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On Thursday, in the beautiful Willamette Valley, I stepped off the stage after sharing my hope for Gen Beta. Though I was brought in to give a lecture to a group of professional business owners and managers, it was leaders with kids at home who came up more intrigued about their kids than their future workforce and clientele. And the following is what I shared with them that piqued their interest. 

There’s something hopeful happening in parenting right now.

Millennial and Gen Z parents (of Gen Alpha and Gen Beta kids) are pushing back on the digital childhood. Screentime is being delayed and limited. No longer is the iPad a babysitter. 

Despite the ubiquity of screens, more than two-thirds of U.S. parents now report limiting their children’s screen time in some way, up significantly from just 50% in 2020, and nearly four in ten parents believe they are stricter than their peers in enforcing those limits. This is not to say screentime has been removed. We have a long way to go there. 

In lieu of screentime, outdoor play is once again encouraged. Playing in the dirt, in the yard, and riding a bike are making a return. Even more traditional and analog toys are gaining in popularity, like simple playing cards or blocks and magnet tiles (the 21st century version of Lincoln Logs). In fact, on Amazon, at the time of the sending of this essay, 47 out of the top 50 bestselling toys are analog. 

On paper, this looks like progress. And in many ways, it is.

But beneath that hopeful surface, there’s a quieter shift unfolding, one that will shape Gen Beta more than screen time ever could. Gen Beta, born in 2026 and onward, will face a new wave of parenting that even their immediate predecessors, Gen Alpha, will only experience in part.

There is a unique paradox existing in parenting today.  Even as parents tell their kids to unplug, they themselves are more plugged in than any parents in history. Not to social media necessarily. Instead, parents today are plugged into a digital operating system governing every aspect of their lives.

Dashboards and sleep monitors. GPS trackers on pets and kids. Security cameras and digital baby monitors. And, more than the surveillance tools, there is a constant stream of advice flowing in from algorithm-curated feeds, which is only increasing with the prevalence of artificial intelligence-generated advice.

We’re raising kids to “go play outside,” while watching them from inside an app. That contradiction matters. In one recent survey, 79% of parents said they permit some degree of unsupervised play outside (KESQ, 2026). But in that same data set, 21% said their child is only allowed outdoors with an adult present. This is the split-screen reality of modern parenting: we want independence, but our anxiety keeps renegotiating the terms.

Because modern parental oversight never actually disappears. It just changes form.

The baby isn’t sleeping in the parents’ room, but the monitor tracks oxygen, heart rate, and breathing.

The parent isn’t at daycare, but photos arrive in their app every hour.

The parent isn’t asking how their child slept, because the sleep score already answered.

The child walks home alone, but their location is live-tracked.

It looks like independence. It feels like freedom. But it isn’t.

Imagine this moment:

“Did you hit your brother?”
“No.”
“Hold on, I’m going to check the camera.”

That exchange rewires something fundamental. The issue is no longer honesty. It’s no longer a character. Technology becomes the ultimate truth. I wrote about Gen Z’s preference to be surveilled in this essay. 

When truth is outsourced, children lose the space to be honest, dishonest, learn consequences, and grow.

Freedom without trust isn’t freedom. It’s probation.

To understand where parenting is trending, you have to look back to where we’ve been.

Baby Boomers parented with provision as the primary metric of love. Work harder. Climb higher. Give your kids those material things and the comfortable, care-free life you never had. Presence at home, due to work, was sacrificed in the name of security and economic stability.

Generation X reacted to their parents’ absence. They overcorrected their latchkey upbringing and wanted to be more present for their kids. They coined the phrase work/life balance. Gen X showed up for their kids…a lot. They made sure their kids were involved and “well-rounded” with endless experiences. And each of those activities from drama to soccer to band camp to little league, was attended by Gen X parents. They hovered. Helicopter parenting wasn’t born out of control; it was born out of an overcorrection.

Millennials took it one step further. Surveys find 77% of Millennials prioritize time with their kids over career advancement (Parents.com, 2025). But here’s the key shift: that time isn’t primarily spent watching kids perform, it’s spent doing life together.

It wasn’t just soccer games. It was experiences. Trips. Activities. Shared moments. This is a move from observation to participation.

For most of human history, parenting was passed down by family and community, not by books and definitely not by social media. The modern parenting book trend as a cultural force emerged in the mid-20th century with Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care in 1946. While the book didn’t invent parenting advice, it certainly accelerated parenting styles into the mainstream conversation, selling tens of millions of copies and shaping how generations thought about raising children. The very word ‘parenting’ only surpassed the older phrase ‘child-rearing’ in usage around the mid-1970s.

Yet, nearly one out of every two Millennial parents (47%) report they’ve researched and chosen a specific parenting philosophy, treating parenting like a curated project (Parents.com, 2025). 

These philosophies may be better known by names like gentle parenting or authoritative parenting or attachment parenting, to name a few.

On the surface, one might jump to commend labeled parenting as thoughtful, intentional, or even educated. 

While there is great value in learning from various frameworks and parenting experts, the heavy reliance on certain models raises an interesting concern. Young parents today are increasingly reliant on a stranger’s decision-making for raising their own kids. Meaning, instead of learning from raising kids in community, watching other parents interact in real life, and learning from parenting advice passed down from one generation to the next, Millennials and young parents are relying on “expert” advice that is simply blanket advice and not specific to their unique situation. 

And here’s the problem with that. When you adopt a framework, you don’t just parent your child, you measure them against a theory. And the moment your kid doesn’t fit the framework, panic sets in.

Because frameworks assume universality. But, if you have spent any time around a child, you very quickly know that children are anything but universal.

This is where the future cracks open. If nearly half of parents already rely on external systems to tell them how to respond, the leap to AI as a parenting guru isn’t radical, it’s logical.

The real concern is that AI doesn’t replace theory and frameworks, it replaces discernment itself.

Millennials were raised to talk about their emotions. Gen Z took that clinically-charged. emotional language and ran with it to an entirely new level, often to their detriment. Now, Millennial and Gen Z parents are teaching emotional fluency from toddlerhood.

And gentle parenting became the cultural banner for that shift. About 75% of Millennial parents have embraced gentle parenting principles (Parents.com, 2025).

Gen Z parents are already beginning to pivot, though, moving away from a single “right” method and toward mixing approaches. One recent survey found that only 38% of Gen Z parents rely solely on gentle parenting, with most blending multiple styles (Parents.com, 2025).

Again, this isn’t wrong. But it carries risk. 

Every bite.
Every hit.
Every scream.
Every “I hate you.”
Every “You’re so mean.”
Every tantrum…

These are normal (within reason) developmental behaviors. They are phases of child development. A child is boundary-testing and forming their identity. They are learning right from wrong. 

Here is the risk with outsourcing parenting to frameworks, and worse yet, to AI chatbots. When parents are trained to interpret every behavior as a signal, they stop seeing phases and start seeing pathology. They then start diagnosing their child. They apply labels. Normal behavior gets labeled as a disorder. And with that label, excuses are made for that child, unlocking a vicious lifelong cycle.

Now, let me be clear, I am generalizing here and there are definitely signals that children put out that should sound alarms and cause a deeper investigation. So, I am not dismissing every outburst as a part of normal child development or denying that sometimes there are underlying issues.

My bigger point is simply what I call WebMD Syndrome.

If you search “stomach ache,” you’ll find a section on abdominal pain that will lead to everything from you ate too much or you need to use the restroom to you have internal bleeding and you’re dying.

Search “my kid hit his brother,” and soon you’re diagnosing trauma, attachment wounds, or neurodivergence.

In fact, I searched for that exact phrase, and the vast disparity of information that shows up is honestly terrifying (I could have written a whole piece critiquing those search results. I went down a rabbit hole…I digress). It is blanket advice that would honestly work on one of my sons and cause my other son to spiral. 

And yet, many parents read internet parenting advice as gospel truth. More than that, they view social media parenting experts as top-tier child behavioral psychologists. Too much information doesn’t create wisdom. It creates a reaction.

What is concerning is that outsourcing parenting to a Google search is one thing, the user can click through an array of sources and find what may or may not be useful to them.

However, when they outsource that parenting advice to ChatGPT, they get very confident, very prescriptive advice that they can go and apply.

Millennials grew up comparing their lives online. Parenting didn’t change that, it intensified it.

In fact, 42% of Millennial moms say they feel pressure to keep up with parenting standards set by peers online (Parents.com, 2025). But here’s the problem: those standards aren’t universal.

They’re shaped by countless forces, including, but not limited to, socioeconomic status, time flexibility, personality, community, values, and beliefs. With some of these parenting influencers, what works for one family becomes gospel for another.

And when your child doesn’t respond the “right” way, you fear something is wrong with you, or your kid. 

Here is the root of my fear for parenting Gen Beta. AI offers relief from that social comparison pressure. No judgment. No comments. No comparison. Just answers.

You can turn to your AI bot for instant advice that affirms the inputter. It is biased to give the parent inputting the parenting question great confidence. It will cheer the parent on, letting them know they are doing great, while spitting out perscriptive advice about their kids.

That’s exactly why it’s so dangerous.

This isn’t an anti-technology argument nor anti-AI.

AI can be an incredible tool. It cannot be a parent.

I have three kids. I’m not a parenting expert. My kids are far from perfect, and I’m an even less perfect parent. My parenting style is: always learning, humbled often.  I’m not a child development specialist. But after years of raising my own children, and spending nearly a decade volunteering every week with elementary-age kids alongside my wife, I’ve seen enough patterns to trust this conviction: we can’t outsource thinking in parenting any more than we can in leadership.

AI can offer perspective. It cannot offer presence. It has no lived experience, only aggregated ones, and it delivers confident answers that are often just someone else’s worldview presented as truth. 

We’ve seen this generational swing before. If we’re not careful, Gen Beta won’t be raised by parents who truly know them, but by systems that analyze them. Discernment is formed through friction. Wisdom comes from trial and error. And children are shaped not by optimized responses, but by being known.

If we’re not careful, Gen Beta won’t be raised by screens. They will be raised by AI.