Parent AI-Literacy Age Matrix

Companion to AI literacy by age: what to expect from a 6-year-old to a 16-year-old.

These bands are starting points for a conversation with your specific child, not a developmental assessment. When a band and a product’s actual minimum age disagree, the stricter rule wins.

The four bands, in full

~6: “It’s a machine that guesses words. It can guess wrong.”

• Supervision: Adult present and driving the keyboard or voice input; child watches and asks.
• Privacy: Adult’s own account only. No child data, images, or names entered under any circumstance.
• Verification: Adult checks every factual claim aloud, in front of the child, so the checking itself is visible.
• Creation: Adult-led only — a story or picture made together, narrated as “let’s see what it comes up with.”
• Prohibited: No solo account. No images of the child. No conversation about people the child knows by name.
• Sample phrase to use out loud: “It’s guessing what word comes next based on lots of books and websites it read. Sometimes its guess is wrong. Let’s check.”

~10: “It learned patterns from lots of text. It doesn’t know things the way a person knows things.”

• Supervision: Adult nearby, on a shared or supervised device, not necessarily reading every line.
• Privacy: No school records, home address, or photos of other children. First name only, and only if genuinely necessary for the task.
• Verification: Child names one way they would check a claim (search engine, textbook, ask an adult) before the adult confirms it.
• Creation: Child drafts with AI assistance; an adult reviews before anything is shared, printed, or submitted anywhere.
• Prohibited: No unsupervised account. No unsupervised image generation. No companion-style or chat-persona apps.
• Sample phrase to use out loud: “It doesn’t know things — it predicts likely words. How would we check if this is actually true?”

~13: “It’s a statistical system with training-data cutoffs and known failure modes I can name.”

• Supervision: Own account possible where the product’s terms allow it (see minimum ages below). Periodic check-ins about what they’re using it for, not shoulder-surfing every session.
• Privacy: Understands that chat logs and account data are not a private diary, and that a provider or a future data breach could expose them.
• Verification: Independently cross-checks anything used for schoolwork, health, or a decision with real stakes.
• Creation: Independent creative and study use, with the household’s disclosure rules (see the family AI agreement template) understood and followed.
• Prohibited: No companion-style “AI friend” products (see do not give a child an AI friend). No use for identity documents. No covert surveillance of siblings, friends, or partners. No bypassing a teacher’s stated AI-use rules for an assignment.
• Sample phrase to use out loud: “You can use tools for school within the rules we and your teachers set. An AI that pretends to be your friend is still a product — that is off-limits.”

~16: Can consistently explain and act on hallucination, bias, privacy, and sycophancy risks

• Supervision: Occasional conversation about how they’re using it, framed as interest rather than monitoring.
• Privacy: Manages their own account privacy settings; understands retention and deletion options for the specific product.
• Verification: Applies verification habits without being prompted to.
• Creation: Increasingly independent use only where consistent skills are demonstrated and the platform, household, school, and local rules allow it.
• Prohibited: Still no companion-style “AI friend” products. Same other legal and safety boundaries as an adult, plus whatever minimum-age terms the specific product still enforces at 16 (several major products require 18).
• Sample phrase to use out loud: “I am not pretending I have this all figured out. I do want to know what you are using, where school rules sit, and how you would ask for help if something felt off.”

Real minimum ages — check and date-stamp this section yourself

Products change these terms. The dates below are when this table was last checked; re-verify before you rely on it if more than a few months have passed.

• Re-checked OpenAI’s terms on: ____________________
• Re-checked Anthropic’s terms on: ____________________
• Re-checked Google Family Link’s Gemini availability on: ____________________

Repeated-session literacy check

Do not move a child to the next supervision level because of age or one repeated sentence. Observe skills across several supervised sessions using this script:

1. Say the mental-model sentence for their current band out loud, before opening the app.
2. Ask them to explain it in their own words and demonstrate a source check and privacy pause.
3. Record whether they applied the skill without prompting in later sessions; a correct repeat-back alone does not establish readiness.
4. Change supervision only after consistent behavior, taking account of the child’s needs, the product rules, and any relevant professional guidance; do not move on a fixed schedule.

Record what happened:

• Date: ____________________
• Band attempted: ____________________
• Could they explain and apply the checking and privacy skills? Consistently / With prompts / Not yet
• Next session’s supervision level: ____________________

Related reading

• A child’s first AI conversation — the facilitated script for the actual first supervised session.
• Talking to teenagers about AI — the two-way conversation that replaces close supervision once a child has their own account.
• What ChatGPT remembers, sees, and shares — the underlying data-retention mechanics behind the privacy rule in every band.