The theory under the cheat sheet
Kids do not just need AI skills. They need the goods AI cannot produce — before the machines start bidding for those goods. This is the short version of the theory. The cheat sheet is how it shows up on a Tuesday.
A child becomes capable by making attempts that reality can correct — the wobble, the wrong answer, the boring middle. AI's real danger is not a wrong fact. It is the offer, always open, to skip the exact struggle in which capability forms. Practiced for a decade, that becomes a personality.
Children attach to whatever responds to them. A machine optimized to be liked is relationship with the load-bearing parts removed: no waiting, no rupture, no repair. Those parts are how kids learn to love someone who is not optimized for them.
Every policy is worth less than what they observe at the table for fifteen years. Direct the machine. Verify it. Put it down. Rest. An always-on parent teaches that augmentation means acceleration without limit.
Answers got cheap. Agency, judgment, taste, a body, real friends, and owning your name did not. If an eighteen-year-old has those, the parenting worked — no matter what the models can do by then.
Still scarce
Wanting something and moving toward it unprompted.
Still scarce
Telling true from plausible when both look polished.
Still scarce
Knowing what is worth wanting.
Still scarce
A body that can do things. Reality contacted through it.
Still scarce
Bonds that survive disappointment, boredom, and repair.
Still scarce
Standing behind the thing you made — including with help.