When Both Parents

When both of a kid’s parents work in tech, you tell yourself you will keep things balanced. Plenty of outside time, plenty of books, screens kept in their proper place. And then your daughter is set a school diorama project, and what comes back is not a shoebox and a glue stick. It is a website.

This is Parker. ilana is her mum and I am her dad, which means she has a digital marketing strategist on one side and a developer on the other, and absolutely nowhere to hide from technology at the dinner table. So when her class was asked to make a diorama of the solar system, she skipped the cardboard and built a digital one instead. What is going to be more useful in 5 years, the ability to cut out cardborad shapes or the ability to vibe code an app into existence.
If the robots take over, probably the cardboard shapes, but we hold out hope.

I should be upfront before we go any further. This is a completely self-indulgent parent post. I have tucked a tidy little lesson in at the end to make myself feel better about it, but we both know why it is really here. Proceed accordingly.

What she actually built

It is a proper interactive web app on a live page. The Sun and all the planets, Mercury through to Neptune, each with its own write up. Venus wrapped in its thick hot clouds. Saturn and its rings of ice and rock. Uranus spinning on its side because it is, in her words, one of the strangest planets in the solar system. She even gave Pluto its due as a dwarf planet with a wonky tilted orbit, which is a braver position to take than it sounds once you have met the people who feel strongly about Pluto.

There are sections on why stars are so hot, on what the solar system actually is, and on how each planet travels its own path around the Sun. It is accurate, it is clearly explained, and it is unmistakably hers.

How she made it

The part that got me was not the page itself, although I am clearly biased. It was watching how she used the tools. She did not ask an AI to do the project for her. She used it the way we use it at work, as a thinking partner. She worked with both ChatGPT and Claude to research her facts, get the wording on each planet right, and figure out how to put the whole thing together, then compared the two like a tiny art director deciding which one had given her the better result.

A normal tool… to her

Ilana and I spend a lot of our working lives thinking carefully about how to use AI well. When to lean on it, when to keep a human firmly in charge, and how to make sure it lifts the quality of the work instead of flattening it. We have written about using AI with intention, and we mean it.

Parker has none of that baggage. To her, an AI is not a debate or a threat or a headline. It is just a tool that sits on the desk next to the coloured pencils. She picks it up when it is useful and puts it down when it is not. There is something genuinely facinating about watching a child treat this technology as completely ordinary, because that is exactly what it is becoming for her whole generation.

What mattered to me was that she still did the thinking. The ideas were hers. The choices were hers. The facts she insisted on double checking because she was not sure the first answer was right were very much hers. The AI helped her get there faster and gave her something to bounce off, which is precisely what it should do, whether you are seven years old or 40+ and running a marketing team.

So, this is what you end up with

I am not holding Parker up as a prodigy. She is a kid who likes a project and happens to have grown up in a house where prompting an AI is about as remarkable as eating breakfast. But I do think there is a small lesson tucked inside her space diorama, and it is the same one we keep landing on at work. The tools are not the point, the leverage they create is. This is all backed by the thinking, the person behind the machine because for now the best results come from a curious human who knows what they are trying to make, using whatever helps them to make it well.

So when people ask what happens when you raise a kid between a developer and a digital marketer, I finally have my answer. She builds a website about space, argues the case for Pluto, and sends her parents off to go and look at it. Honestly, we could not be prouder.