'Preparing for the Workforce': Forcing Our Kids Into Our Broken Morality
We can't all be so blind that we can't see a better way.
This weekend I held my first ever parenting with AI session at the AI K12 Deeper Learning Summit. It was honestly a little hard to process. But I know something happened because I couldn't stop the tears on my drive home. They came from nowhere and everywhere all at once. Pride overwhelming me - the culmination of years of work finally finding its way into the world. That moment when all the lonely nights, all the hotel rooms, almost a year away from family, suddenly crystalizes into something real you can touch.
And then, an article in The Guardian where I'm quoted came out the next day. A perfect circle - my work recognized, validated. It felt like it wasn't all for zero.
The Same Old Tired Oppressive Framing
But after reading the article, I found myself hollowed out. The quotes in a fancy publication came packaged in the same framing I've been fighting against. A framing I know I challenged wholesale during my interview.
Because, while I sincerely appreciate The Guardian and the writer for elevating parental work, it was still very superficial. The standard 'getting them ready.' Which to me is absolutely not the point.
I'm not sure what we're getting our kids ready for? The same socially constructed world we lived in? The same injustices that we codified in all the nation-building documents here in the US and abroad?
Are we preparing them to compete again, to compete more, to compete with, against, and for AIs? What in the hell are we preparing them for?
We have built a social system based on side-eyeing others and assumed competition and we teach our kids to "prepare" for a future where they must compete (again) for everything.
Fuck that.
Fuck the idea that my child, who has the most liberating digital technology ever made, now just has to live in a world where our old bullshit economic models are once again normalized. I see the term "Striver Parent", trying to supercharge their kids for "the future of the workforce".
Why are all y'all so excited about forcing your child into that system?
Our kids grow up with no intrinsic understanding of a zero-sum game, and yet we're not using this moment to listen to them, to learn from them. We're still desperately trying to fit them into our obsolete and broken morality.
Your child doesn't need to compete against other children. They don’t need to fight against the machines. Your child doesn't need to win at yesterday's game.
Your child doesn't need to be prepared for AI. Your child needs to be liberated by it.
When I held that session this weekend, what moved me was not seeing parents figure out how to give their kids an edge. It was witnessing the first glimmers of recognition that we might actually have the tools to break the cycle - to raise a generation that isn't bound by our limitations, our fears, our tired zero-sum thinking.
The Guardian missed it. Most of the coverage misses it. But I see it in the children who approach these technologies without our baggage. They don't see AI as something to compete with. They see it as a collaborator in possibility.
So no, I don't want to prepare my child for the future. I want to let my child show me what that future could be if we'd just stop imposing our broken frameworks on their boundless imagination.
And that's the work that matters to me. Not getting quoted in articles that frame this revolution as just another thing to adapt to, but creating spaces where we can imagine something fundamentally different. Where parenting with AI isn't about advantage, but about liberation.
Maybe that's why I cried on the drive home. Because for a moment, I could see it clearly. And then the old narrative came crashing back in.
But fuck that narrative. We deserve better. Our children deserve better.
And I'm not going to stop until we build it.