I was writing the week’s menu on the Miele refrigerator in our Spanish apartment when I noticed two dotted lines flashing on the freezer temperature gauge. I had no idea what it meant. So I pulled out my phone, opened Claude, described what I was seeing, and within seconds, I was fixing the problem. My 7-year-old son saw me go from clueless to detached in less than a minute.

Nine months ago, I moved my family of four from Connecticut to Las Rozas de Madrid. We are all learning Spanish one day at a time. I knew there would be a lot of things to figure out as we went along. But living daily life in a new language and culture is a humbling experience that you can’t fully anticipate until you’re in it.

That’s why I turn to AI when life throws something at me that I don’t yet have the language or knowledge to handle.

I use Claude all the time.

Just in the last few weeks, I used Claude to chat with a doctor through our insurance app when my son came home from school with a bruise. And then translate the blood test results and research the right supplements to order. And again, understanding an audit letter from the Tax Agency about a package that our neighbor had sent us months before.

What I didn’t anticipate was that my children would be watching. Not passively, but silently absorbing.

My 7 year old son experiences Claude as a kind of magical answering machine. On the bus to school, when he wants to learn everything there is to know about diamonds, I open him up and we go deeper together. He asks questions, I read the answers and they generate more questions. He has no idea what technology is. You just know that you can get answers to all the things you ask yourself. I love that just because you don’t know doesn’t mean you’re at a dead end. I learn with him.

My 10 year old son knows exactly what Claude is. He’s been watching me use it for months and we recently used it together for the first time on something important to him.

He wants to write a fantasy novel; He has it all planned in his head. But he is a perfectionist and the gap between the big idea and the entire 30,000-word book seemed impossible to him. He could visualize it, but he couldn’t see the steps and he was paralyzed. So I told him that Claude could help.

We sat together and he watched me write a detailed message. From that, Claude built a roadmap and I watched my son go from stagnation to joy as he read it. Each phase and milestone was broken down into small steps you could take to turn your dream into a reality. For the first time, this thing I wanted to do so much really seemed doable. I asked Claude to build him a printable workbook to work on character development, plot, setting, and scenes. With a goal of 250 words per day, you should be able to have your first draft ready in four months.

While he nodded in agreement with many of Claude’s suggestions, he rejected others. He did not agree with the editing process. He had a better way. It might take longer, he said, but it would improve the final product.

My kids also use Claude.

At that moment, I was very proud. He did not blindly accept what came out of the tool. He thought critically, taking what made sense to him and discarding what didn’t. The road map did not write its novel. It just cleared the way for me to do it. Without him, a dream that could have been completely abandoned became something that could start today.

As a mom, I’ve thought about whether any of this is good for them. Whether you’re modeling curiosity and resilience, or simply handing them an easy button to outsource the hard parts.

Then I think about my oldest son on that bus. He didn’t give up his thoughts. He used a tool to get out of his own way so he could start the thing, and then he trusted himself to take the initiative from there.

And I think about my youngest son, who is full of questions all the time. The answers Claude gives do not obscure his thinking; They just intensify it.

This is what I think they are absorbing: that not knowing doesn’t have to be a dead end. Sometimes you just need to know what the right question to ask is.

We are all still learning Spanish, discovering this new life in Spain. Most of the time I still don’t know what I’m doing. But I open Claude, ask a question and keep moving forward. My children are learning to do the same. And honestly, I think it’s one of the best things I can teach you. That everything is really imaginable.