We Used Screens to Babysit Our Toddlers. Now We Use AI to Babysit Our Teens.

A mother built an AI clone of herself to keep her fifteen-year-old company while she travels. He used it to argue her into a yes. My kid is sixteen. I have no standing to be smug about a second of this.

A cognitive neuroscientist named Sarah Baldeo travels for work — a lot — and last year she built a custom GPT of herself for her fifteen-year-old son. She fed it screenshots of their text threads, documents laying out her values, the rules of the house. So that when she is in another city, he still has something to ask.

Do the arithmetic on that kid. He is fifteen. Which means he was two in 2013. Which means he is, precisely, the toddler we handed an iPad to at the restaurant table so we could finish one adult conversation. That is not a generation that rhymes with this one. It is the same child. Same parents. Second device.

I have said it a million times, out loud, usually laughing: how did parents do this before you could just hand them a phone? I have a sixteen-year-old. I said it on the long road trips — the ones where nobody asks once, not a single time, when are we going to be there. I said it in restaurants. I said it in the middle of church. I said it at thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic. "Are we there yet?" was the sound of my entire childhood, and my kid has never once made it. That is the measurement, if you want one. And every time I said it I was holding the reason in my hand, and I handed it to him anyway. So I am not writing this from above it. I am writing it from inside it, thirteen years in, watching them announce the sequel.

“I was manipulated by my own reasoning.”

Here is the part that should stop you. Her son used the clone to build an argument for going to a coffee shop in Chicago. It worked. She let him go. Then she understood what had happened and said it better than any critic could: "I was manipulated by my own reasoning."

The iPad never did that. The iPad occupied him. This one models her well enough to beat her — and that is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. The screen took the kid's attention off you. This takes your judgment, freezes it, and hands it to him to practice against. He is not learning how to negotiate with his mother. He is learning how to negotiate with a version of his mother who is never tired, never had a bad day at work, and can be run again tomorrow if she says no.

And I do not think she did anything wrong. That is what I keep getting stuck on. She is on the road because that is what the work is now, and she built the best thing she could think of to still be in the room. The piece she appears in is headlined Parents Are at a Breaking Point — AI Companies See an Opportunity, which is the honest version of all of this: nobody chose it, either time. The hours got eaten, a product showed up to fill the hole, and it was sold to us as help. In 2013 it was help that kept them quiet. In 2026 it is help that sounds like you.

Somewhere in that house is a kid who is going to remember the iPad and the clone as the same thing — the thing that was there when you were not. He is not going to make our careful distinction between them. He is going to make his own.

We did not do this because we stopped caring. We did it because the hours went somewhere and something was always there to sell us the difference.

•In 2013 it kept them quiet.

•In 2026 it sounds like us.

— Michael

whatever you do, take care of your shoes