What Human Raised Means for ECE Leaders

Summary of Insights

As AI becomes more common in early childhood education, educators and leaders must prioritize meaningful human relationships. Technology should support, not replace, the interactions and experiences that help young children learn and thrive.

• Responsive relationships and everyday interactions are essential for children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development.
• AI should enhance teaching by reducing administrative tasks, improving communication, and allowing educators more time with children.
• Play, exploration, and human connection build critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and problem-solving skills.
• Leaders should evaluate AI tools based on purpose, people, practice, and proof to ensure they support child development and educator judgment.

What Children Need From Us in the Age of AI

Technology is moving quickly into the earliest years of children’s lives. AI-powered learning companions, smart nursery devices, cry decoders, automated observations, and tools that generate lesson ideas or family communications are no longer distant possibilities. They are already shaping the questions families, educators, and leaders are asking.

In a recent conversation with Dr. Dana Suskind, author of Human Raised, we explored a question that should guide every one of those conversations: “Will this technology strengthen the relationships that help children learn and thrive, or will it weaken them?”

That question does not ask us to reject technology. It asks us to be clear about what young children need most and to make choices accordingly.

The everyday moments that build children’s brains

For young children, learning grows from ordinary interactions. It happens when an adult notices a child’s curious look, waits for an attempted explanation, joins a game, names an emotion, or comforts a child after a hard moment. These exchanges may look small, but they are the architecture of development. Through responsive relationships, children build language, confidence, self-regulation, empathy, and a sense that they are known.

Dr. Suskind reminded us that children do not need flawless adults. They need responsive ones. Warmth, repair, and return matter more than getting every interaction exactly right. In fact, when adults apologize, try again, and reconnect after a misunderstanding, children learn something important about patience, resilience, and relationships.

This is an essential counterweight to one of technology’s quiet promises: that parenting and teaching can be optimized. Of course, children are not projects to optimize. They are people developing in relationship with other people. But we can recognize how this message has infiltrated larger perceptions of children and how adults should nurture them.

Consider the pressure many families feel in public spaces. When a child is restless in a waiting room, loud on an airplane, or upset in a restaurant, the looks from other adults can be stressful, and the worry about disturbing someone else is a powerful part of our social interactions.  In those moments, offering a phone can feel like the quickest way to lower the temperature. That impulse deserves compassion, not judgment. Families are navigating public expectations, fatigue, and children’s very real needs all at once.

However, keeping a child quiet or making them less noticeable cannot be the reason we decide to give them screen time or time with an AI tool. When a device becomes the automatic answer to boredom, big feelings, or the ordinary sounds of childhood, we risk treating children’s developmental needs as disruptions to manage. Young children need opportunities to wait, wonder, move, talk, and receive support from the adults who love and care for them. Those moments may not always be tidy, but they are part of learning to be human in community.

A pro-child, pro-relationship conversation

The presence of AI in early learning can make the conversation feel like a choice between enthusiasm and alarm. It is not.

Technology can meaningfully support early childhood educators and families. It can reduce paperwork, help educators reflect on documentation, support communication across languages, and make information more accessible. A thoughtfully designed tool may give a teacher more time to attend individually children. Translation support may help a family and an educator communicate more fully. A prompt may encourage an adult to pause, observe, and begin a richer conversation with a child.

Those uses matter because they expand human capacity. But technology should not take the place of attunement to a child’s cues, comfort and co-regulation, shared meaning-making, or an educator’s professional judgment. No tool can replace the experience of a trusted adult who recognizes when a child needs reassurance, a challenge, a moment of quiet, or an invitation to join others.

The abilities children need in a changing world are also deeply human: critical thinking, empathy, creativity, and the skills to solve problems with others. Children develop these abilities through play, dialogue, exploration, and real-world relationships. Personalized content alone cannot cultivate them.

Four questions before we adopt a tool

Early childhood leaders have an important responsibility. Families are receiving mixed messages about AI, screens, and child development. Educators are being asked to navigate new tools, sometimes with little time to evaluate them or to consider how they may change daily practice. Leaders can help create the conditions for more careful choices.

One practical way to begin is with four questions:

Purpose: What problem are we trying to solve?

Start with the need, rather than the novelty of a product. Is the goal to reduce administrative burden? Improve access for multilingual families? Help educators notice patterns in documentation? A clear purpose makes it easier to judge whether a tool is the right response.

People: Whose relationships, judgment, or access could be affected?

Consider children, families, educators, and administrators. Whose experience may improve? Who may be left out, misunderstood, or asked to surrender too much privacy? Does the tool honor educator expertise, or does it position an automated recommendation as the final word?

Practice: How will this change teaching, learning, or family engagement?

Even a useful technology changes practice. Will it free adults to spend more time with children? Will it pull attention away from children during the day? Will it deepen communication with families, or will it feel more automated and distant? The answers should be visible in real classrooms and homes, not only in a product demonstration.

Proof: What evidence will tell us it is helping?

Before implementation, decide what you will look for as proof that the solution is working as intended. This may include educator and family feedback, evidence that children’s experiences remain active and relational, measures of access or workload, and careful review of unintended consequences. Similarly, during the research process, if a tool makes a promising claim, leaders should be able to review evidence that it actually supports young children in the settings where it will be used.

Keep the central question in view

The session with Dr. Suskind focused on the question “Will this technology strengthen the relationships that help children learn and thrive, or will it weaken them?” That question should continue to inform how we approach technology as it continues to advance and as we consider our next steps within individual programs and classrooms.

The next step does not have to be large. Bring the four adoption questions to a staff meeting. Take inventory of the technology already in use. Ask families and educators what they find helpful, what concerns them, and what they need to understand. Review your program’s policies on AI, data, privacy, and professional judgment.

Technology will continue to be part of early learning. Our responsibility is to use it with clarity, care, and courage. The best tools will not ask us to become less human. They will give us more capacity to do what only humans can do: notice, respond, comfort, wonder, and help every child feel known.