Should I Let My Child Use ChatGPT?

Quick answer

Yes, for most families - with guidance, and with your involvement scaled to your child's age. OpenAI's terms require users to be at least 13, and under-18s to have a parent's or guardian's permission, so for primary-aged children the answer is not yet. From 13, the realistic question is not whether your child will use ChatGPT - most Australian teenagers already do - but whether they will use it with your guidance or without it. Supervised, honest use builds a genuinely valuable skill. Unsupervised, unexamined use tends to build a quiet dependence. The difference is not the tool. It is the setup, and the setup is yours to choose.

What the age rules actually say

OpenAI's terms set 13 as the minimum age for ChatGPT, and anyone under 18 needs a parent's or guardian's permission. That gives you two clean anchors. Under 13, the answer is not yet, and you are on firm ground saying so. From 13 to 17, yes is available, but it formally runs through you - a useful framing, because it makes your involvement a condition of use rather than an intrusion on it.

Two caveats. The age terms answer "may they", not "should they" - readiness varies more by child than by birthday. And your school may have its own policy on AI in assessment, which sits on top of anything you decide at home.

The case for yes

Start with the fact most bans quietly ignore: your teenager is very likely using AI already. An Elevate Education survey found around three-quarters of Australian high-schoolers use AI at least a few times a week, almost a quarter daily, with ChatGPT the most common tool. Saying no at home mostly moves that use somewhere you cannot see it.

Used well, ChatGPT is the most patient tutor your child will ever meet. It will explain photosynthesis a fourth time without sighing, generate practice questions on demand, and argue the other side of an essay thesis at 9pm on a Sunday. Those are genuinely useful things, and the skill of directing them is worth money later: PwC's 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer found jobs requiring AI skills carry a 56% wage premium.

There is also the plainer argument. This technology will sit inside your child's working life whether you like it or not. Learning to use it with judgement, at home, with you nearby, is the gentlest training ground they will ever get.

The case for caution

The tool makes things up. ChatGPT works by predicting likely words, not by looking up facts, so it produces confident, fluent, sometimes wrong answers - invented statistics, fabricated citations, plausible nonsense. A child who treats the screen as authoritative will get burned; the plain-English detail is in ChatGPT explained for parents.

The bigger risk is quieter. In RAND's American Youth Panel research, 67% of students said using AI for schoolwork harms critical thinking - the students themselves suspect the habit. And Gerlich's 2025 study in Societies, with 666 participants, found heavy AI use associated with cognitive offloading - letting the machine do the thinking - and weaker critical thinking, with the effect strongest in 17- to 25-year-olds.

Neither finding says ban it. Both say the same thing: unsupervised, unexamined use is where the damage happens.

Supervised or unsupervised? Scale it by stage

The direction of travel matters more than the exact ages. You are not building a permanent supervision regime; you are lending your judgement while theirs develops, then handing it back.

How to say yes well

1. Do the first session together. Set up the account side by side, try a few prompts, and let them see you check an answer against a real source.
2. State the principle out loud: AI extends your thinking, it never replaces it. One sentence, repeated until it is furniture.
3. Agree the homework line before the first assignment. A shared standard like the traffic-light framework in AI homework help: what to allow and what to watch prevents the argument before it starts.
4. Make "could you do this yourself?" a normal question - curious, not accusatory, asked often enough that they start asking it of themselves.
5. Revisit the arrangement each school term. The tools change fast; ten minutes at the start of term keeps the rules matched to reality.

The recommendation: say yes, slowly. Anchor it to the age terms, start supervised, taper deliberately, and treat the first year as an apprenticeship in judgement rather than a licence. A ban feels safer and delivers less - the use continues, just without you. The wider case for building this capability early, and what Australian teenagers should actually learn, is set out in AI education for teenagers in Australia.