A Call to Action to My Fellow Millennial Parents
Millennial Parents…
We are the bridge generation. 
We remember dial-up. We burned CDs. We knew boredom.
And we also remember the transition into speed. Landline to wireless, facebook to FaceTime (remember that mind blowing transition?)…
And we’re now here… having kids and raising the next generation and we’re in one of the biggest technological revolutions of our times. The unique perspectives and the experiences we have as Millennials is that we remember the pre- and post- wild technological changes.
The era of pre-internet, post-internet, pre-smart phones, post-smart phones. And now living through pre- and post-AI… In each transition we had been calibrated to the pre-existence of the tech to ride the dopamine waves of these wild revolutionary transitions.
And now, as many of us are in the life stage of parenting and in this realm where we have the opportunity to lead what it means to parent in the age of AI.
If we’re not intentional, our children won’t just be influenced by AI…
They’ll be raised by it.
Here are some call to actions to my fellow millennial parents:
What does it mean to parent consciously in the age of AI?
Bring back the manual arts. Let’s teach our children to plant seeds. Literally. Garden. Grow herbs. Compost. Watch things sprout from dirt and die and come back again.
The lessons of slow – patience, resilience, nurturing without immediate reward. It’s the antidote to algorithmic instant gratification. We are losing attention spans by the seconds every year. You know that you and I can both attest to that in our own lives.
What’s the best way to teach our kids scale and wonder?
Take school outside. As the entire education system is about to get disrupted with AI, while that shift is happening, let’s take our kids outside.
Travel. Explore. Let them see different ways of being, speaking, worshipping, working.
Camp under the stars. Let’s give them a chance at remembering what the dirt underneath them feels like in between their toes. Spending slow summers by a creek or a river catching tadpoles and collecting roly-poly in a cup.
It teaches them scale. That they’re a part of something much bigger than themselves when the world feels like it’s anll accessible through a screen.
How do we protect our kids from disinformation?
Teach history honestly. Line up the banned books in your home library. Mark the books that changed your perspective of the world. Tell them how information gets erased, rewritten, and spun. Let them see that power often comes through storytelling and that the best thinkers learn to question and read.
Raise kids who are curious, not compliant.
Let’s Root Them in Real Community
We talk about the loneliness pandemic all the time. What can we do? We need third spaces and our kids need third spaces.
The local book store (thank you B&N for coming back). The YMCA. A church. A local pottery studio. A block party.
If they don’t exist? Are you the one who may have the resources to create one for your local community? Can you organize a block party?
Somewhere where they are known, where no one is selling to them, where presence matters and someone other than your nuclear family who cares for their wellbeing.
What are the risks if we don’t parent consciously in the age of AI?
If we don’t model slowness, they will chase speed.
If we don’t model presence, they will outsource intimacy.
If we don’t model patience, they will demand convenience.
They’ll expect life to read their minds.
And crumble when it doesn’t.
And let’s be real.
We can’t just tell our kids these things.
We have to be them.
We don’t get to scroll mindlessly while asking them to play mindfully.
We don’t get to outsource every hard thing to tech and expect them to build grit.
The more addicted we become to the machine,
the more it becomes the parent to our children.
We need to raise conscious kids in the age of AI. It’s not resisting the inevitable technological changes. It’s about holding onto the sacredness of being human so that they have that gift of remembering to come home to when the world continues to evolve at the speed of light…
