Tell the truth
If AI helped write, edit, generate, or imitate something, teach children to disclose that help instead of hiding it.
Family Guide
Help children stay truthful and human.
Catholic families do not need panic, and they do not need naive permissiveness. Children need formation: truthfulness, privacy, discernment, prayer, real friendship, and clear rules they can actually understand.
House Rules
Make the rules concrete.
Vague warnings do not form children. Clear expectations do: what is allowed, what is not, what must be disclosed, and why it matters.
Protect private life
Family conflict, confession-related matters, health details, school struggles, and other sensitive things do not belong in a public tool.
Do not outsource friendship
A chatbot can imitate attention. It cannot love, forgive, notice, sacrifice, or belong to a child in the way a real person can.
Verify images and voices
Children should know that a picture, video, or voice can look real and still be false.
Keep prayer unmediated
AI can help find a prayer or explain a devotion. It should not become the place a child goes instead of speaking to God.
Ask before school use
When work is assigned by a teacher, children need clear rules about what help is allowed and what must be their own.
The goal is not tech-savvy children. The goal is truthful children.
A child can learn how a tool works and still be formed badly by it. Catholic formation asks deeper questions about honesty, attention, responsibility, friendship, and prayer.
At the Table
Ask questions children can answer.
The best family policy will not sound like a legal document. It will become a repeated conversation about truth, privacy, school, friendship, and God.
What would make it dishonest to use AI on this assignment?
Is this tool helping you learn, or helping you avoid learning?
Would you be comfortable if a parent, teacher, or priest saw what you typed here?
Does this make real friendship, prayer, reading, or silence easier or harder?
What source would help us check whether this answer is true?
Warning Signs
Slow down when the tool starts replacing life.
- A child wants to keep a chatbot relationship secret.
- Generated work is being submitted as personal work.
- AI is used for private spiritual, emotional, or family crises.
- The tool imitates a deceased loved one, saint, priest, or sacred authority.
- Screen use pushes out sleep, prayer, reading, chores, friendship, or Mass.
A Simple Home Policy
Say it plainly enough to live.
- We use AI as a tool, not as a companion, teacher of faith, or conscience.
- We disclose AI help when it affects schoolwork, writing, images, or public posts.
- We do not paste private family, health, spiritual, or school crisis details into AI tools.
- We check important answers with real sources and real people.
- We keep times and places in the home where no machine gets our attention.
Source Trail
Keep formation bigger than the feed.
These sources are starting points, not a replacement for parents, teachers, pastors, and real family judgment.
Pope Leo XIV, World Communications Day 2026
A pastoral warning about false intimacy, simulated substitutes, and the need to protect human communication.
Open source→Antiqua et nova
The Vatican note on AI, human intelligence, dignity, moral responsibility, and the common good.
Open source→USCCB artificial intelligence
Bishops' resources on AI, ethics, human dignity, policy, education, and pastoral concern.
Open source→