A universal truth about parenting is that the second you think you’ve got a handle on a difficult stage in your child’s development — sleepless nights, the terrible twos, puberty — everything changes. For parents of teens, nothing captures that constant scramble more than trying to keep up with technology. First the worry was phones, then wave after wave of social media. Now? Artificial intelligence.

AI is suddenly omnipresent in teens’ lives, unleashed on their devices without any real guardrails. We are, in effect, running a full-scale experiment on teens’ social, emotional and cognitive development, and parents are the main backstop for their safety. That’s a daunting role when so many parents (myself included) don’t fully understand AI.

For advice, I turned to clinical psychologist Lisa Damour. There are few people I trust more on this issue than Damour: She has devoted her career to supporting adolescents and has written the book — three of them, in fact — on teens. When my daughter unwrapped her first phone at Christmas, it came with a set of rules drawn from Damour’s last book, "The Emotional Lives of Teenagers."

Damour doesn’t offer an easy checklist of dos and don’ts, or bright lines about when kids are ready for certain types of AI. Instead, she lays out a guide to opening up communication.

That starts with resetting how parents talk to their teens about technology. Whether the topic is phones or AI, many of us reflexively pit ourselves against our kids instead of approaching these conversations in a way that strengthens our relationship with them.

The goal is to act as teammates rather than adversaries — for parents and teens to face the technology together, rather than confronting each other. “Our posture matters,” she says. So instead of saying, “Don't let me catch you using AI,” a better approach is to gauge their attitudes about AI.

That can be as simple as asking the right questions, Damour says. She offers a few examples for parents, such as, “What’s your idea of acceptable AI use?” “What do adults need to know about AI?” or “What are your friends doing with this that kind of freaks you out?” A parent can then build off their teen’s views to develop boundaries around AI rather than impose their own doctrine.

Establishing that channel of communication doesn’t just help kids make better decisions when using AI. It also creates space for teens to come to their parents when they make a mistake or see something wrong — say, a classmate circulating an explicit AI-generated image.

And new technology offers plenty of opportunities to make mistakes — some where the stakes feel unnervingly high. That’s especially true for areas where AI might seem to make life easier for teens, yet could stunt their social and cognitive growth.

For example, a recent Pew survey found that more than half of teens are turning to AI for help with their homework — and one in 10 say they rely on chatbots for all or most of their schoolwork. The problem isn’t simply that kids are taking shortcuts. It’s that AI might allow them to skip over the parts that feel hard.

A key part of adolescence is developing the capacity to grapple with difficulty — to tolerate discomfort and find a way through it, Damour says. She recommends parents talk to teens about how they are using AI for homework, discussing when that could be holding them back. “AI can make things frictionless,” she suggests saying. “It can make your homework frictionless. When is that a good thing and when is it actually a bad thing? Because friction is actually where we get growth.”

That frictionless quality applies to another area where AI is causing angst among parents: teens’ intimate relationships with chatbots. The worst-case scenarios, where teens have been encouraged into self-harm or even suicide, have struck fear in parents’ hearts. Yet even more benign interactions can be problematic. That’s because real-life relationships have conflict, and learning how to navigate it is a key part of development, Damour says.

Damour points out that the scariest stories have something in common: The teens had thousands of interactions with chatbots. “Most of the time, for kids to get that far off course requires many, many hours of unsupervised time online,” she notes.

That’s where practicing good digital hygiene can help. Although Damour has few hard-and-fast rules, her one line in the sand is this: no technology in the bedroom overnight.

That’s an expectation most easily set when kids first start to use, say, an iPad. But all is not lost if that horse has already left the gate. If late-night technology use seems to be a problem for your teen, Damour suggests there’s still time to set a rule — one that doesn’t only apply to kids but extends to the entire family. “All of the data we have about why kids shouldn't have tech in their bedrooms, much of it applies [to] adults” as well, she says.

Teens may not love that plan, but they at least can recognize its logic. And that’s something parents should keep in mind as they set boundaries around AI — rules can’t feel arbitrary or teens won’t follow them.

In the end, Damour reminds parents that they have two major guardrails when it comes to teens and risky behavior, whether that’s drinking at a party or harmful AI use: Rules need to make sense to the teen, and parents need to have a good enough relationship that their child reaches out when they’ve broken one. “That’s it,” she says. “There’s no other version of protecting our children.”

Will they still make mistakes with AI? Probably. But when they do, their parents will be there to guide them through.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

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