordinate. Call the parents. Text the group chat. Get on the same page about what platforms you’re each allowing, and when.

Because here’s what I learned the hard way: if all the parents in the friend group agree on no Snapchat for now, that rule is easy to hold. If only you are saying no, your kid is the one holding out while everyone else has it — and you both know that’s unsustainable. The “but everyone has it” argument only has power if it’s true. You have more influence over whether it’s true than you might think.

My biggest regret with our older daughter wasn’t anything we did wrong at home. It was that we didn’t have this conversation with other parents first. We kept our family’s choices to ourselves, and I watched her navigate the gap between what we’d agreed to and what her friends had access to, mostly on her own. I could have made that so much easier — for her and for us — with a few phone calls before summer started.

Consider sharing this article with the parents in your community. Or share the contract. Start the conversation. It only takes one person to send the text.

AI awareness — most phone contracts skip this entirely, and I think it’s a real miss. If your kid has a phone, they have access to AI tools whether you’ve set it up for them or not. The conversation isn’t “no AI.” It’s: AI gets things wrong (often very confidently), it doesn’t have your kid’s best interests at heart, and they should never tell it their name, their location, or anything personal. And if something an AI says makes them feel bad about themselves — they close it. AI cannot be a friend, no matter how much it sounds like one.

(If they’ve already found Character.AI, have that conversation now. Not after something goes sideways.)

Now the part that I think actually changes things.

The research organization America Succeeds has spent years identifying what they call “durable skills” — the competencies that employers rate as most essential, that schools are increasingly asked to teach, and that matter far more for a full and capable life than most of the content we tend to obsess over. These aren’t soft skills. They hold up.

Three of them map almost exactly onto what a first phone, handled well, can actually practice.

Metacognition — do they know what the phone is doing to them?

Metacognition is self-understanding and personal management. It’s the ability to observe your own thinking, notice what’s happening in real time, and adjust. It’s one of the most predictive skills we know of for long-term success — and it’s exactly what most kids are not developing when they scroll.

Here’s how you flip the phone from a metacognition killer into a metacognition tool: once a week, your kid checks their own screen time data and shares what they notice with you. Not to get in trouble. To get curious. What apps are they spending the most time on? Does that match what they’d say if you asked? How do they feel after a long session versus a short one?

This is the practice. You’re not managing their time — you’re teaching them to manage their own attention, and to notice the gap between how they’re actually spending it and how they want to.

That skill will matter at 22 and 42 and 62. Start now, while they still want to impress you.

Critical Thinking — can they evaluate what they’re seeing?

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze information, evaluate sources, and form reasoned judgments rather than just react. It’s also, right now, the skill that protects your kid from misinformation, from manipulation, and from AI that sounds completely confident but is making things up.

The practice is simple to say and harder to build: before they share something, they check it. Before they believe something, they ask: how do I know this is true? Who is saying this, and why?

And specifically for AI: AI tools generate text that sounds authoritative — like something a knowledgeable person wrote. But AI fabricates citations, gets dates wrong, and reflects biases baked into its training. Teaching your kid to use AI as a thinking partner — not a source of facts — is one of the most important lessons the phone era is asking us to give them. “Does this seem right? Where would I check?” should become a reflex.

Build that habit now, before the stakes get higher.

Fortitude — what happens when something goes wrong?

Fortitude, in the America Succeeds framework, is about constitution and resilience — the capacity to keep going, to be honest, to repair when things break. It’s grit, but it’s also integrity.

Here’s the thing: something is going to go wrong. They’ll break a rule. They’ll see something they shouldn’t. They’ll say something online they wish they hadn’t, or end up in a situation they don’t know how to get out of. This isn’t pessimism — it’s how kids learn.

The phone contract prepares for this. Not just with consequences — but with a repair path. What does rebuilding trust look like? What does honesty earn? The kids who come out of hard moments with more judgment than they went in with are the ones who learned that telling the truth was safer than hiding it, and that mistakes aren’t the end of the story.

Build that culture now. It’s the most important thing you can put in place before the phone arrives — and it has almost nothing to do with the phone.

The honest bottom line

None of this works if you hand it over.

It only works if you build it together — sitting down with your kid, going through each section, letting them ask questions, letting them push back on things that feel unfair. Something they had a hand in is something they’re more likely to actually hold themselves to.

And then you review it. Quarterly, at minimum. The contract that makes sense at twelve won’t be right at fourteen. Trust grows as they show you they can handle it. The document grows with them.

We’re doing it differently this summer. My younger daughter has been counting down, and she deserves a real conversation — not just a list of rules, but a plan for what this phone can actually do for her.

The sample contract below is what we’re starting with. Take it, adapt it, make it yours. It covers tech safety, privacy, social media, AI, screen time, and the durable skills section that most contracts are missing.

[Download the Family Phone Agreement →] (free — just click)

Here’s to raising kids who are ready for whatever comes next.

— Monica

If you want to read more:

• Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health — The landmark 2023 report that kicked off the national conversation. Dense but worth it. Or read the summary version — it’s only a few pages.

• How Using Social Media Affects Teenagers — Child Mind Institute. This is the one I send to parents who want a clear, readable breakdown of the research without wading through academic papers.

• Are AI Chatbots Safe for Kids? — From the American Academy of Pediatrics. Practical, updated, and it addresses Character.AI directly.

• ConnectSafely’s Family Guide to Parental Controls — The most comprehensive plain-English walkthrough of device controls I’ve found. Covers iPhone, Android, and individual platforms.

• America Succeeds: Defining Durable Skills — If you want to go deeper on the framework I referenced above, this is where to start.

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