What your child is actually using

The accurate picture is duller and more useful: it is a very fluent pattern machine. Fluency is the product. Correctness is a frequent side effect, not a guarantee.

Why this is genuinely good news for your child

A fluent explaining machine is an unusually good fit for the thing schools cannot give every child: infinite patience. A tired teacher with thirty pupils cannot explain long division a sixth time, in terms of Minecraft, at 9pm. This can, and it will not sigh.

The risk and the opportunity come from the same property. It will explain anything, endlessly, in any style: including explaining something wrong, and including doing the work instead of teaching it. Which one you get depends almost entirely on how the request is phrased, which is what the rest of this course is about.

Notice that the second prompt is not more technical. It is just more specific about who is learning and what the tool is allowed to do. That is the whole skill, and you can teach it in an afternoon.

What to do before you set rules

• Find out what your child is already using, without making it an interrogation. 'Show me the last thing you asked it' works better than 'have you been using AI?'
• Use it yourself for a week on something real: a work email, a recipe, a school form. Rules written by someone who has never used the tool are obvious to a child instantly.
• Notice one thing it got wrong. You will need that example later; nothing lands like a mistake you found yourself.