Parenting used to come with uncertainty. Now it comes with uncertainty, comparison, and an endless stream of advice from people, platforms, and tools that seem to know exactly what a parent should do next. A child may stop listening the way they once did, and a teenager may begin to pull away. A screen becomes easier than a conversation. Suddenly, the strategies that once worked no longer seem to fit, and even thoughtful parents can start to wonder whether they are falling behind.
Dayna Guido has spent more than 40 years inside the rooms where people try to tell the truth about their lives. A clinical social worker, educator, supervisor, and author, she has watched generations of parents and clinicians wrestle with questions that rarely come with clean answers. Her work has always lived in the uneasy space between guidance and humility, between professional ethics and human complication.
Now, as artificial intelligence slips further into daily life, Guido is concerned with a question that sounds simple until it is not: what happens when parents begin outsourcing uncertainty?
When Convenience Becomes a Substitute for Connection
The appeal is obvious. Parenting is exhausting, and the internet has trained us to believe that every difficulty should produce an immediate answer. A toddler will not sleep, or a teenager becomes withdrawn. A child says something cruel, strange, or frightened. In the old world, a parent might have called a friend, asked a grandparent, sat with discomfort, or waited long enough for the shape of the problem to change. Now, there is always something else to consult. A tool can summarize, suggest, soothe, schedule, and respond with a confidence that feels, in the moment, like relief.
Guido does not approach AI with blanket suspicion. She sees its usefulness, including for professionals who need help thinking through ideas, organizing information, or easing the burden of administrative work. Her concern is more intimate than that. It is not that technology can answer questions. It is that, over time, people may forget which questions are supposed to be lived through with other people.
Parenting, in Guido’s view, is not a performance of competence. It is a relationship formed in real time, often under conditions of fatigue, tenderness, irritation, and surprise. A parent watches a child watch a video of another child dressing up online, then decides whether to let the moment pass, turn it off, or use it as an opening. Maybe the answer is not panic. Maybe the answer is, “Now let’s dress up ourselves.” The screen becomes not the center of the experience, but a bridge back into the room.
The Cost of Growing Up on Display
That distinction matters. Childhood is increasingly mediated by images of other children doing extraordinary or strangely adult things, applying makeup with influencer precision, posing in costumes, participating in a culture of display before they have any real way to understand what display costs. Guido’s concern is not prudishness, and it is not nostalgia disguised as expertise. It is clinical and moral at once. Children are building a sense of self in an environment where the self is constantly being measured against what can be edited, posted, enhanced, and approved.
For parents, the same pressure appears in another form. The family online always seems more harmonious, more intentional, more attractive, more successfully regulated. The parent looking at it from the kitchen counter, half-listening to a child and half-answering an email, is left with the old shame in a new container. Everyone else seems to be doing it beautifully. Everyone else seems to know.
Guido’s answer is not to tell parents to become stricter, purer, or more perfectly analog. She is careful about perfection because she has spent a career watching people suffer under its weight.
“There is no such thing as a perfect parent,” Guido says. “There’s no perfect body. There’s no perfect child. There’s no perfect job.”
A family is not a machine that runs better when every interval is optimized. It is a living arrangement among people whose needs keep changing. The harder work is not achieving an impossible standard, but learning how to stay connected inside the imperfection.
The Human Experiences AI Cannot Replicate
This is where AI, for all its brilliance, reveals its limits.
“AI actually has not been a parent,” Guido says. “AI has not been human. And we are still human.”
It has not sat at a table with a child who refuses to eat. It has not felt the peculiar grief of watching someone grow away from you while still needing you completely. It has not stood in the rain with children on a warm day, laughing as they slide through the yard. It has not eaten a meal, missed someone, lost patience, repaired a hurt, or been forgiven.
Guido often returns to the senses when she talks about what makes us human. Taste, touch, smell, sound, the body’s way of knowing that something is real. The pleasure of food being made. The sound of real laughter. The regulating presence of another person who can sit nearby and help a nervous system come down.
“AI cannot replicate our senses,” Guido says.
These experiences do not merely decorate a life. They organize it. They teach children that being alive is more than being impressive, and that connection is not the same as access.
A More Ethical Way to Engage With Technology
The current temptation is to confuse friction with failure. If a child is bored, we offer stimulation. If a parent is uncertain, we offer instruction. If a clinician is overwhelmed, we offer efficiency. Yet Guido’s long practice in ethics and supervision suggests that some forms of friction are where judgment develops. People do not become wise by receiving endless answers. They become wise by practicing attention, by noticing consequences, by making mistakes in the presence of people who will help them repair.
This may be especially important for the professionals guiding parents through the new terrain. Therapists, supervisors, educators, and organizational leaders are being asked to respond to technological shifts while living through those shifts themselves. They are helping families talk about devices while managing their own dependence on them. They are trying to make ethical decisions in systems that often reward speed over reflection. Guido’s work has always insisted that ethics cannot be reduced to compliance. It has to be learned in the body, in conversation, in scenarios that are cloudy because life is cloudy.
The question for parents is not whether technology will be present. It already is. The better question is what kind of presence the adults in a child’s life will offer in response.
“There’s really no going back,” Guido says, “but we can create what is healthy for one another.”
There may be moments when a video becomes play, when a search becomes a conversation, when a device is used and then put away. There may be families that bring back landlines, not as a gimmick, but as an attempt to recover the sound of children talking without being watched. There may be grandparents asked not to pull out phones around babies, not because phones are evil, but because attention is contagious.
The Relief of Being Imperfectly Present
Underneath all of this is a quieter invitation. Trust that family life does not have to look extraordinary to be meaningful. Trust that a child can learn from watching an adult be imperfect and still engaged. Trust that boredom, awkwardness, rain, bad moods, and ordinary conversation still have developmental value. Trust that not every question needs to be answered before it has been felt.
AI can help people think, sort, and sometimes see. It can offer language when language feels hard to find. But it cannot enter the living room and become a relationship. It cannot replace the parent who closes the laptop, looks at the child, and decides to be present without being impressive. It cannot love us in our unfinishedness.
That remains our work, and perhaps our relief.
