The Ben Mulroney Show - How AI Can Help Parent Your Kid

Episode Date: August 29, 2026

On today's episode of 'The Ben Mulroney Show,' Ben welcomes Amanda Hoover, Senior Correspondent at Business Insider. Together they unpack a new parenting dilemma involving where the line should be drawn when it comes to managing children with the use of AI. The modern parenting throuple If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠   Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar-raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto

for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family. to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Hello, mid-sized business. We see your big ambitions, but how do you achieve the wins you want when your technology is holding you back? SAP Grow is built to grow with your business, no matter its size,

with AI embedded at its core, working across every single. system, all ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow. AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Well, I think each and every one of us are trying to figure out how to best incorporate AI into our personal lives, our professional lives, so that we can optimize things. It never ceases to amaze me what I can achieve by using AI as part of my workflow. and I'm slowly learning how to use it in my personal life.

And parents are no different. But this next story, I think, is like these guys nailed it. This story of Molly and Sean Morris. And what they're doing with AI and their five-year-old daughter is a story that we need to share. And the person to share it is Amanda Hoover, the senior correspondent and Business Insider. Amanda, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. I mean, when I read this story of yours, it's,

Of course, this is the perfect way to use AI. Why don't you tell everyone about the story? Yeah, well, I'm curious which one you think is perfect because it's kind of a debate between the couple and they're using it in a few different ways. I love the first thing. The first thing to me is just so beautiful. Yeah, the first thing that they're doing,

they told me that at night they do something that they call collaborative storytelling where they're kind of just like building worlds with their daughter and she's participating and it's very nonsensical fantasy, pure childhood imagination, what they do in the morning, then they use like an AI image generator tool to have her kind of like work with the AI to visualize these scenes because she is too young to create a photo realistic version of fairies doing all these absurd things or, you know, wherever the story leads them. So they kind of look at this as it's still fully like human creative.

Yeah. But then there's this AI added piece. that allows her to do something that she wouldn't be able to do if she was, you know, drilling with crayons. Yeah, and I think that what that might do for her development and for sort of the communication between parents and building relationships between parents and the kids is, I think, just such a wonderful use of AI. The fact that Molly runs a startup and she uses AI for work, I mean, I think it's probably why it feels like these people, these,

this family's ahead of the curve. Yeah. But talk to, talking about the debate between Molly and her husband. Right. So then it leads into, you know, where's the line here? They very clearly have a line when it comes to story time.

The debate that they were having, they've been having in their house. And then while I was interviewing the two of them, it came up again. Sean wants to get something called an Omi wearables, you know, the kind of AI screenless wearable that listens into what's going on can act as a digital assistant for you. And it has a feature called the parent whisperer. And what this does is, you know, it's listening in on your interactions

with your kids. And in some ways, you know, if the kid is saying, oh, you know, I have a soccer game this weekend. Then the parent doesn't necessarily have to remember that. You know, the wearable can remind them. But it can also kind of analyze interactions. And this is what Sean was interested in. You know, this is their one child. He's never been a dad before. I know parents, it's not. a job that comes with a lot of training besides what you experience in your own childhood, perhaps. So he is interested in this to try it out as something that could coach him, you know, after he thinks back on a difficult parenting situation or if there's a meltdown of some type that often happens, he could kind of consult this wearable and ask, you know, did I do that

right? Could I have handled it better? And Molly does not like this. Yeah. And look, I'm in the middle of the middle of middle of raising three kids, not by myself, but in my opinion, you know, you learn by doing, right? And it's all trial and error. If it doesn't work, you do something different. But every parent is different. What I like, though, is they're, I mean, my sense when reading it is he wants to try it to see if it works. And if it doesn't work, he'll abandon it, which I like, because that's, that's sort of a microcosm of what so many of us are doing with AI in our lives. trying it out.

If it doesn't work, we try something else. And it just feels to me like much like having kids, there's no real instruction manual on how to incorporate AI into your life because everyone's life is unique. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And what I will say to finish it out, you know, as he was explaining to me his reasoning for this, by the end, Molly kind of heard him out in a new way

and said maybe they'll try it. But she still wants this distinction where this is not going to replace their moral judgment. They're not going to take advice from this thing that's never been apparent and doesn't have feeling. And doesn't probably understand the nuance of, you know, their relationship with their child and their goals. And let it replace that judge. Yeah. And that's that, see, that's, that's what my, my daughter is a, is a very creative, a young woman. She's, she's, she's been doing graphic design since she was sick.

She's 13 now. And she hates the idea of AI. It's the death of creativity, dad. And so we have these conversations about it. But I do believe that if you use it, if you're the boss, if it's taking initiative from you and you're not taking orders from it, then the humanity is still part of the equation. But if you're following its orders, then the humanity is peeled away, I think. That's sort of how I see it. Yeah, and I think that's the debate that everyone's trying to have at the workplace, in their personal lives, using AI for health recommendations and advice, which we know people are doing.

Talking to people about using it in parenting, these are like, like you said, these are people that are a little bit earlier than a lot of others. A lot of those people are AI optimists and early adopters, and they really really believe in the technology. Of all the reporting I've done about this, this is kind of where the highest skepticism was. was when it comes to these AI becoming, you know, in the middle of parent and child interactions or replacing some of the things that from time to time can be annoying. You know, I'm sure telling a story every night is difficult after a long day of work. But, you know, it's people were very, very precious about a lot of the parts of parenting. And do you know this, this, this, this, this wearable that he wants to wear? Do we know what it was trained on? Was it trained on every

single parenting book that's ever been written? I'm not, I'm not sure. Obviously, when you go to consult things like chat chvety, it's going to be trained on, possibly they trained it on parenting books. A lot of blogs, I imagine, because there's been so many parenting blogs

that was the start of blogging in a lot of ways. And there's been so many mom influencers, mom bloggers. There's been a lot of content on the, internet about parenting. So you can imagine that there's going to be very different ideas, perhaps, that any of these tools. And there's, and there's, there are fads and waves in parenting as well. And, and there are, there are groups that will say, you got to do, you got to do things this way. And then there's a whole other group that says, whatever you do, don't do it that way. And so,

you know, I didn't read a single parenting book. And my kids, they're fine. Yeah, they're fine. We're figuring it out. We're figuring it out. But, uh, I, uh, I, uh, I, uh, I, uh, I, uh, I, I don't. I always say, it's ironic advice that I give parents. I always say, never take any advice that begins with always or never. And I appreciate the irony of what I just said because there's no one way to do it. And my dad told me before I had kids. He's like, it's the most incredible thing in the world when you have a kid. It's a miracle.

It's the most special thing you'll ever experience. It also happens millions of times a day to millions of people. It's commonplace. It's every day. and it's also a gift from God. And so you got to figure out how to throw AI into that paradox. Yeah, I actually spoke to, a different parent I spoke to for this story was explaining to me that she noticed if she was querying a chat bot about parenting, it was giving a lot of

answers that were, you know, in the realm of gentle parenting because that has been a huge parenting trend and framework over the past couple of years. So that also raises the question of if you go to chatbots and ask this, are more people going to be pushed down one path of parenting? Maybe if you keep asking, push back and say, okay, no, I recognize that this is gentle parenting. That's not what I want to do. Or I don't agree with these aspects of gentle parenting. What other advice? But how many people have the time to interrogate that chatbot while in like some type of emotional crisis with a screaming kid?

Like, you really might take the first thing because the chatbot speaks with such authority and say, okay, okay, like, let's try this. And, you know, if everyone is doing this, it could really start to shift societal parenting. Well, it's a really great piece. And it opens up a whole line of questioning for parenting and where we're going. And Amanda Hoover, senior correspondent at Business Insider, has written The Modern Parenting Thruple. I thank you very much. And I hope you have a great weekend.

Thank you, you too. All right. Remember to find us on YouTube. We upload full interviews and content all the time.