Stop Protecting Your Child's Brain and Start Building It
What children need most from parents has nothing to do with technology.
Posted May 28, 2026 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
My daughter was riding one of those little green/yellow plastic bikes around the room and she got stuck between the coffee table and the couch. "Daddy, I'm stuck. Help."
My first instinct was to push the table out of the way. It would have taken three seconds and the problem would have been solved and she'd continue riding around the room. That was the easy move, and it was the one I usually make and almost made again.
But I did have other options. I could have walked out of the room and let her figure it out alone or I could have stayed in the room but refused to move the table. I took the third one and said, "Just figure it out," and I stayed where I was. Three seconds later she lifted the bike, turned it around, and went the other way.
I am not telling this story because I knew what I was doing. I am telling it because the choice I almost made, pushing the table, is the choice I and many parents make a hundred times a day without thinking about it. And it is this choice that, multiplied across years, affects a child's capacity to solve problems independently.
Why Restriction Alone Is Not Enough
The conversations about children and technology almost always start with restriction. Let's limit screen time , monitor apps, and set boundaries around AI . Those are reasonable steps but they are also the wrong unit of analysis. Restriction is not the same as construction. You can remove every screen from a child's life and still fail to build the conditions where thinking actually develops.
Alison Gopnik's research on child development argues that parents are not carpenters shaping a child into a finished product but gardeners creating the conditions in which a child can grow. A carpenter controls the outcome. A gardener controls the soil. The soil is what matters is this situation above.
It is flawed to assume the conditions that build cognitive capacity in young children are only because of lessons, curricula, or carefully curated educational content taught in schools. They are often formed through unstructured time, boredom , the experience of wanting something and not having it handed over, and the freedom to try something, get it wrong, and sit in the wrongness long enough to figure out what went wrong.
These later conditions are often uncomfortable. They look, from the outside, like a parent or teacher doing nothing. That is a problem in a culture that measures parental quality by how much intervention a parent provides. Sometimes the most important developmental work looks like neglect.
How Early Experiences Shape Brain Development
Dahl and colleagues published a 2018 paper in Nature that reframed adolescent brain development as an investment window. They claim that the brain's plasticity during childhood and adolescence is not a vulnerability to be managed but a resource to be invested in. The experiences a child has during these years shape neural architecture in ways that become increasingly difficult to replicate later.
So what is parental responsibility within this framing? It is not enough to protect children from harmful inputs. Children need to get the experiences for their brains that build the structures they will rely on for the rest of their lives.
Those experiences are specific. They include sustained attention to problems that do not resolve quickly. They include social negotiation without adult arbitration. They include physical exploration of environments that have not been pre-sanitized for safety. They include long stretches of time in which nothing is scheduled and the child has to generate their own direction. Every one of these experiences is becoming rarer, not only because of screens, but because of a parenting culture that treats childhood as management rather than a developmental process to be supported.
The Hardest Thing a Parent Can Do
I've written before about cognitive foreclosure : the difference between an adult who loses a skill to AI (atrophy, reversible) and a child who never builds the skill in the first place (foreclosure, likely permanent). Parents are usually relieved when they hear this distinction. It confirms that their instinct to limit AI exposure is correct.
And it is correct. But it is also incomplete.
A child who never uses AI but spends every unscheduled hour in adult-directed activity is also experiencing a form of foreclosure. The cognitive architecture that comes from self-directed exploration, from boredom, and from social problem-solving, cannot be built through only adult instruction. It’s often built through experience but the experience has to be the child's, not the parent's plan for the child.
A child lying on the floor doing nothing is not wasting time. A child who is bored and has not yet been rescued from the boredom is experiening cognitive freedom . A child who is struggling with a social conflict and has not yet had an adult intervene is building skills of negotiation, perspective-taking , and emotional regulation .
Parents ask me "how do I protect my child from AI?" And my answer has begun to lean towards, "Am I providing the conditions where my child's capacity to think is actually being built?" Those conditions are not expensive or complicated. They are the oldest conditions in human development. They just require a parent who can tolerate watching their child struggle for a few moments. And that, in a culture that has redefined good parenting as the elimination of struggle, may be the hardest ask of all.
Dahl, R. E., Allen, N. B., Wilbrecht, L., & Suleiman, A. B. (2018). Importance of investing in adolescence from a developmental science perspective. Nature, 554(7693), 441–450. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature25770
Gopnik, A. (2016). The gardener and the carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Timothy Cook, M.Ed., is an international educator and AI researcher studying how algorithms reshape cognitive development, creativity, and student well-being in educational environments.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.