Half of parents fear kids rely on AI too much as schools struggle to set guidelines

Half of parents worry their children rely on AI too much, survey finds

A Deloitte back-to-school poll of 1,150 parents captures a familiar knot of anxieties, that children lean on AI too heavily and that schools teach it too little. Artificial intelligence has moved out of the office and the university lecture hall and into the primary school classroom, and a fresh survey suggests plenty of parents are uneasy about it. Half of those polled said they were worried their child "relies on AI too much," according to Deloitte's annual back-to-school study. The figure comes from a survey of 1,150 parents of school-aged children, and it lands in the middle of a broader argument about how much technology belongs in a child's day. It echoes earlier findings that children are picking up AI faster than adults, and it revives an older debate about screen time and where sensible limits should sit. What makes the worry striking is how far ahead of the classroom it runs. Only 22% of parents said their child's school provides approved generative AI tools, and just 33% said their school has set guidelines for using the technology at all. Yet the tools are already in children's hands. Nearly 30% of respondents said their children were using generative AI in their schoolwork, a level of adoption that has outpaced the rules meant to govern it. The anxiety cuts both ways, which is part of what makes it hard to resolve. More than a third of parents said they were concerned that schools are not preparing children with enough AI skills, and one in eight said they planned to pay for AI tutoring or camps to close the gap themselves. So parents are caught between two fears at once, that their children are leaning on AI too heavily and that they are not learning to use it well enough. Both worries can be true, and for many families they clearly are. A classroom in flux The numbers add a new layer to a running debate over technology in schools, one that predates the current wave of chatbots. Business Insider's Katie Notopolous wrote in May about her third grader and his friends using Google's Gemini on school-issued Chromebooks to generate silly pictures of poop and dinosaurs, a small illustration of how casually the tools now sit in young pupils' reach. Districts are already wrestling with a related tension, weighing the pull of platforms such as YouTube against a years-long slide in maths and reading scores. AI arrives on top of that unfinished argument rather than in place of it. Some teachers have responded by turning back the clock. One physics teacher in Canada told Business Insider last year that his students' use of AI had pushed him toward more analogue work, so that he could be sure the thinking on the page was actually theirs. "I've tried to sort of shift back toward some handwritten assignments, instead of having them do it on the computer," the teacher, Ward, said. "That way, I can tell this is how they're writing. I know it's theirs." That instinct sits alongside research suggesting the picture is not straightforwardly bleak. Studies on children and screens have repeatedly found that what matters is less the raw quantity of time than the quality of what is on the screen and whether an adult is involved. Applied to AI, that framing shifts the question from whether children use the tools to how, and with what guidance. A pupil who uses a chatbot to skip the hard thinking is in a very different position from one using it to check work or explore an idea. For now, the survey mostly captures a moment of unease rather than a settled verdict. Parents can see AI reshaping the world their children are growing up in faster than schools, or families, have managed to write the rules for it. What the figures do not tell us is how that anxiety translates into behaviour at home, whether it hardens into limits or softens as the tools become ordinary. On current evidence, most parents are still working that out in real time.

Parents worry AI is becoming a crutch for their kids while schools struggle to keep up, survey finds

Only 1 in 3 schools has AI guidelines as nearly 50% parents grow anxious about kids leaning on AI too much. Kids are using AI for their homework, and half of their parents are not sure that's a good thing. Deloitte's 2026 Back-to-School Survey, which polled 1,207 parents of K-12 students, found that 49% worry their child relies on AI too much. The findings suggest AI adoption is moving far faster than the policies meant to guide it, leaving many parents unsure how these tools are being used in education. What the survey found about kids and AI in school The numbers paint a clear picture of a gap between adoption and oversight. 28% of students already use generative AI in their schoolwork, yet only 33% of schools have guidelines for its use. Only 22% of schools provide or recommend approved generative AI tools to students. Recommended Videos Perhaps most telling, 38% of parents do not even know whether their child's school has an AI policy at all, pointing to both a communication failure and a policy one. Meanwhile, 35% of parents say they are concerned schools are not doing enough to prepare students for an AI-driven future. The gap between what kids are doing and what schools are formally acknowledging is widening every semester. How parents are filling the gap themselves With schools slow to act, some parents are taking matters into their own hands. 13% say they plan to pay for generative AI-related classes or tutoring outside of school, a sign that a private market for AI education is already forming. Meanwhile, the irony is hard to miss. The same survey found that parents who use generative AI alongside search and social media in their own back-to-school shopping spend an average of $737 per child, nearly double the $381 spent by parents who use no digital tools at all. This means AI anxiety and AI adoption are growing in the same households simultaneously. If schools do not move faster on AI guidance, parents will keep building workarounds on their own, and the gap between prepared and unprepared students will only get wider. Since AI is becoming a normal study tool for many students, the bigger question is whether schools can teach children to use it wisely instead of letting it do the thinking for them.