Decide how AI fits in your family: a worksheet for parents

Before you write anything

Twenty minutes, with everyone who lives there

You already have an approach

Your family already has an approach. It is unwritten, the two adults do not entirely agree on it, and the children have worked out most of it by trial and error. That is why it produces arguments at nine in the evening. Writing four lines down does not add rules to your house — it makes the ones you already half-have sayable, and a rule that can be said can be argued with and changed.

Nothing here tells you what to decide. A family that wants none of this indoors and a family that uses it every day answer the same four questions and reach different lines; if your answer to the first one is “none”, that is a finished answer and the other three still matter. Do it with the people it applies to in the room. An approach handed down at the end is a rule, not an agreement, and only one of those survives a disagreement.

Four decisions

Four decisions, one line each

Answer them out loud before anyone writes. If a line needs more than a sentence it is two decisions in a coat — split it, or drop the half nobody is sure about yet.

Who it covers

“Does this apply to you as well?”

The four lines are written and everyone has agreed to them. Your twelve-year-old reads them back, then points out that you used a tool yourself on Tuesday to write a difficult email to the school, and that line two says nothing about work. She is not being clever. She has found the real gap on the first reading.

What do you do with the card?

Explain that adults and children are not under the same rules.Add what you use it for to the same card, in your own words.Agree to stop using it yourself, to keep things even.

Write it down

The same decisions, written two ways

The policy

Two pages headed “Family Technology Agreement”, with numbered clauses covering devices, hours, homework, privacy and consequences. It took a Sunday afternoon and it is genuinely thorough. By half term nobody in the house could tell you what clause four says, including the person who wrote it.

The card

Four lines and a date, stuck on the fridge. “It is for getting unstuck, not for anything handed in. Not in bedrooms, not with anyone’s name in it. Nobody is in trouble — say when you used it. We read this again at the end of term.” Everyone in the house can recite it, which is what makes it possible for anyone to notice when it is being bent.

The short one is not a lighter version of the long one. It is the one that gets kept, because it can be held in a head, said in a doorway, and rewritten in thirty seconds on the evening it turns out to be wrong.

Three things to keep

Say what it is for before you say where it is banned. A purpose already covers the tool that arrives next month; a list of bans has to be rewritten for it.
Two limits your family keeps beat nine it does not. Choose the ones you can see from the kitchen.
Put a date on it. An agreement everyone has promised to reread is one a child can argue with, and being argued with is how it stays true.