Your Screenager Isn’t As Tech-Savvy As You Think — And Here’s Why

Your eight-year-old finds a setting in three taps that took you ten minutes to locate. Your teenager builds a social media edit while carrying on three other conversations. It looks like mastery, and lately, that assumption has let a lot of adults off the hook. Kids grew up with this stuff, the thinking goes. They get it. We don’t have to teach them.

Elizabeth Tweedale, successful tech entrepreneur and founder of the coding education company Coco Coders, thinks that assumption doesn’t stand on solid ground. And she believes AI is about to make it a much bigger problem.

“Adults often call children digital natives because they can navigate technology faster than we can,” she says. But speed is not the same thing as understanding. A child can move through an app, a game, or an AI chatbot with total ease and still have no idea how any of it actually works, where to push back, and when to trust it.

Fluency Is Not Literacy

Kids who have never known a world without smartphones are undeniably fast with technology. They swipe, tap, and adapt to new interfaces almost instinctively. But navigating an app is not the same as understanding how its designer designed it to hold your attention. Asking a chatbot a question is not the same as knowing where the answer materialized from, or whether it’s even accurate.

Previously, a kid who wasn’t privy to search engine-ranked results could still get by fine. The integration of AI into the current cultural landscape changes the stakes considerably. When a child asks an AI chatbot a question, receives a confident, well-written answer, and has no framework for evaluating whether that answer is reliable, biased, or simply false, the consequences extend well beyond media literacy. These algorithms have started shaping how kids learn, what they believe, and how they think.

“A child can be an expert technology consumer at ten years old and still be technologically illiterate,” a distinction Elizabeth wants more parents to make.

The Overlooked Half Of The Equation

For several years, the conversation around kids and screens has focused almost entirely on limiting consumption. Efforts were made to lessen time on devices, reduce hours gaming, and tighten controls on social media. Although these efforts are valid, Elizabeth believes that the conversation brushes over something just as fundamental: kids are not being taught to create and collaborate with technology, only to consume it or let it control their thinking.

The goal isn’t to raise a generation of software engineers, but to give kids a basic, working understanding that technology is built by people, made up of decisions, and open to being questioned, tested, and improved. A child who has written even a simple piece of code comprehends that software doesn’t just exist. Choices were made to direct its behavior. That knowledge changes how children interact with apps, algorithms, and the AI tools they’ll encounter for the rest of their lives.

Access to foundational computer science education still varies widely depending on where a child goes to school and depending on the school’s policies. National data has consistently shown gaps in early exposure and a general lack of exposure throughout K-12 education.

What This Looks Like At Home

Parents don’t need a background in computer science to start closing this gap. A few shifts in how families talk about technology can go a long way.

When a child gets an answer from an AI platform, ask where it might have come from. When they’re scrolling a feed, ask why they think it’s showing them those particular posts. These questions reflect the curiosity parents already model when they are involved in their child’s education; similar to how they would ask about equations in math homework. The goal is to instill the same curiosity in children so they can learn to ask those questions themselves, without being prompted or supervised.

Elizabeth also highlights something parents may not expect: that children and teens are usually eager for this kind of ownership. Given the chance to understand the reasoning behind a rule rather than just following it blindly, most children prefer to be involved in the thinking rather than feel controlled by it.

Raising Kids Who Shape Technology, Not Just Consume It

Elizabeth spent years helping build the AI systems kids are now growing up alongside, and that vantage point is part of why she pushes back on the idea that screen fluency is enough. A generation raised to be fast with technology can still grow up with no real sense of how it works, why it makes the choices it does, or what it means to build something with it instead of just clicking through it.

She wants parents to start acknowledging and implementing this early. Not by taking devices away, but by treating technology as something kids are allowed to question, take apart, and eventually create with themselves.

The label “digital native” was more about speed than understanding. And speed, on its own, was never going to be enough.

Elizabeth Tweedale is the founder and CEO of Coco Coders, an education company teaching children ages six to fourteen the coding and computational thinking skills that build the foundation for AI literacy. Learn more at cococoders.com.

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.