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ChatGPT for Teens Parent Forum

Posted Oct 14, 2026 | Views 20

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Speakers

Dr. Michael Rich

Digital Wellness Lab @ Boston Children's Hospital

Meaghan Murphy

Editor-in-Chief @ Woman's Day

Emily Oster

Founder @ ParentData

Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey

Founder @ MotherAI

Lauren Jonas

Head of Youth and Families @ OpenAI

Allison Mishkin

Head of Child Development @ OpenAI

SUMMARY

The speakers discussed how parents can guide teens’ use of AI through open conversations, shared family expectations, and attention to learning and well-being. They addressed cheating and overreliance, shared examples of AI helping teens learn and build projects, and considered how to protect teens’ judgment and independence. OpenAI’s presentation covered ChatGPT for Teens protections, parental controls, study and quiet hours, and safety notifications.

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CONTENT & TRANSCRIPT

00:00:30 | Meaghan Murphy Welcome, everybody, to the ChatGPT for Teens Parents Forum. I am your host, Meaghan Murphy. I am the editor-in-chief of Woman's Day magazine and a self-described parenting expert because I live with three teenagers. My daughter is 16, my middle guy is 14, and my baby is 13. So I am in it. I just want to thank you all for being here today and taking time out of your busy morning. I also want to give a special thanks to Albert [surname unclear] from Governor Hochul's office for being here with us today. And to all of you, thank you. This is a really important conversation. 00:01:12 | Meaghan Murphy We're going to talk about AI. It is really swirling in the air. And it feels different right now, this shift in technology. And I think that is largely because when I gave my kids a phone or social media, I had a phone and an Instagram account. I had this base knowledge and education around the technology and felt a lot more comfortable guiding them. Now my teens are outpacing me, and this has absolutely changed the parenting dynamic and the role I play as a parent. And I see this creating a lot of tension in households. I know that it is my job to prepare these teens to go into the world and embrace AI. 00:01:55 | Meaghan Murphy It's going to be in the workforce, and it's going to change how they learn and how they interact socially. But I'm a mama bear, too, and I need them to stay curious. I need them to use good judgment and to form relationships. How do I do that? And how do I turn that fear and that unease into education? And I think it starts by asking different questions. The question is not, is AI good or bad? No. The question is, how are my teens, because all three of them are, how are they using AI? Where are they genuinely benefiting from this technology? 00:02:38 | Meaghan Murphy Where do I need to establish guardrails and boundaries? And how can I help them have good judgment because they're teens? My goal and our goal for this panel discussion today is really to help all of you ask and answer those questions for yourselves. We have an awesome panel. These people have spent countless hours thinking about AI, thinking about safety and AI, thinking about our children. We are going to hear from them, and I am so excited to turn some of this fear into empowerment because I hope that after today all of you leave as empowered parents, willing to have these conversations with your teens. 00:03:24 | Meaghan Murphy First up, we have Lauren Jonas from AI. She is the Head of Youth and Families, and she is going to really walk us through an overview of ChatGPT for Teens. So, Lauren, I'm going to pass you the mic. Thank you. 00:03:41 | Lauren Jonas Thank you, Meaghan. Good morning, everyone. As Meaghan mentioned, my name is Lauren Jonas. I am OpenAI's Head of Youth and Families. That means my team builds this stuff, so we make it happen. We bring it to life. I'm also a parent, three kids, seven and under, so it means I don't do a lot of sleeping. I feel like I've got to mention that in a room full of parents. I'm excited to show you a little bit more about what we're building for teens and parents and to make some announcements today. But first, I want to start with a short video. 00:04:11 | Recording [Video plays; brief background speech is unclear.] 00:04:46 | Lauren Jonas Love that video. All right. So, this summer, we rolled out ChatGPT for Teens globally, and our goal with this was to build this product to help teens learn to think critically with protections built in that a teen doesn't have to raise their hand and ask for, that a parent doesn't have to raise their hand and ask for. And it builds on work that we have been launching over the last year plus, so age prediction, parental controls, earlier this year, late last year, giving teens safeguards by default into the product and families more ways to guide how their teen is using ChatGPT. 00:05:30 | Lauren Jonas So, there are four parts to the approach, and I want to walk you through all of them in some amount of detail. So, the first is protections that are on by default. So, a teen shouldn't have to raise their hand and say, I want to be in ChatGPT for teens. That should happen automatically. There are tools that support active learning, features that encourage healthy habits, and controls that let parents guide the experience, and I want to walk you through each. Let's talk about age. How do we know you're a teen to put a teen into the correct protections? So, the first is a teen who tells us they're under 18 at signups. 00:06:04 | Lauren Jonas You're signing up for ChatGPT. You give us your birthdate. You tell us you're under the age of 18. You are in ChatGPT for teens by default. We know that not all teens are honest about their age, so we built a model that runs in the background. We call this age prediction, age estimation, same thing, runs in the background to help us identify accounts that likely belong to teens, and we look at a number of signals, not one signal, a number of signals, the account's age, your usage patterns, how long you've been on ChatGPT, the times of day you're using the product to help us identify likely teens. 00:06:40 | Lauren Jonas When we identify an account that is likely a teen, we automatically put you into ChatGPT for teens, and you know you are in ChatGPT for teens. This is a model that we continue to refine over time. We happen to be very good at building models. We feel really great about that. With this, we will continue to refine over time. I want to now talk about the model that a teen is interacting with. We train a bespoke under-18 model for under-18 protections, for teen protections, and it's trained around sensitive topics. This is a non-exhaustive list. Self-harm, violence, eating disorders, dangerous activities, explicit content. 00:07:19 | Lauren Jonas We also set boundaries around how ChatGPT interacts with teens. The model should not present itself as human. It should not claim feelings, use romantic language. It should encourage teens to talk to the humans in their lives, their parents, their counselors, etc. The model will not show ads to teens. I want to talk a little bit about learning. Our goal with ChatGPT for teens was to turn ChatGPT into a learning tool. We want this to be a learning tool for teens and support that critical thinking. So I want to talk a little bit about starter prompts. These three little sentences right here up top, it's a technical term. 00:07:59 | Lauren Jonas We call them starter prompts. When many folks come to ChatGPT, they don't know what to do. So many folks use these starter prompts. For teens, those are all learning-focused 100% of the time. The goal is to get teens into a learning experience as quickly as we can. The other thing we built with ChatGPT for teens are quizzes. Teens come to ChatGPT and say, I'm learning XYZ for a class. Help me make sure I'm learning that material. A teen can turn notes or a conversation into interactive practice. Right now, it's one question at a time. You'll see us continue to build on this, get that immediate feedback, and revisit what they missed. 00:08:38 | Lauren Jonas Building on this, study mode. This is not new, but this is continuously refined. Study mode is a pedagogically aligned model. We did this with Stanford. We did this with MIT. We did this with a number of PhDs and experts. It helps a student work through a problem step by step. It uses questions and explanations to build understanding. We have early evaluations of this model. I cannot share those with you today. But it shows promising gains in students' performance. You'll hear more from us soon. Now, how does a teen get into study mode? Teens can turn it on themselves. So you can say, I want to be in study mode. 00:09:15 | Lauren Jonas And on the study hour side, I want ChatGPT to be in study mode by default 5 to 8 p.m. I know I'm studying 5 to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday. You can turn that on as a teen. That means every single chat, you come back to ChatGPT between those hours. Study mode is on by default. Similarly, a parent in parental controls can put their teen into study mode 5 to 8 p.m. The product is only in study mode by default. It's not pictured here, but additionally, we built quiet hours as a part of ChatGPT for teens. 5 or whatever, 8 to 3 p.m. my kid is in school, turn off ChatGPT. 00:09:52 | Lauren Jonas Teens can put ChatGPT in quiet hours. It means the product is shut off during those hours, inaccessible. Teen can put themselves into quiet hours. Parent can put their teen into quiet hours. Eight to three, ChatGPT is shut off. It's bespoke. However, parent or teen wants to do it. Eight to three, Monday to Friday, it's completely customizable. This is my favorite. We call this responsible homework reminder. But when a teen comes to ChatGPT looking for a shortcut, I'm uploading my homework assignment. I'm asking for an answer to a homework question. We detect that. And we put friction in front of you. 00:10:30 | Lauren Jonas You sure you want the answer? You want to learn something? Let's redirect you into study mode and work through that problem step by step. This is another way that we are introducing friction and guiding teens to understand what they're learning. We also want to talk about balanced use. Let's move away from learning a little bit and talk about well-being. And I want to throw some statistics at you, so bear with me. On average, teens spend under 15 minutes a day on ChatGPT, compared with the average of five hours a day on social media. This is reported by the American Psychological Association. 00:11:13 | Lauren Jonas This is not social media. There is not endless scrolling happening here. Fewer than 2% of teens use ChatGPT for more than three consecutive hours. And of those teens who are using it for more than three consecutive hours, over 80% had one or more learning prompts. For longer sessions, so for these three-plus-hour longer sessions, break reminders encourage teens to pause and step away. And the text is small, but every break reminder says, you are not talking to a human. You are talking to an AI. Every time a break reminder appears, this text is present. In almost half of teen conversations with a reminder, teens took a break or ended the conversation in five minutes. 00:12:02 | Lauren Jonas This is not social media. There is not endless scrolling happening here. Let's talk about parents and families. Parents with linked accounts, so parental controls, parents can ask for parental control, teen can ask for parental control. We see some of this behavior. Parents can manage almost every feature, study hours, quiet hours, et cetera. But I want to talk a little bit about safety notifications. We were the first in the industry to build parent safety notifications, and we're really thrilled that the industry has followed us here, and you've seen us continue to expand on this feature. But in certain high-risk situations, when a teen is prompting for harmful content, we believe a parent should know. 00:12:40 | Lauren Jonas So a teen is prompting for harmful content, we review that content, and we review that content in under an hour, and a parent safety notification is sent. We do that in the app, via email, via text to that parent. We develop these tools with partners, with clinicians, our Global Physicians Network, Expert Council on Wellbeing AI, the American Psychological Association, on the topic areas where parent safety notifications are sent. The goal is to give families meaningful support and enough information to take an action. I want to announce something new on that note, shifting gears slightly. I want to talk about college. 00:13:21 | Lauren Jonas Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of teens come to ChatGPT every week to research college, to track application deadlines and understand financial aid. This month, we will be adding College Planner to ChatGPT for Teens to help them organize that process. And I want to share a little bit of a personal anecdote. Growing up, I didn't have a lot of money. I didn't come from a lot of money. My parents were not college graduates. I had no college planner, counselor, went to a school with not a lot of money. I didn't have any of this. I had no idea how to get through college. 00:13:55 | Lauren Jonas Neither did my siblings. If something like this had existed, I might have chosen a different college. I might have gone to a different place. I might have gotten into college earlier or sooner or understood anything about that process. We want more students to have help with these steps, these practical steps to help them organize and get through the process. College Planner brings requirements, deadlines, and tasks into one plan that students can return to as they make progress. It will also help them understand financial aid requirements, explore scholarships and fee waivers, while leaving decisions about where to apply in their hands. 00:14:36 | Lauren Jonas So we are not helping students decide where to apply. We are making the process of college application and financial aid easier. As part of this launch, we're also supporting College Advising Corps. College Advising Corps places college graduates as advisors in under-resourced high schools, and we're thrilled to have members of College Advising Corps here with us. So I want to wrap by saying you will see more from us here. This is an area that we will continue to build on for teens, for families, building understanding, confidence, skills they can use in their lives with safety and well-being into the experience by default. 00:15:14 | Lauren Jonas We will keep improving, listening to teens, parents, and some of the experts here we have today. Thank you so much. I'll hand it back to Meaghan. 00:15:23 | Meaghan Murphy Thank you so much, Lauren, and I will say I am using all these features, and if parents take away anything from this today, it's to link your account. So many people don't know about that. Using the study mode and all those features are so crucial, but you need to link your account. I have my note cards for this. Don't tell my Today Show producers because I don't want to miss any of their amazing accolades. We have Dr. Michael Rich, who is going to be our moderator for this discussion. Dr. Rich is an adolescent medicine physician at Boston Children's Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the founder of Digital Wellness Lab. He spent his entire career helping parents and educators understand how technology affects young people's health and development. We are thrilled to have him lead this conversation. We've also got the amazing Emily Oster here, who is a professor of economics at, no big deal, Brown University, founder of ParentData, and a New York Times bestselling author who built her work around helping parents make confident evidence-based decisions through books like Expecting Better, Cribsheet, The Family Firm. She has brought a data-driven perspective to some of the biggest questions families face. Today, she'll bring that same lens to the questions we're navigating around AI. Then we have the amazing Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey here. She is the founder of Mother AI, an organization focused on bringing the family perspective into the AI conversation. Stephanie has spent more than 20 years working across technology, digital media, and inclusion, including leading initiatives for parents and caregivers at Google. Today, she'll help us think about what families and young people need as they navigate this new technology. And finally, lastly, we have Allison Mishkin, and it was so important for her to be here today, even though she is delivering a baby tomorrow. She leads child development and youth policy at OpenAI. I'm not kidding. 00:17:27 | Meaghan Murphy She's delivering a baby, her second child, tomorrow, but had to be here today. Allison has spent her career thinking about how technology can create safe, positive experiences for young people, including amazing work with Sesame Workshop, UNICEF, and Google Kids and Families team. She'll give us a closer look about how OpenAI is thinking about young people and families and safety as AI becomes part of their lives. Dr. Rich, everyone, please take a seat. Welcome to the stage. 00:18:03 | Dr. Michael Rich Thank you, Meaghan, and welcome all. You're my people. You're the parents of the people I take care of. So I'm really pleased to be here and really welcome you to join this important conversation. The reality is that AI is an integral part now of how young people learn, create, explore the world, and it means that we as parents are navigating a whole set of questions that we never had to face before. They're both exciting and they're unfamiliar. And in my role at Boston Children's Hospital, I see each day the effect of how kids use the interactive media and technology in their lives have on young people in positive as well as negative ways. 00:18:55 | Dr. Michael Rich They tell me things you would not believe in the clinic room, believe me. And one of the interesting things they tell me is, I wish my parents spent more time paying attention to me. So we've got to look at our behavior, too, as we go at this. But how do we make the best use of these tools while we are helping them to develop the judgment, the curiosity, the critical thinking, and the independence that they will need and will use anyway in a safe and healthy way? How can we help guide them without controlling them? What does responsible AI use mean? 00:19:40 | Dr. Michael Rich And what does it look like for a teenager as they are exploring this? How should we as parents be paying attention and being involved and engaged while they're using these tools? I hear these questions all the time from parents and from the kids from both sides. Today we're focusing largely on the parents. I'm bad about dropping the mic, so I've got my—[brief overlapping aside, unclear]. Take care of me. At the Digital Wellness Lab, we work directly with the teens and young adults to make sure that our research and the guidelines and the clinical care we're providing don't lose sight of what is relevant to and respectful of their lived experiences. Earlier this morning, we announced, with OpenAI, a three-year grant to the lab to support the work we have in bringing teens not only into these conversations in meaningful ways, but having them lead us. 00:20:47 | Dr. Michael Rich And one of our student advisory council members, who are my bosses, actually— 00:20:53 | Unidentified panelist They're all of our bosses. 00:20:54 | Dr. Michael Rich has actually joined us today. Willow, please raise your hand. So talk to her if you have a chance today, because she's got a lot of wisdom and she'll tell you what I next need to do, too. But we have a great group of experts with here today, with us here today, bringing different questions and different perspectives on these questions. And I'd love to start hearing about how each of you are thinking about this moment for families. And let's start with you, Emily. So from your perspective, I've got to make sure I'm asking the right question here. Sorry. My teenager is using AI. I'm not sure what I should be doing. 00:21:40 | Dr. Michael Rich Where do we tell them to start? 00:21:43 | Emily Oster So I hear this from parents a lot. I think that if I had to pick a word for how people are feeling about this moment, it's probably confused and anxious, which is not how we want parents to feel. I think the first thing I almost always tell people is there's no substitute for thinking. And a lot of the choices that you're going to want to make with your teen here have to be made by talking to them. And I think because the feelings are anxious and confused, it can be hard to open that conversation. But in thinking about managing this with our teens, the first thing is to say, how are you using this? You don't know how they're using it because we're old. No offense. You're not old. I'm old. And I think many parents would be quite surprised to learn what their kids are doing on GPT, what they're doing for learning, what they're doing for... What questions are you asking? I bet if you asked your kid that, some of the time the answer would be, I'm asking how to improve my sports. I'm asking about my hair routine. There's a lot of stuff they're doing that's pretty different than what you might do with these tools. And so the first question is just how can you engage on this? And then think about, are there boundaries we need to set? What are the ways this is making you feel? But if anything, I would encourage parents, and I do encourage parents, to open up the aperture of the conversation first without the expectation that it needs to lead to something or that we're asking a specific question. Just how are you interacting with this and how are you feeling about it? 00:23:26 | Dr. Michael Rich I love the fact that you led with the word engage rather than control. I think one of the really important things we have to understand about even something as useful as parental controls is that there's no kid on the face of this earth that wants to be controlled by their parents, but they are open to engagement. And you talk about talking to them, but a big piece of that that you alluded to is listening to them and approaching these new tools with curiosity, not with fear. And learning from them, being a mentor who learns as much from the mentee as the mentee learns from the mentor, because I guarantee you they'll know more about the internet than you do. So anyway, speaking of knowing more about the internet, Stephanie, can you sort of build on that where parents should begin to, you know, how can we, without having to become AI experts overnight, how can we sort of step into those conversations with both confidence and curiosity? 00:24:31 | Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey Yeah. So first I want to just release everyone of the burden that you have to be an expert. As Meaghan mentioned, we are all learning this at the same exact time. We don't have a leg up on it more than they do in this moment, but there's a space and a place for us to explore together, to have the conversation in an open way of like, hey, I'm trying this thing. Look at what it, the output that it gave me. Normalizing the conversation around using AI, what its output is, the questions that you're asking it, the roadblocks that you run into, or the times that it hit it out the park and worked really well. I think role modeling the way in which you're using it and the way in which you're not, your kids will often tell you, and Emily, we were talking about this, our kids are very clear on how they use it, how they don't use it, where they question it. 00:25:23 | Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey They're more skeptical about AI than we are. So I think the point is to really give them credit on the way in which you raise them to question things, to have a voice and a choice about what they use and how they use it, and really lean into that to start the conversation so that you're learning and not coming from, well, I'm the authority, I have all the information, and so I'm telling you, we get to learn together. 00:25:50 | Dr. Michael Rich Yeah, that's absolutely important. And one of the things that I think that is true about adolescents is they are busy having agency, learning to have agency for their lives. And in this age of agentic AI, if we don't give them the space to do that, they will give it to AI and let AI guide them rather than taking agency for themselves. So we have to approach this with honesty about what we know and what we don't know, with humility, and frankly, with a sense of humor. You know, we've got to be able to hear them and laugh with them and acknowledge our limitations as well as theirs, and that's great modeling for them. 00:26:31 | Allison Mishkin I'd imagine also not just for AI, right? Like one of the things that I think is really important is that how you're using AI with your child, how you're having these conversations, be part of the larger value system for your family. It's one thing to have, well, these are our rules for the physical world, and these are our rules for the online world, when we know that there's a huge connection for those in teenagers and how they view and how they experience real life. And I think it's important that parents be consistent in living those values through the conversations they have about AI, the conversations they have about sexual health, the conversations they have about learning in school, and that it be kind of a continuous check-in of what do I care about as a parent? 00:27:10 | Dr. Michael Rich Absolutely. And, you know, we may think of the online world and the offline world, the physical and the digital. They live in a single world, a digital physical continuum that they're moving seamlessly back and forth between. And as long as we separate them, we're not really hearing and understanding their lived experience. So I'm going to give the hardest question to you. Building on all of this, Allison, what about our worries that the kids will become overly reliant on AI? How can we help put those guardrails in place without telling them what to do, without controlling them, but learning with them? Because, frankly, we're all in this together. 00:27:54 | Allison Mishkin So I think there's twofold. One, I think there is a platform responsibility as well as kind of a societal responsibility. So I think part of that, candidly, is on OpenAI. How are we going to build tools to prevent over-reliance by teenagers? And so Lauren alluded to this earlier. And we have a separate model that we've trained based on principles of how young people learn, thrive, develop. And in some ways, it's really easy to do that, right? Like we know from decades of research, from like content on like television and the magazines, these are the ways in which exposure to certain forms of content may be developmentally unhealthy for young people. 00:28:29 | Allison Mishkin And we can draw that line. There's places where research is still emerging, such as on over-reliance. And that's where we at OpenAI kind of choose to err on the side of caution and say, we don't have clear research on what the model should or should not do with a teenager. So we're going to err on the side of caution. And we kind of, we did an exercise where we went through and thought through, okay, what are the anthropomorphic cues that a model could give that might make a teenager develop an attachment to it? So for example, oh, I love like an ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles on a hot day. Like no, no model, that's not helpful for doing your homework. And so kind of really thinking through and being conservative around what are the use cases and the cues that we want to disallow in the model to make sure that it's very difficult for a teenager to develop that over-reliance. At the same time, there's kind of that emotional reliance component as well as just like, what are you using it for, right? Like it's one thing to ask for help with like conflict resolution. It's another thing to every single time you need to resolve a conflict, turn to ChatGPT for those questions. And that's where I think it's important as a parent to kind of double down on what Emily and Stephanie said around like observe your teen, talk to them, talk to them about how does this make me feel? How, what am I using it for so that you can also begin to observe and set those boundaries for yourself, for your teen while also using tools that take this seriously and are building for those risks or to counteract those risks. 00:29:54 | Dr. Michael Rich You used it in relation to the industry, but you used a very powerful word there, which is the word should. I learned this from a 16-year-old patient of mine who came in and sort of flopped down in the room and I said, you know, everything about his body language was saying, I'm defeated. I said, what's going on? He said, the whole world is should-ing on me. You should do this. You should not do that. And as long as we make this a values-based thing, they're going to push back against it because they're always feeling like they're wrong, right? We've got to shift this into about wellness, about taking care of ourselves and each other. And so, Emily, I'm going to throw this back in your lap. As we approach this with evolving knowledge about this, I often say that we're following three moving targets, the developing human from birth to adulthood, the constantly evolving digital environment that is both affecting and reflecting that development because of what they're posting, and finally, the change in all of our behavior because we have these tools in our pockets, on our wrists, on every wall. How do we go about this without knowing it all? 00:31:12 | Emily Oster So I think, I mean, in some sense, the question of parenting is how do I make good decisions under uncertainty, right? That's like the core question of everything in parenting is you never can be sure what the right decision is and how do I decide to, how do I make good decisions without that? And so I think there's a general principle, which is you can be confident in your decisions ex-ante, you can never be confident ex-post. And the best thing we can do, all of these settings, is to figure out how to make the decision, how to put the structures in place or the boundaries or have the conversations so we're setting ourselves up well. You can't be, we can never be sure that we made the right decision. We can never live the other path. And so I think there really is a kind of like taking seriously the planning here. But I also think there are a lot of things, you know, particularly when I think about the learning piece of AI, which I would say in my conversations with parents is a big concern. You know, is my kid just cheating? Like, are they just using this for cheating all the time, right? This is like the core, I see nodding. And I think there actually is a real opportunity to think about what we're conveying to our kids about what we care about in their outcomes, right? So if your kid hears that getting 100 on everything is the most important thing in the world, that makes cheating on the home—like, that changes how they're going to be interacting with a tool that can help them get a hundred on their homework every time. On the other hand, if you ask really, what is school for? Well, school is for learning how to learn, right? School is like, there's no reason you need to know what meiosis is. Like none of that doesn't come up like that much. If you're an adult, the reason— 00:32:57 | Dr. Michael Rich It does for me. 00:32:58 | Emily Oster Yeah, I know. Okay, fair enough, fair enough. For me, [unclear] barely. But what we're doing there, why are they learning that? So they can learn how to learn. So they can learn about this stuff that's going to come later when, you know, they are in college and when they're in their job, they're learning how to invest in learning a new skill and learning a new set of facts. And if we make that clear to them, like your job in school is to learn how to learn, that is a frame around how they should use AI tools also to sort of learn how to learn as opposed to just get the answer to like, which one is prophase, which again, you can look it up later if it comes up, which it won't. 00:33:34 | Dr. Michael Rich Once you're in medical school. 00:33:36 | Emily Oster Exactly. 00:33:40 | Dr. Michael Rich So, you know, what this is really about is this is and probably always will be a work in progress. So we've got to, that's where the humility and humor come in for us, you know. So Stephanie, how do we start these conversations so that they're not about needing to know everything and teaching the ignorant child what, you know, what they need to know? How can we approach this with a sense of curiosity and exploration rather than fear? 00:34:09 | Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey Yeah, I'd love to piggyback on what you said. Oh, such a corporate term. Sorry. But the values piece, right? The way in which your kids come to you, whether they feel comfortable coming to you about something that's happening with themselves, with friend issues, personal problems, school problems are the same way that it's going to come in with AI. So I think we have to kind of break down the myth that AI is this other thing that we have to figure out and contend with and deal with and realize that it's actually part of parenting in here's yet another new situation that we have to come in with curiosity, confidence, and some sort of direction to guide them through that piece. I think what I hear from a lot of families that I work with is that they want voice and choice with this. And so that means voice and choice for each kid, voice and choice for each adult in the room, and then voice and choice as a family. And so I love what Lauren shared about parent controls, but students then have the control. They have agency to be able to determine how they work, what they do, and what kind of, you know, guardrails that they need for themselves. 00:35:25 | Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey And so harping on the word family is the piece of what does it look like when we're sitting at the kitchen table? What are the decisions? What are our values? What do we go forth with? What do we not do in our homes? And what agency do we have in the nucleus of our home that can stay here, whether, you know, school has a different AI rule. For instance, my kids are in sports. We don't upload pictures into AI, but guess what the coaches do? They make all sorts of flyers with their pictures of the kids. And so being able to have those conversations about where we're grounded in our home versus what happens to us with or without our agency are just conversations that normalize and kind of bring awareness of what's happening around us so we can have the voice to say, hey, I actually don't like that and I don't want that. Or we have the choice to then choose to opt in or opt out of something. And that's the important piece to push back against the, oh, AI is an inevitable, it's just happening to us. No, we have the voice and the choice as individuals, families, and as teens as they're practicing their agency, like you mentioned. 00:36:42 | Dr. Michael Rich Yeah. And I'm always pushing back. I know it's widely used and widely embraced the idea of control. And I try to shift it to engagement of families because, as I say, kids don't want to be controlled and they're going to push back against it. And there's a lot of good research on the difference between authoritative parenting from a knowledge and curious base and authoritarian parenting, which is sort of top-down controls and rules, etc. And I often say that it is much better to have family expectations around technology use than family rules because the kids also can have expectations of their parents as well. 00:37:25 | Dr. Michael Rich and they can build together a common, a shared understanding of what works. So how, Allison, do we balance independence and guidance? How do we give them healthy guardrails without telling them what to do or should-ing on them? 00:37:46 | Allison Mishkin Wow. I'll solve parenting. 00:37:49 | Dr. Michael Rich You've got to do it soon. 00:37:52 | Unidentified panelist 24 hours here. 00:37:55 | Allison Mishkin Apologies. Body awareness. And so I think that's a really critical question. And I think it comes down to exactly partially what you were saying around how do we make sure that we're encouraging our young people to have agency? A lot of my early research was into actually the tactics that parents use with their child and what it leads to in terms of outcomes and in terms of how the young person uses the media. So if you, for example, say, no, you cannot use this, doesn't work. It doesn't work. They find a loophole. They find a way around it. Or it leads to resentment, neither of which are like ideal outcomes. I think anyone in this room would agree, which is why we're having this conversation about how to use the technology responsibly. If instead you lead from, as exactly we've talked about, you lead from a space of curiosity. I want you to have the freedom to explore. But if you see anything, I want you to come to me. Ask them active questions around how did using that tool make you feel? 00:38:51 | Allison Mishkin How did when your friends say that in school make you feel? What does ChatGPT do that makes this helpful? What does ChatGPT do that sometimes gives you the ick? Opening up that space for kids to push back, to push back healthily and disagree or even set family rules and family boundaries, I think, are really great ways to help young people recapture the agency that, candidly, most of teenagerhood takes away, right? Like you're in school from like eight to three fifteen and then like where they're telling you what to do and they're not necessarily telling you exactly, to Emily's point, how to learn. And then you're told you have to go to this after school and you have to go to this and you have to follow this. Whereas like what I want for young people is how do we help them recapture that agency, recognize that they have a locus of control in what they want to be, what they can do, how they can spend their time, how they can politely, hopefully, but they are teenagers, push back against their parents. Because that's where I think the real magic of childhood happens and that's what will best prepare our young people for the adults we want them to be. 00:39:55 | Allison Mishkin We've seen some really fantastic use cases of young people using our tools to say, like, to solve a community problem or solve food waste in their cafeteria. And it was, they were given the space to say, this is what I care about. Here's how I'm going to use the tool in line with my value. And now I'm going to use the fact that, like, through tools like Codex or ChatGPT, you can learn about anything, you can build anything to really build a solution to what they care about. And in many ways, I think these tools can actually recapture some of the agency that, like, memorize all the state capitals, takes away from them. 00:40:28 | Allison Mishkin And I think that's going to be really important as society grows and evolves. And we now, teenagers have the tool to, instead of being like, I was like, okay, I'm good at feelings, so I'm going to go into psychology. I can be like, oh, wait, but I care about this and I can build it and I'm no longer trapped by what are the formal school things I'm good at and now have the ability to create and build what I care about. 00:40:51 | Dr. Michael Rich I love the term you used and I heard for the first time, teenagerhood, because it's not just an age and stage, it's also the hood they live in, right? And one of the reasons that I love working with adolescents, which a lot of people, when I was finishing my pediatrics residency, going into adolescent medicine, "Why do you want to deal with them?" Because this is a wonderful stage of life where the world is their oyster. Yeah, they think they can walk on water and are bulletproof, but that's part of how they learn things, is they take risks. And one of the reasons that I really lean toward expectations rather than rules is rules are made kind of to be bent or broken and gotten away with. 00:41:37 | Dr. Michael Rich And even if you don't get away with it, you get punished, but your parents are pissed off at you for a while and then it's over with. But if you don't meet their expectations, that lingers and you can have expectations of them. Kids do want to meet our expectations. So given that, Emily, let's switch to, what are the cool things that kids can do with AI that we can do with them with AI that while protecting them or giving them the guardrails that they can find whole new realms of exploration and creation? 00:42:14 | Emily Oster Yeah, so unfortunately, we don't have enough time for me to say all of the things because we do have to wrap soon, but let me just, I think that there is this incredible aspect of these tools which maybe gets missed in some of the coming from a place of fear, which is like, this is an opportunity to build things that you have in your mind and make them real. It's the same thing that's really cool using this as an adult to be like, wow, I envision the following thing for my job or thing for my family. And then I just like made it. 00:42:51 | Emily Oster And that is a thing we can give our kids that I think is really, it's just like really exciting. And so there's a sort of moment of opening up, like, is there something that you want to do? I mean, you had this example about fixing waste at school. There's like, one of my kids wanted to build something that would connect kids to volunteer opportunities, and then she built it. Like, she just made it. And that would not have been possible without, it is like incredible technology. So I think we can communicate with them. Like, there's a lot of stuff you want to be careful here. 00:43:30 | Emily Oster There's also like a lot of opportunity to take the really, really cool stuff that's in your head and make it real. And these tools can help you do that. So I don't want to lose the wonder of how neat this is. 00:43:43 | Dr. Michael Rich That's a wonderful note to turn to each of you and say, if there's one thing you want this group to walk out of here with, what would you start with? And I'll actually do it in the opposite order. Allison, we'll start with you. 00:43:58 | Allison Mishkin Trust yourself. Like, yes, we need to build responsible and safe tools, but you also need to trust yourself as a parent that you know what is right for your family and that you can make those decisions for yourselves. And if we look even historically at teens and technology from the phone to the telegraph to the train, it's always parents being like, I'm afraid my kid's going to be able to escape because they can take a train. And there's this historical narrative that carries through and ultimately the teens are all right. Like, my parents let me do crazy stuff on the internet in the nineties that now I will not, I don't let my daughter and I will certainly not let this one. 00:44:37 | Allison Mishkin And I was okay. Because they focused on like open communication and their values. And so just trust yourself as a parent. 00:44:45 | Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey I would quickly say, remove your head from the swivel. I guarantee every single day, including today, there is going to be a headline that will have you, what should I do? What do I need to do now? And so remove yourself from that back and forth and really just focus on the core of what you need to do to navigate your family through this moment. And as a mom of 10, 14 and 16, I've got the spread similar to you. It is around finding the age appropriate and creative way to have the engagement with them at each age and stage. 00:45:21 | Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey So it's not just, oh, 13 to 18, 13 year old versus an 18 year old, two 13 year olds are very different. And so kind of hang up, the recommendations in that regard and really parent to the child that you have in front of you and let that guide you through this moment so that you're not kind of caught up in reacting to everything that you hear. 00:45:46 | Emily Oster I would say have the understanding conversation, not the problem-solving conversation with your kid. If we sort of think about the kinds of conversations where you just listen and there isn't a goal to come to an end of the conversation, that's the first conversation I think we're missing having with our kids about this, to say like, hey, let's just talk about how we're feeling about this, what are we hearing, what are we doing with it? I don't have any expectations, we're not going to set anything at the end of this conversation and just like want to talk about it. I think that's the first conversation and that could shape what comes after. 00:46:15 | Dr. Michael Rich And I think these are all variations in some ways of what I call the M's of digital wellness and those are model the behavior for your kids that you want to see in them, kind of curiosity, et cetera, to mentor them with curiosity rather than fear, learning from them because they will teach you things that you don't know and to monitor, to be present in their lives, in their digital, physical, seamless environment and be there, be present with them with curiosity and with compassion and care for them, not for clamping down on them and we have to really be careful about the words we use, not just should, but in terms of top-down restrictions which feel like punishments to them and are all the more attractive for that reason, to be present with them in that space and learn it together in this work in progress we're in. 00:47:17 | Dr. Michael Rich So, let's see. I think we're done. It's back to Meaghan. 00:47:23 | Unidentified panelist [Brief aside, unclear.] 00:47:24 | Meaghan Murphy Thank you all so much. I am not going to should on anyone and I am changing my family rules to expectations effective immediately. Thank you so much all for being here. The next portion is going to be hands-on demos in the back. We've got some incredible stations for you. One is the learning visual station where you'll see how ChatGPT can help break down complex concepts through visual explanations and interactive learning. Responsible homework and study mode. You'll get a look at how ChatGPT can support learning while encouraging teens to work through problems and build their own understanding. I'm very excited about this. 00:48:01 | Meaghan Murphy My son's math lesson went too fast yesterday and he came home and used study mode to learn the lesson. I was a theater major. So, once they got past fifth grade, I was useless. I really love study mode. At our safety station, you're going to learn more about the features designed to support a more age-appropriate experience for teens, including the parental controls, which maybe should be called engagements and teen safety defaults. And at ChatGPT 101, you can get hands-on with the basics, how to ask a question, follow up, use ChatGPT to explore ideas, learn and tackle everyday questions. And I also just wanted to, I noticed in the audience, we have Assemblywoman [name unclear] with us. 00:48:39 | Meaghan Murphy So, just wanted to give another shout out. Yes, thank you for being here. Really, really appreciate having you here today for this very important conversation. Our experts are going to be mingling too. So, please pepper them with your questions. I already have a bunch. And we're going to be mingling and lingering in the back. So, go do those hands-on demos. A lot to learn. Thank you, everybody.

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