Moms Have Enough to Worry About

Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey self-identifies as a nerd. She’s felt pulled toward numbers, analytics, and experimentation her whole life. She loved math and science growing up and studied electrical engineering in college.

In her first job as an engineer, however, she felt isolated. She was the only young Black woman in her work world, and her colleagues all seemed to be in different life stages. She decided to pivot to a space that felt more comfortable and has had a long and successful career, first in digital media and now in the technology sector for the last decade.

She’s been following the public conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) for years in her work. But she was shocked when one day in 2023 her kids came home from school talking about AI chatbots. “My husband and I had been engaging with it and talking about it, but once my kids said the words and that they knew what it was, I was like, wait a minute. I perked up,” LeBlanc-Godfrey said. She knew this wasn’t just another social media fad, like the latest TikTok dance, that her kids would be interested in one day and forget about the next. AI was already changing the way we work and live, and she knew it would only become more present in their lives. Yet even as someone working in the technology space, she realized she wasn’t equipped to help her kids navigate these new tools.

“I quickly realized that there is a need for relatable, digestible, accessible information around AI. At the intersection of technology and parenting, there's questions about screen time, there's cyberbullying, there's privacy, there's bias, there's social media, there's deepfakes,” said LeBlanc-Godfrey.

And if she didn’t know enough to feel confident in helping her kids through that journey, then what about other parents who might even be less adept at these technologies and the possibilities and hazards they create? That led her to launch Mother AI, a resource for parents like her who are trying to understand AI better, not only so they can help their kids with it, but so they can use it to make their lives easier. She says she’s on a mission to “flatten the technology learning curve for parents so that they can make the best decisions for their family within the digital landscape.”

LeBlanc-Godfrey joined our BLLx event on AI, Apps, and the Mental Load in July. I recently followed up with LeBlanc-Godfrey about the pressure on parents, especially moms, to educate their kids on quickly evolving technologies and her advice to parents just starting to tackle the questions around kids and AI.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Haley Swenson: You see AI as more of an opportunity for parents to connect with their kids and learn together than something they should worry about. Can you talk a little bit about how gender comes into AI and parenting? I think that with all this “anxious generation” talk, many parents feel nervous about their kids and how they use technology. Is AI one more thing that mom mainly tends to carry the emotional labor of, when it comes to monitoring the kids’ use of it, and talking to their kids about it? Is this one thing moms will handle more than dads, or are you seeing more gender parity there?

Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey: One thousand percent it's something that is on the hearts and minds of moms, because we worry about everything! We are scrolling in the middle of the night and reading all the things to look out for with our kids. Technology can fit into that big list of things mothers are worrying about, trying to figure out a plan for. However, I think there’s an opportunity to open the door for more conversations with dads on this and letting them take the lead on thinking about. Lots of dads love gadgets and new technologies and will be excited to explore this with their kids.

My husband and I met in undergrad and are both engineers and techies. We are naturally interested in and talk about technology together and with our kids. We make it a conversation so it’s not just one of us thinking about it.

When it comes to kids using technology, to screen time and the apps, particularly Instagram and Tiktok, and the content that they're seeing, there’s this two-edged sword where— Tiktok has been responsible for us going to some really cool places! Because my daughter will say, “Hey, I saw this exhibit, or Kendra Scott has something, or the ice cream exhibit is in New York, or this or that,” and it's like, “All right, great! [They] save me from having to look up things for us to do that they will be interested in, because they're finding it.“

But then there are other things, where they will repeat something they’ve [heard or seen online]. Like a “science experiment,” where you could supposedly make a coin move a battery or something like that. They would look at things and be like, “Oh, yeah, this is true.” Whenever they show us something like that science experiment—I literally went into Google and searched to see if it was real. And all the videos debunk it, and I showed them. We do a lot of leveling with them on what they share with us and whether it’s real or not. Just because we hear it and someone sounds confident doesn't mean you believe it, which means you have to go to additional sources. The primary focus is teaching them how to be critical thinkers and how to verify what they see or read so they're not just believing the first video that you see about something.

Going back to the question about gender, I think this could be a great gateway for parents to work together on discussing and deciding, what are the rules of engagement around these things? And that can then open up conversations around other decisions that need to be made in the household and how you’ll handle them.

Yes, [the project] is called Mother AI, but my husband always likes to add, “Dads too!” And yes, I agree. Hopefully more dads.

Can you talk a little bit about AI as a unique technology? It’s a game changer compared to our conversations about social media or smart phones over the years. I think some parents are just really intimidated by it. I certainly have been. But you want us to see it as an opportunity. What are its benefits to us as working parents?

AI is this technology that has existed for decades, but it's always been integrated into a product or service. Our emails have a spam folder. That's an AI algorithm that's kind of making those decisions as to what's a legitimate email versus what's not. We’ve all binge-watched things, and then been given similar recommendations. That's an algorithm that's behind it, tapping our credit cards, the weather that we see on our phones when we change different locations, the maps that we use every day to get directions on where we have to go. AI is incorporated into all those things.

But it hasn't been until now that we have these chatbots that allow people to engage with AI directly in the form of text, audio and video. That means we get an opportunity as individuals to play with AI in this new way.

A lot of the media around it has been almost like, “Is AI going to be an apocalyptic event? Is it going to take away all of our jobs?” We've got all this that can really deter someone from ever wanting to touch or engage with this technology.

It can also help parents in their day-to-day household management, as well as personally and professionally. There’s a way that it could help you with meal plan planning. There's a way that it can help you have conversations with your kids when they ask you things that you don't even have the words to describe in age-appropriate or creative ways. It can be a partner with you in their learning journey and help with homework on a daily basis. It's a way to figure out and manage all kinds of problems or tasks within your household.

Like the other day, I used an AI chat bot to figure out how to maintain all of the systems within my home—the HVAC, the dishwasher, the refrigerator. It let me know how often I should be servicing them, what servicing looks like, whether it is DIY, or whether I need to hire someone. And then I [asked it to] put that in a table. So now I know, for example, apparently there's something in your dishwasher that you're supposed to clean out regularly. No one gives us a homeowners’ manual when we buy a home, or on how to live life as adults, and it can help with that. AI allows me to lean into my curiosity about things on my to-do list and get me a succinct answer and a tactical plan for delivering it.

And then on the content creativity side, you can say [to a chat bot], “Hey, this is my brain dump. Clean it up and make it sound like a professional email.” Or, “Make it sound confident.” And instead of going from this complete, white space to being able to start with something, put it in and then have a conversation to get to your desire.

Using AI chatbots can be the on-ramp for folks to engage with AI technology as a whole. That allows folks to be creative and confident in the technology and then learn more about it, and at the same time, learn the issues and the risks that are associated with it. That’s important. But you’ll understand those risks better if you understand how it works and why people want to use it.

What an excellent opportunity to show your kids the process and the mental work it takes to solve a problem or answer a hard question, to make that visible in your interaction with AI. Your household maintenance example is great. It shows how many things you have to think about to keep their household functioning, and they also see AI isn’t just a one-stop-shop for answers. You had to work and think about how to communicate all that complexity to get what you wanted. And that’s a skill you have to practice.

Yes! The first prompt that I ever wrote for a chatbot was, “How can you help me? What do you do?” And then we had a conversation. Start there. And if you do it with your kids sitting next to you and helping you, you’ll be amazed by the ideas they have too.

There are so many concerns around education and kids using AI. Is it cheating? Are kids going to stop learning if they’re using this technology? I remember when we first got search engines. Before that, I would read through encyclopedias when I wanted to know about something. And that was often all the information that I had access to. If there was just a paragraph on what I was researching, that's all I had.

So like a search engine, I want kids to learn how to use AI as a guide and a support for whatever it is that they’re doing, and not just copy and paste. I’ll say to my kids, “Yeah, you could copy the chatbot, but it's not going to get you far.” AI is another resource to complement the human engagement and interaction that you have with your kids.