What we risk losing in relationships and parenting
Dayna Guido on raising humans in the age of AI: What we risk losing in relationships and parenting
This article orginally appears on MSN in May of 2026.
The Change Happening Closest to Home
When people talk about artificial intelligence, they usually talk about work. They talk about speed, scale, efficiency, and whether entire roles will disappear. That conversation is understandable, but it misses something closer and more intimate. The more immediate shift is not happening in conference rooms. It is happening in kitchens, cars, classrooms, and living rooms. It is happening in the spaces where people learn how to listen, how to argue, how to tolerate silence, and how to be known.
That is what makes this moment so consequential. AI is not only changing what people can do. It is quietly changing how they relate. Because those changes arrive as conveniences rather than crises, they are easy to excuse. A child asks a system instead of a parent. A partner reaches for a device instead of starting a difficult conversation. A family sits together without really being together at all.
Dayna Guido, a clinical social worker and educator whose work sits at the intersection of ethics, mental health, and emerging technology, has spent years thinking about what gets gained and what gets lost when human processes are handed over to systems. Her concern is not nostalgic, and it is not anti-technology. It is rooted in a simpler question: what kind of people are we becoming when friction disappears from so much of daily life?
Easier Does Not Mean Better
One of the reasons AI is moving so quickly into everyday life is that it makes so many things feel easier. It gives answers and offers structure right away. What’s more is that it spares people some of the awkwardness, uncertainty, and vulnerability that come with dealing with other human beings. In a culture already trained to value convenience, that kind of responsiveness can feel almost irresistible.
But relationships have never been built on convenience.
Guido points to what has become a common sight in public and private life alike. “You go out into the community, you go out into the world, and you see people’s bodies hunched over their devices,” she says. “They’re not connected with other people. They’re connecting with other people through a device only.”
That observation lands because it is so ordinary. It does not describe some speculative future. Rather, it describes now. It describes families in the same home who are increasingly isolated from one another. More specifically, it describes shared meals interrupted by notifications, conversations thinned out by distraction, and moments that might once have led to connection now absorbed by screens.
The issue is not that technology has entered family life. That battle is long over. The issue is that more and more forms of human engagement are being replaced by something smoother, faster, and less demanding. Over time, that changes people. It changes what they expect from one another, what feels tolerable. and how much effort they are willing to invest in a real relationship.
The Problem With Simulated Understanding
AI can be impressive in the way it reflects language back to people. It can sound calm, organized, and emotionally attuned. For someone who feels overwhelmed or misunderstood, that can be powerful. A system that responds clearly and without judgment may feel preferable to a person who interrupts, reacts badly, or requires patience.
Still, the feeling of being understood is not the same as actually being understood.
Human understanding comes with history, context, embodied presence, and the messy unpredictability of real interaction. It is shaped through misreadings, clarifications, repair, and trust. It cannot be reduced to a polished response. That is part of what makes relationships difficult, but it is also what makes them transformative.
A system can mirror a person’s language. It can affirm a feeling. It can organize a thought. What it cannot do is bring lived understanding into the room. It cannot know what it means to carry history in a body, to pause because someone’s face has changed, or to sense the emotional truth sitting underneath a polished sentence.
That distinction matters, especially for children growing up in an environment where simulated understanding may begin to feel normal.
What Children Learn When Answers Come Too Fast
Children do not experience AI as a novelty. They experience it as part of the air around them. It is simply there, available, responsive, and ready to answer. That means adults are not just deciding whether children will use AI. They are deciding how children will learn to think in a world where AI is always within reach.
Guido has already seen the shift begin. “We already started to see children asking AI and not confiding in parents or talking to a teacher or talking to a friend,” she says.
That detail matters more than it may seem to at first. A child who goes first to a device is not just choosing a different source of information. That child is learning something about where answers live, what relationships are for, and how uncertainty should be handled. If every confusion is quickly resolved from the outside, there is less reason to struggle through it from within. If every question is routed immediately to a system, the habit of reflection can weaken before it is fully formed.
Guido links this to critical thinking in the most practical sense. “The less we use our brains, the more they’re not going to get used,” she says. The comparison is almost physical because it needs to be. Children develop confidence not just by receiving answers, but by working toward them. They build judgment by comparing, testing, questioning, and sometimes getting things wrong. They develop emotional steadiness by learning that not every discomfort needs an instant resolution.
When that developmental process gets interrupted by convenience, the result may not be obvious right away. A child may look capable, quick, and informed while becoming less patient, less self-directed, and less practiced in the inner work of thinking.
Parenting Without a Map
For parents, this creates a peculiar kind of challenge. They are being asked to set boundaries around tools that feel useful, powerful, and increasingly unavoidable. At the same time, they are doing that without having grown up inside the same landscape themselves.
The temptation, naturally, is to treat AI as just another support. Sometimes it is one. It can help organize information, clarify a question, and serve a practical purpose. The problem begins when its usefulness obscures its limits.
Guido’s approach is not absolutist. She does not suggest families can or should remove AI entirely. What she suggests is more demanding than that because it requires intention. Parents have to teach children that AI is a tool, not an authority, and certainly not a substitute for other people.
Her advice is grounded and simple: begin with your own thinking, then consult the tool, then return to human conversation. “You might start without it, ask some questions, and then go look at AI, and then come back and have a conversation,” she says.
That sequence matters because it preserves a child’s agency. It teaches that the first responsibility is not to retrieve an answer, but to engage the question.
Why Friction Still Matters
Much of modern life has been organized around removing friction. Usually that sounds like progress. In many cases, it is. Yet human development has never followed the same logic as convenience.
Children do not become resilient because life is smooth. They become resilient because they experience difficulty, remain in a relationship through it, and discover that they can think, adapt, and recover. Patience grows through waiting. Social skill grows through awkwardness. Emotional intelligence grows through misunderstanding, repair, and repetition.
AI is attractive in part because it reduces all of that. It offers a cleaner path. The risk is that families begin to confuse efficiency with development.
Guido keeps returning to the importance of engagement, and the word feels useful precisely because it is broader than productivity. “I think the word engagement is really important,” she says. Not engagement with a system that responds on command, but engagement in the fuller sense: being present to the world, to other people, to the body, to the senses, to the slower rhythms that make thought and connection possible.
That can look like time outside, shared routines, tactile activities, conversation without devices, or simply the discipline of being together without outsourcing every lull or question to a machine. None of those things are flashy. That is partly why they matter. They keep the center of life anchored in something older and sturdier than convenience.
The Future Will Show Up in Ordinary Family Habits
The next generation will reflect the conditions in which it was raised. That much is not controversial. What is changing is the nature of those conditions. Children are now growing up in environments where a machine can answer immediately, reassure endlessly, and insert itself into more and more parts of daily life. The practical question is no longer whether that will shape them. It will. The question is what adults are going to do about it.
Guido remains hopeful, and that hope matters. She notes that people still hunger for tactile life, for embodied experience, for the kind of engagement that cannot be replicated through a screen. That desire has not disappeared, but it does need protection.
Families do not need perfection. They need awareness, as well as enough conviction to say that some things should stay human even when a machine can do them faster. In addition, they need enough patience to let children wrestle with questions before handing them polished answers. Lastly, they need enough discipline to remember that the quality of a home is shaped not only by which tools are available there, but by what forms of attention still survive inside it.
AI will keep advancing. That part is settled. What is not settled is whether families will allow its logic to define childhood, parenting, and relationships by default. The children growing up now will carry the answer.
