25 Quotes on Raising Children in an AI World: Safety, Education & Human Agency

Whether you’re in technology or not, AI is becoming an increasingly important part of how children learn, communicate, create and navigate the world. But as AI becomes more deeply embedded in childhood, there are growing questions about equity, safety, privacy, education, critical thinking and the role technology should play in a child’s life.

Some of the most important voices in this conversation are coming from AI researchers, educators, child-rights advocates, UNICEF leaders — and, importantly, children themselves. Here are some of their statements on what an AI-powered future could mean for the next generation.

1. AI & Equity

“Decisions made today will determine whether AI amplifies inequality or helps dismantle it.”
~ Katherine Hoffmann Pham, AI Lead, UNICEF Office of Innovation, Future Present: AI Solutions Changing Children’s Lives Today, March 2026.

“UNICEF has a clear purpose: to ensure AI is of benefit to every child, not just some.”
~ Katherine Hoffmann Pham, UNICEF

“AI has extraordinary potential for children: widening access to knowledge, helping children with disabilities, supporting learning, and bringing information and services to communities historically left behind.”
~ Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director

“The choices we make today will determine whether AI amplifies opportunity for children or deepens exclusion.”
~ UNICEF, Prospects for Children 2026: Global Outlook

2. Safety, Rights & Governance

“Technology alone will not make a better world: its promise can only be fulfilled if societies, governments and companies embed child rights into the design and application of innovations.”
~ UNICEF, The State of the World’s Children 2024

“But opportunities without safeguards can deepen inequality and cause harm.”
~ Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director

“We cannot repeat the mistakes made with social media, responding to harms only after they have become deeply embedded.”
~ Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director

“That means safety by design.”
~ Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director

“Everywhere, governance must be proactive and child-centred.”
~ UNICEF, Prospects for Children 2026: Global Outlook

“AI is a powerful tool, it is not the goal itself. Like any tool, it can help or harm.”
~ Tanya Accone / UNICEF

3. Children Must Have a Voice

“We need to design AI systems not only for children, but with children.”
~ UNICEF Global Forum on AI for Children

“If we’re making decisions on AI for children, we need to be including children.”
~ UNICEF Global Forum on AI for Children

“The decisions we make today will define the economies, societies, and generations of tomorrow.”
~ Baroness Beeban Kidron, Founder and Chair, 5Rights Foundation

“This is about not just equipping children to survive the digital future, but to shape it.”
~ UNICEF, Prospects for Children 2026: Global Outlook

4. AI & Education

“I think we should absolutely incorporate AI into kids’ learning, into classrooms. This is a useful tool for us.”
~ Fei-Fei Li, Stanford AI researcher

“I believe that if we teach responsible tool-using, students will be superpowered by AI, by calculator, by computer.”
~ Fei-Fei Li

“They have to learn both the utility and the harm of fire. The same thing with AI.”
~ Fei-Fei Li

“I believe that we will be able to deliver education for every child in the world by the end of the decade.”
~ Stuart J. Russell, AI researcher and professor

“Getting AI tutoring systems to understand the pedagogical role is one of the major challenges.”
~ Stuart J. Russell

“If that happens, it’s the failure of education, not the failure of the students.”
~ Fei-Fei Li

“There’s a lot of appearance of intelligence coming from the fact that the systems use a very fluent language – but what they produce doesn’t always make sense.”
~ Stuart J. Russell

5. Critical Thinking, Dependency & Digital Literacy

“If I lived my life in 2040 and found that this AI, and I couldn’t live without it, then that’s a problem.”
~ 17-year-old from Egypt, UNICEF Innocenti, Skills for an AI World: Where We May Be Tomorrow, 2026

“Students will be lazy mentally because they will always do research [with AI] instead of trying to learn in the classroom.”
~ 9–12-year-old from Mozambique, UNICEF Innocenti, Skills for an AI World: Where We May Be Tomorrow, 2026

“To summarize information or conduct research, honestly, [AI] makes my work much faster, but it does worsen my research skills.”
~ 16–17-year-old consulted by UNICEF, UNICEF Innocenti

“It is too simple to say AI is good or bad; like almost all technology, how we view AI is about uses and abuses.”
~ Baroness Beeban Kidron, 5Rights Foundation

“Children today grow up in a digital world that changes faster than many adults can follow.”
~ Michele Servadei, UNICEF Montenegro Representative

“Our parents did not grow up with social media, AI tools or constant notifications like we did. That is why I think children and adults need to learn together how to stay safe online, recognize harmful content and talk openly about what happens on the internet.”
~ Iva Rašović, UNICEF Montenegro Young Reporter

6. Data, Privacy & Big Tech

“Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, are ‘hoovering up’ children’s data ‘without consent, without consideration and without attention to the fact that this comes from children.’”
~ Professor Sonia Livingstone, UN Regional Information Centre interview, March 2026

“It’s promising, but I’m not going to say it’s beneficial as of yet.”
~ Professor Sonia Livingstone, UN Regional Information Centre interview, March 2026

“The mistake we are making – again – is leaving it to a handful of dominant tech companies to determine what is and isn’t in our best interests – including those of children.”
~ Baroness Beeban Kidron, 5Rights Foundation

Important Questions To Ask

We as a community must thank these thought leaders and children for asking questions and encouraging us to think critically of how we’re using AI. Whatever one ultimately believes about the probability of catastrophic AI risk, these people have forced an important conversation into the open.

There are two urgent questions.