Lots of parents and teachers share the same quiet worry these days. If kids are asking ChatGPT to write their essays, summarize their reading, and explain their math, are they really still learning how to think for themselves?
The worry is fair. A widely cited 2025 study by Michael Gerlich found that heavy AI use lined up with weaker critical thinking, and younger users showed the steepest decline (Gerlich, 2025).
But here's a more hopeful finding that hasn't gotten nearly as much attention. A 2025 study in Acta Psychologica looked at 580 university students and found that strong information literacy buffered them against the negative effects of AI dependence on their thinking skills (Wang et al., 2025).
Information literacy is part of a bigger idea Renee Hobbs has been building on for decades. As she defines it in Media Literacy in Action, media literacy is "a lifelong learning practice that involves accessing, analyzing, creating, reflecting, and taking action" (Hobbs, 2025). It's both protective and empowering. It guards kids against harmful messages, and it gives them tools to participate as informed citizens.
That framework maps almost perfectly onto raising AI-literate kids. Here's what it can look like at the kitchen table.
Access. Help your child find good sources. AI is one tool among many, not a stand-in for libraries, encyclopedias, or trusted journalism. Knowing where to look matters as much as knowing how to ask.
Analyze. Every message is made by someone, for a purpose, with a point of view. AI is no exception. Ask your child: who built this chatbot? What might the company want? What got left out of this answer? Then fact-check a claim, or run the same question through two different tools and compare.
Create. Making things is at the heart of literacy. Encourage kids to write, draw, and build their own work, using AI as a helper, not the author. That's how the muscles AI can't replace get built.
Reflect. Talk about how using AI made them feel. Confident? Lazy? Curious? Reflection is where the understanding actually lives.
Act. Help them choose when to use AI responsibly and respectfully, and when to put it away. That's media literacy as citizenship.
One important note from the Wang study. Information literacy buffered the harm to critical thinking, but among heavy AI users it also increased cognitive fatigue. Doing the thinking work alongside AI is tiring in itself. So the goal isn't unlimited AI use with a dash of skepticism. It's moderate use paired with rich literacy habits.
The good news is that this work isn't new. Media literacy educators have been quietly building these habits in young people for more than forty years. The job now is to bring that wisdom to AI conversations at home, and to give children the tools to stay in charge of their own thinking.
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References
Gerlich, M. (2025). AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6.
Hobbs, R. (2025). Media Literacy in Action: Questioning the Media (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury.
Wang et al. (2025). Learners' AI dependence and critical thinking: The psychological mechanism of fatigue and the social buffering role of AI literacy. Acta Psychologica.
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