Dr. Dana Suskind on the surprising science of parenting, the illusions of AI and protecting our children's analog world
In the sticky humidity of a 1980s New Orleans afternoon, long before smartphones and algorithms rearranged daily life, Dana Suskind and I were two public high school girls getting ready for senior prom. We were crammed into a downtown hotel room amid a chaotic mess of hairspray, borrowed accessories and teenage laughter. Dana, with the same effortless generosity that defines her character today, loaned me the very dress I wore that night. There were no portable screens to capture the moment, no digital feeds waiting to log our teenage joy and no social media platforms to index our memories. Decades later, I still remember that evening vividly because we were fully present for it. Some would say our connection was built the old-fashioned way.
Back then, I knew Dana was smart. We went to a highly competitive school where intelligence was hardly in short supply, yet she stood out. What I could never have imagined was that she would go on to become one of the nation's leading pediatric surgeons and an authoritative voice on childhood brain development, language and learning. Yet as I spoke to her recently about her timely new book, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI, I realized her message comes down to something our generation often took for granted: Human connection isn't merely pleasant. It is essential.
Today, Dana serves as professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, where she is founding director of the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Program and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health. For decades, her research has focused on the powerful role parents and language play in shaping children's developing brains.
That work led naturally to Human Raised.
"My whole work has been about how language and interaction and human connection build children's brains," she tells me, her voice carrying the calm of a clinician. "Now all of a sudden we've got this new technology that can mimic the exact interactions that wire our children's brains. I realized this could be a major turning point for humanity."
Cracking the Social Gate
Unlike social media, which largely competed for attention, artificial intelligence can engage directly with users, responding, conversing and even creating what feel like relationships. For young children whose brains are still developing, Suskind believes that distinction matters.
Infant brains possess what neuroscientists call a social gate. It is a biological filter embedded in our evolutionary wiring, meaning babies learn and develop neural pathways only from other living humans. If you place a young baby in front of a standard television program or a passive tablet app, their brain hardware does not wire up. The infant brain effectively ignores the screen because it lacks real-time responsiveness. But because an AI agent can respond, adapt, converse and mimic human behavior contingently, it can crack that social gate wide open. It doesn't just distract a child. It actively builds a psychological relationship with them.
"We sleepwalked right into the social media era because we had no idea what it was going to do to us," Dana says. "It looked like a great thing that would make us connected, but it did the exact opposite. With AI, my hope is that our collective antennae are up a bit higher. The stakes are much greater because this technology can insert itself into the sacred space between parent and child. We are already seeing data showing that up to 70 percent of teens have interacted with or formed emotional attachments to AI companions. Why? Because interacting with code is entirely frictionless. It never rejects you, it never gets angry and it never forces you to compromise."
But that frictionless digital world, Suskind warns, is exactly the trap. The real human world is full of healthy friction. Growing up normally means learning how to handle moments of intense boredom, navigate social mistakes and take real-world emotional risks. It means doing the hard work of asking a kid on the playground to play or gathering the courage to ask someone out on a first date. If our children substitute artificial companions for human ones, they miss the training ground of life. If they never learn to do the hard, messy things growing up, we are going to have severe developmental issues down the road.
"There is so much good that can come from AI," Dana says when asked whether parents need to choose between embracing technology and rejecting it. "But at the same time, we should be much more discerning and intentional in what we allow into our children's lives."
The Struggle Is Good
At the heart of Human Raised is an evergreen framework Suskind calls HOPE. The H stands for "Human Connection," reminding us that early interaction is a biological requirement for brain building. O is for "Owning Our Imperfections," reassurance that children do not need perfect parents. They need present ones. P is for "Protecting the Early Years," a critical window when the brain's physical hardware is forged. E stands for "Enhance, Not Replace," her baseline rule for technology.
"The most liberating moment for me in writing this book," Dana confesses, "was realizing that all my imperfections as a mother were actually a good thing for my kids. Good-enough parenting is exactly how children build resilience, empathy and adaptability. When a parent is tired, or busy, or makes a mistake and fixes it, the child learns how the real human world works. An AI companion that tells a child they are perfect twenty-four hours a day creates a false echo chamber that hollows out true empathy. In this case, the struggle is good."
To put this philosophy into daily practice, Suskind also developed a practical mental checklist called DETECT. She urges parents to evaluate any new app or toy by looking at its Design, Ethical training, Troubling impacts, Evidence of real educational value, Confidentiality of data and what it ultimately Teaches. She notes that platforms like YouTube Kids are already flooded with automated, AI-generated videos, creating what she calls toddler misinformation on a grand scale. Parents must become the active guardians of the gate.
Throughout our conversation, Suskind repeatedly returned to the power of ordinary moments. The interactions that matter most are rarely dramatic, she explains. They happen during bedtime stories, family dinners, walks around the neighborhood and conversations in the car. At the TMW Center, she and her colleagues distilled those interactions into what they call the "Three Ts": Tune In, Talk More and Take Turns. Those simple exchanges, she says, are what build children's brains.
Suskind also worries that AI could undermine some of childhood's most important experiences: boredom, unstructured play, curiosity and learning through failure.
"Curiosity is connected to lifelong learning and innovation," she says. "It's built by unstructured play and having to figure out problems."
Those messy experiences, she argues, cannot be optimized or outsourced.
The Most Powerful Technology
Yet despite the warnings, Dana is no tech hater. As a surgeon who implants advanced medical technology into children's ears to give them the gift of hearing, she knows technology can support human flourishing. In the classroom and the clinic, she imagines a beautiful future where AI lifts the crushing weight of administrative labor from teachers and doctors, freeing them to look a student or a patient in the eye.
Suskind's optimism simply comes with guardrails. She tells me the goal is not to win a battle against technology but to preserve what technology cannot replicate. Children do not need a perfectly optimized childhood. They need relationships that challenge them, surprise them and teach them how to navigate the beautifully unpredictable experience of being human.
"The future isn't predetermined," she says. "We are incredibly powerful. AI can out-compute any human, which means the rules of the game have changed. The ultimate differentiator for our kids in the future won't be math speed, optimization or raw memorization. It will be their capacity to be fully, beautifully and messily human."
When I asked what she hopes readers take away from the book, her answer felt both reassuring and empowering.
"I want parents to understand that they are the most powerful technology in their children's lives," she says. "Children need imperfect, good-enough humans who are supporting them the best they can."
It's a message that resonates far beyond parenting. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, Suskind's reminder is refreshingly human: Our relationships, our presence and our imperfect humanity remain irreplaceable.