Hearing It Said Out Loud
Thirty-one years after I first read the Hart and Risley study in 1995, more than two thousand of us spent a morning on what I’ve been building on all along.
The Room I Wasn’t In
At nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning I sat down at my desk in the glass-walled office with a cup of full-caffeine coffee (the real kind, because I knew I’d need it until quarter to twelve), turned on my listening ears, and did not take my eyes off the screen for almost three hours.
The screen was a symposium from Brookings and ZERO TO THREE called Generation AI Starts Early, on what AI is doing to children under eight. I mentioned it in the margins of last week’s post. People were in the room in person, and more of us were in the room online, more than two thousand from around the world, researchers and policy people and technologists, all asking about the years when the architecture of a human brain is still going up.
I had been building on the same idea for thirty-one years, since I first read Hart and Risley three decades ago: that babies’ and toddlers’ brains grow and develop in the context of human relationships. Every product I made and tried to put into the hands of parents and caregivers came from that. Most of those years, I did it without a room like this one.
What Nature Still Does Better
Sweta Shah of Brookings introduced the keynote speaker, Dana Suskind, and I want to be honest about what her talk did to me, because it wasn’t only validating.
She is a cochlear implant surgeon, not anti-technology by any stretch. She told the room that somewhere between eighty and ninety percent of a child’s brain is built in the first three years of life, and that “human interaction is the instruction guide for wiring it.” Not perfect interaction. “We are good enough,” she said, because babies don’t learn from perfect parents. Nature is still the gold standard, and what’s at risk now isn’t only attention. It’s intimacy. It’s the relationships a developing brain uses to learn how to be human.
When her “Human Edge” slide came up, I laughed out loud. I wrote about those same twenty-first century skills in the 1990s.
She wants “human raised,” the idea behind her book, to become a label as recognizable as “organic.” And she said the part I wrote down twice: we can’t allow human connection to become a luxury good while everyone else gets an artificial substitute.
I am building a tool for the people doing the raising. I am not building a replacement for it, and I have never once wanted to. But sitting there with a researcher naming exactly what’s at stake if any of us get this wrong, I felt the weight of it differently than I had at my desk. Validation and warning arrived together. I don’t think I’m supposed to resolve that. I think I’m supposed to keep building inside it.
The Stoplight I’d Already Built
The first panel began with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a developmental psychologist, who would not let anyone talk about “AI” as one thing. She sorted it. Social companions that talk to children directly: red light. Learning products: yellow, as long as the toy actually does what it claims. And green, when the information is gated, meaning a closed system for teachers, parents, and caregivers, built by people with real experience and expertise, so the person asking can trust what comes back.
I sat with that longer than the moment warranted, because it describes what I built. A closed system. Thirty years of sessions in homes and clinics, a parent coaching certification, and a philosophy I’ve spent a decade calling Investigative Parenting™: wonder before you worry, before you ever reach for a verdict. LUMA runs on a general-purpose language model, as I told you last week, but what she knows and how she behaves come from the closed system I built around it. I didn’t know, until that stoplight, that I’d been building toward a category with color.
Getting You Back to Your Life
On the second panel, Alexandra Mishkin, who works on these questions at OpenAI, said she loves friction and wants more of it in the design of these tools. A chatbot, she said, is at its most successful when it gets you offline and to the thing you came to it for in the first place. And it isn’t enough for these tools to hand out information or ask a reflective question. Design for the teachable moment.
Then she said the sentence that made me stop typing: “If you don’t have research on what the outcome will be, you should err on the side of caution.”
Last week I showed you LUMA’s list for the nights when no one picks up. Something chewy to bite on. Music and two minutes of swaying. Come back and tell me whether it helped. I hadn’t had a name for what that was. A teachable moment, it turns out: you leave knowing one more thing your own body can do for you at three in the morning.
In the margin I wrote my own addition to Mishkin's idea: the skill worth teaching is knowing when to turn to LUMA, and when not to.
The Cost of Reaching Everyone
The speaker who stayed with me longest wasn’t the keynote. It was Vivian Castellanos, who wanted to replicate what home-visiting programs do for families, and built an AI assistant for parents and caregivers to do it. It has reached over 300,000 parents. The moderator noted it runs at about one-fifteenth the cost of other home-visiting programs. Castellanos said the AI was the easy part. What kept her going was the small moments it gave parents to remember how powerful they already are.
She also said, plainly, that the incentives are messy. Sometimes she has to convince people to use her product over something more engaging.
On the first panel, Jenny Radesky had told parents they can wait and see whether an AI product has proven its worth for their child before they buy it. Good advice. It also assumes you have the luxury of waiting. And in the keynote, Suskind had named the families who most worry her, the under-resourced ones who may not be able to stay focused on what’s healthiest for a child’s brain.
LUMA was built for the parent or caregiver up at two in the morning who can’t wait for a retreat, a parenting book, or an online class. After Castellanos spoke, that stopped feeling like one of my design choices and started feeling like the one the rest depend on.
The Screen, Going Quiet
At quarter to twelve the public session ended and the screen went still. (The symposium went on for the rest of the day, behind a door I wasn’t invited through.) The coffee had gone cold somewhere in the second hour, and I hadn’t noticed. The sun had moved across the whole floor of the office. I sat and watched it for a while.
The decisions we make alone, at our desks and our kitchen tables and our two a.m. couches, are rarely as alone as they feel.
About the Author
Cindi Z. Stevens Copeland, MA, CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist with more than 30 years of experience working with children and families. She is the founder of Right Track Parenting and the creator of the Investigative Parenting™ methodology, a research-backed framework that guides parents to wonder before they worry, imagine before they interpret, and create before they catastrophize. Cindi holds a Certificate in the Foundations of Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and is a certified Parent Coach through the Parent Coaching Institute. She runs a direct-pay private practice in Northern Virginia and is the creator of LUMA™, an AI-powered companion for anyone raising or caring for a child available at RaisingHumans.ai. Learn more about Cindi and Right Track Parenting at righttrackparenting.com.
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