ROOKE: Mother Finds Insane Way To Outsource Her Parenting

There aren’t a lot of things that surprise me or give me pause when it comes to modern-day parenting styles, but the latest revelation of a mother using AI to raise her children is more than just troubling … It’s insane.

Lilian Schmidt, who (it is worth noting) is not a single mother, has turned to ChatGPT to help her raise her 3-year-old daughter and 14-year-old stepson, according to the New York Post, which cites SWNS, a U.K.-based media company. She claims that she often asks it for advice, but never lets the bot “make decisions.”

“I use it to make me a better mom,” Schmidt, who is based in Zurich, Switzerland, said, adding, “I’d never go back.”

She admits that she outsources the typical roles of motherhood to an artificial coding system that acts as her toddler’s therapist, meal planner, and activity director. Schmidt said that she leans heavily on the app when she is at her lowest energy levels during the day because she believes she has trained the bot to be “someone who understands their development.”

I co-parent with ChatGPT — I love turning off my brain and letting AI help raise my child https://t.co/4jvLE3lSap pic.twitter.com/b89CVx8Eyf

— New York Post (@nypost) July 30, 2025

No one or thing can understand a child’s development or what they need emotionally better than their parent. Relying on AI to raise your child is worse than neglectful, because you are signaling to her that they aren’t worth the effort it takes to provide the personal love and care she deserves. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)

ChatGPT might be this shiny thing that seems to help solve all of Schmidt’s problems, but she will wake up one day, realizing that she has wasted the best moments of her daughter’s life, allowing an inanimate object to get to know her child better than she does.

Parents often don’t realize until it’s too late that they only have 18 summers, Christmases, birthdays, and so on, with their children before they are no longer an intact family unit. The moment their child becomes an adult, the parent-child dynamic changes.

This is an unbelievably dark story about ChatGPT from top to bottom, especially the twist at the end here https://t.co/6Ji7UdOMtC pic.twitter.com/T45C8dC7Uk

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) June 13, 2025

The reality is that parents like Schmidt are suffering from a breakdown in the broader family unit. In decades past, grandparents and even great-grandparents often lived in the same community, if not in the same home, as the young family. The mental load of wondering what to make for dinner or how to deal with toddler tantrums was spread out over generations, bringing lifetimes of experience and thoughtful help to the stressed-out mother. However, now that dynamic is extremely rare. (ROOKE: The Strange Tension Of Raising Adults While Holding Onto Children)

Schmidt claims ChatGPT helps her control her emotions and be a better mom, but it’s all a fallacy. AI is just a series of code learning from your informational input. The knowledge she needs is all right there, but she has no one to encourage her to do better and tap into her inherent motherly instincts. So she outsources it to AI, thinking that it will solve her problems. Her daughter will not see it this way when she realizes the lack of connection to her mother came about because Schmidt let AI do the heavy lifting.

Technology is terrible for children. We put off giving them phones, screen time, and internet access because it’s an obvious evil. It’s not a giant leap to say that allowing technology to raise your children will have a profoundly negative impact on their emotional and social development.

Follow Mary Rooke on X: @MaryRooke

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