Youthful Futures · Essay 2 of 12
Adult Information, Child Power
Young people can know almost anything adults know long before they have adult control over their own lives. What does that do to growing up?
There is something historically unusual about being thirteen today.
A thirteen-year-old can ask an artificial intelligence system what depression feels like, learn how nuclear weapons work, watch footage from a war thousands of kilometres away, understand what their parents' salary means, learn about sexuality, discover arguments against their family's religion, follow influencers explaining investment strategies and receive step-by-step instructions for building a computer program.
Then somebody can tell them it is time to put the phone away and go to bed.
For most of history, information and authority were entangled. Adults knew things children did not. Teachers had books students did not own. Professionals had access to specialised knowledge that outsiders could not easily reach. Parents could delay conversations because the information itself could often be delayed.
That arrangement has weakened quickly.
Globally, 82 per cent of people aged 15 to 24 are now online. In high-income countries youth internet use is essentially universal, while young people are still substantially more likely than older people to be connected in low-income countries.1
Artificial intelligence pushes this further because access to information is becoming access to explanation.
Search engines gave young people the world's documents. Generative AI increasingly offers to interpret those documents, answer follow-up questions and tailor explanations to the person asking.
In the United States, where good recent data exists, 64 per cent of teenagers aged 13 to 17 told Pew in 2025 that they had used an AI chatbot. About three in ten said they used one daily. ChatGPT alone was used by 59 per cent.2
Those figures should not be carelessly projected onto the world, but they show how quickly a new kind of relationship with information can become normal.
We tend to discuss this as a technology problem.
Are children getting misinformation?
Are they cheating?
How much screen time is healthy?
Should schools ban phones?
Those questions matter.
But a deeper change hides underneath them.
Young people are receiving adult-scale access to information without adult-scale control over their lives.
Knowing and being able to act are two different forms of power.
A fifteen-year-old may know that their school is teaching something badly but have little choice over attending. They may understand that a family relationship is unhealthy while being financially dependent on that family. They may know more about a political conflict than many adults but have no vote. They may know precisely which career they want but live somewhere where that pathway barely exists.
Information can therefore liberate and frustrate at the same time.
It can also create a strange inversion of expertise.
A young person may know considerably more than their parent about a particular online culture, piece of software, game or political controversy. The parent retains authority. The child may possess more domain knowledge.
Schools face the same problem.
The teacher is no longer automatically the person in the room with the greatest access to information. That does not make the teacher unnecessary. It makes the teacher's role harder.
When answers are abundant, helping someone distinguish a plausible answer from a good one becomes more important.
PISA 2022 offers a useful glimpse of this problem. Across OECD countries, 73 per cent of students reported no trouble finding learning resources online by themselves. Yet only 51 per cent said they could easily evaluate the quality of online information. Among lower-performing students, 60 per cent could not easily judge its quality.3
The scarce resource is shifting.
It was once access to knowledge.
Increasingly, it is judgment.
This makes some adult responses to technology feel oddly inadequate.
Taking away the phone may remove a distraction. It does not teach judgment.
Banning ChatGPT may preserve the integrity of this week's homework. It does not prepare a sixteen-year-old to use a system like it responsibly for the next fifty years.
Nor should we romanticise access.
More information is not automatically more freedom.
UNICEF's 2025 review of childhood in a digital world reaches a more complicated conclusion than either technology enthusiasts or technology critics might like. Digital experiences can help children build skills, play and connect. They can also expose children to harmful content and experiences. Connectivity is a prerequisite for developing many digital skills, but access alone is not enough. What young people actually do online and what happens to them there matter enormously.4
There is another uncomfortable question here: whose values are embedded in the systems doing the explaining?
UNESCO has warned that generative AI can reproduce biases and cultural assumptions contained in training data and has called for age-appropriate, privacy-conscious and human-centred use in education.5
This matters because childhood has always involved adults deciding when a young person is ready to encounter something.
The internet weakened that gate.
AI may weaken it further.
Perhaps the task therefore changes.
The goal cannot be to restore information scarcity. That world is disappearing.
Nor should the goal be to hand thirteen-year-olds unrestricted access to every system and simply call it empowerment.
The challenge is to help someone develop the capacity to live with enormous access before they possess enormous power.
How do you evaluate what a machine tells you?
How do you decide what deserves your attention?
How do you recognise manipulation?
When should you ask another person?
How do you live with knowledge about problems you cannot personally solve?
How do you distinguish understanding something from merely having received an explanation of it?
These sound like digital-literacy questions.
They are actually questions about growing up.
For previous generations, adults could sometimes protect children by controlling what they knew.
That option is becoming weaker.
We may have to replace it with something much more difficult:
helping young people know what to do with knowing.