We Are Designing Childhood. We Should Act Like It |
We Are Designing Childhood. We Should Act Like It
Updated: May 22, 2026 17:37 pm IST Published On May 22, 2026 17:17 pm IST Last Updated On May 22, 2026 17:37 pm IST
Published On May 22, 2026 17:17 pm IST
Last Updated On May 22, 2026 17:37 pm IST
A mother at the India AI Impact Summit held in February 2026 told me her four-year-old had called ChatGPT her best friend. She said it and then went silent. I have been thinking about that pause ever since. Yes, it is alarming, but it is also very precise and telling. She was not describing a parenting failure. She was describing a real-world design outcome. A system was built. A child encountered it. A relationship formed. Nobody in that product decision chain was thinking about this mother, this child, this moment. And yet here we were, standing in a hallway, inside the consequence of choices made by people who will never meet her daughter. That is the problem. And it is not the mother's problem to solve.
A Room That Doesn't Usually Sit Together
At the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026, Bachpan Manao convened a panel called Raising with Algorithms: Who Shapes the World the Next Generation Grows Into.
The room brought together a learning design researcher from the LEGO Group, an early childhood systems builder working at the scale of India's Anganwadi network, an AI developer building language tools for communities left out of mainstream technology, an early childhood practitioner working with parents and educators, and a public policy lens from NITI Aayog. Five sectors, one stage, one question: what is happening to childhood as intelligent systems have become part of everyday life? That consequence, a relationship a child is forming with a system that was never designed with her in mind, is not a parenting problem. It is not a technology problem. It is not a policy problem. It is all of those at once, which is why none of those sectors has been able to hold it alone. A product team optimises for engagement. A regulator responds to harm after it has happened. A parent manages with what she has.
A teacher adapts to what the institution asks of her. An Anganwadi worker fills in the forms the system requires. Each of them is doing something reasonable. None of them can see the whole. That is why the conversation needed to happen. What it surfaced was not a framework. It was a set of things that people across very different positions still believe childhood requires, and a set of specific warnings about what is being invisibly taken........