Anyone who has been a child or a parent knows the scene: the flexo light on, an incomprehensible math problem on the table, tears falling from the frustration of not understanding a lesson or not being able to pronounce a foreign language, and a parent losing patience after explaining the same thing for the fifth time.
In China they have found a way to turn it around, parents frustrated and exhausted by their workdays are delegating the academic supervision of their children to artificial intelligence. While in different countries there is a strong debate and fear about whether AI erodes critical thinking of students, the opposite is true in China: a 2025 survey led by KPMG revealed that more than 90% of the Chinese are optimistic about this technology.
The phenomenon came to light and sparked debate on social media when a mother in Shandong province discovered her husband playing on his mobile phone while letting her Kimi AIa chatbot capable of processing two million characters, did his son’s homework. But this father is not an isolated case. Many adults are using AI not just to teach, but to do the dreaded “parenting chores.” Mr. Zhang, for example, admitted to using the chatbot Doubao to generate summaries of the Aesop’s Fables and print step-by-step images for your third grader’s craft projects.
The market has responded with an avalanche of gadgets. Zheng Wenqi, a working mother, bought for about 375 dollars the “Native Language Star”, a device composed of a mask that muffles your voice in Chinese and a speaker that translates it into English to converse with your children. Others, like university professor Wu Ling, They invested $1,170 in AlphaDoga robot dog powered by the DeepSeek model that practices English, dances and keeps his only son company.
There are even parents who have gone one step further by becoming creators. This is the case of Yin Xingyu, a mother from Shenzhen who does not know how to program, but who uses the technique of vibecoding with DeepSeek to create interactive English word games for her 6-year-old daughter, as well as generate personalized comics using the Nano Banana Pro imaging model. For the purist parents, devices have emerged such as the “Youdao AI Q&A Pen”, a smart pen designed from “asceticism”: it has no browser or games, it only guides the child step by step in their mathematical reasoning without giving them the direct answer.
A multi-million dollar business in a gray area
All this enthusiasm has fueled a runaway educational technology market valued at more than $43 billion. Outsourcing has left the homes to take to the streets and, until July 2024, The opening of about 50,000 was estimated “AI study rooms” across the country. In these establishments, children sit in cubicles in front of standardized tablets; They cannot leave until the indicators on the screen turn from red (errors) to green (correct answers).
As detailed on CCTVthe “teachers” in these rooms do not teach, they are prohibited from explaining the subject and they act as mere supervisors and commissioned salespeople. To cope with the monotony of 6 to 8 hours answering questions, some children learn to play Go or Gomoku secretly on the same machines, often with the supervisors’ blind eye. However, former employees and parents report that in many of these centers, “artificial intelligence” is just a marketing façade to charge more, and children simply consume pre-recorded lessons on basic tablets.
Behind these study rooms hides a business survival tactic. Many of these centers operate in a gray zone to avoid the strict “double reduction” policy. imposed by the government in 2021which banned for-profit tutoring to relieve financial and academic pressure on families. By arguing that “it is AI that teaches and not a human,” these companies dodge education regulators, registering under names of “cultural media” and avoiding words like “enrollment” or “classes.” Franchises are strategically expanding into peri-urban areas and small towns, where rents are low and parents are equally willing to pay for a place to leave their children.
This mass adoption is no accident; is backed by a clear state directive. The Chinese government is promoting the integration of AI in education as part of a national strategy to accelerate its technological progress against global competitors such as the United States.
The regulations are already on the table. Starting with the fall 2025 semester, Beijing will require a minimum of eight hours per year of AI education in all primary and secondary schools. The transition has been rapid and planned, with higher education leading the way: 99% of university students and teachers in China already use generative tools, and elite universities such as Zhejiang or Fudan have made AI courses mandatory and transversal subjects.
Science supports this dive. An empirical study conducted with high school students in H city showed that the duration of daily use of AI tools significantly and positively influences students’ AI knowledge and algorithmic thinking. That is, constant exposure is already shaping your cognitive and technological abilities.
The debate is served
The families’ opinions are drastically divided. For many, AI democratizes education. Mothers like Li Linyun celebrate that the Doubao chatbot be a “24-hour, knowledgeable and extremely patient teacher,” which has saved him hundreds of dollars on human tutors and improved his relationship with his daughter.
On the other hand, technological dependence terrifies educators and a faction of parents, who criticize that children are becoming lazy and losing the ability to think independently. In study halls, proctors notice that students, desperate to turn the screen green, resort to tactical memorization: repeatedly choosing incorrect answers by discard until the system approves them, without actually learning the concept.
Added to this is the “AI illusion” and its hallucinations. Su Xiao, mother of a ninth grader, discovered that the general models They could invent historical data with complete confidence and fluency, or omit crucial data in mathematical problems, offering logically impeccable but erroneous results. This forced her to become a “cyber quality inspector,” exhaustively reviewing every task her daughter did with the machine.
Given these risks, the Chinese Ministry of Education had to intervenerecently prohibiting elementary students from using AI tools independently to complete their assignments. The directive stresses that AI should only be a support tool supervised by parents, to avoid over-dependence and protect data privacy.
Traditional schools have not stood idly by. Teachers have already begun to identify “AI-flavored tasks.” Xu Shuang and Yu Yi, language teachers, They tell how they detect the tests generated by algorithms: they tend to have empty content, lack human emotion and abuse perfect grammatical structures or chains of unnatural parallel sentences.
To combat “copy and paste”, the educational system is changing. Schools like Beijing No. 12 Middle School they are assigning tasks that require the structured use of AI. For example, they ask students to use big data to analyze consumption during the Spring Festival and use neural translators to present their findings in English. The objective is to force the student to use critical thinking when handling the tool, not letting the tool do the work.
However, the elephant in the room is inequality. The researchers They warn that AI could widen the social gap. Empirical data confirms this: the educational level of parents is the factor that most positively impacts students’ skills and critical thinking when interacting with AI. While children from urban and privileged backgrounds learn to co-create with qualified teachers, rural students risk being simply “parked” in front of screens in low-cost study rooms for hours.
Ultimately, artificial intelligence in education is like a mirror that reflects our attitude towards learning. If it is used to shortcut effort, it is nothing more than a “lazy response generator”; but if used judiciously, it can be an excellent “learning companion.”
The technology fever in China shows that banning AI is useless and against the times. The challenge is to teach children to question the machine. But above all, this phenomenon underscores an inescapable truth: real education requires human connection. An AI can structure an essay or recite grammar endlessly, but it cannot replicate the value of appropriate critique, the tacit understanding of a collaborative exploration, or the warmth of a smile in a face-to-face exchange. Technology can do its homework, but raising and educating remains, inevitably, a human task.
Image | freepik and Annushka Ahuja
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