Mahaan was nine. He was failing. Right in front of me.
We had just landed in Sintra, Portugal. He joined the local football team. Nobody spoke English. Nobody looked like him. He stood between huddles glancing back at us. The look was clear. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
He couldn’t pull up a translator. There was no app to fix the drill. He had to stand there. Not understanding. Figure it out or stay there.
He chose to stay. Weeks went by. He learned the coach’s hands. He found a way to talk to teammates without words—a pass. A nod. A silent joke. By month two. Half the team were best friends.
I think about that often.
Why? Because it’s rare now.
Talk about AI and kids and the fear is always the same. Cheating essays. Short attention spans. Writing prompts instead of sentences. Valid worries. I’ve studied learning for twenty years. I’ve raised two kids in twelve countries. The fear keeping me awake isn’t plagiarism.
I’m afraid we’re creating kids who never sit in discomfort long enough to see who they are.
Learning science has a concept for this. Assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation fits new info into what you know. Easy. Comfortable. Low friction.
Accommodation? That’s when the new info doesn’t fit. The mental model breaks. You have to rebuild. Uncomfortable. Yes. But that’s where growth happens.
Most kids use AI as an assimilation machine. That scares me.
My daughter Laaha is a writer. She carries an actual typewriter. She disappears for hours. I watch her wrestle a sentence into the meaning she intends. Not the easy one.
When she tries AI tools, the words come back faster. Cleaner. Thinner. There’s an answer. No search. She noticed. I didn’t need to tell her. The writing that costs you something is the writing that means something.
That cost. That reward. We wanted to save that for her. For him.
So we left. My husband and I ditched the conventional life. We moved constantly. Twelve countries. Education built around the world. Not a classroom.
People thought we were fleeing. Or chasing Instagram fame. No.
We engineered a specific childhood. One where they can’t Google the problem.
A country with no English. A friend from scratch. Someone different. A logistical mess. Social confusion. Emotional weight. No clean answers.
Take Kotor. Montenegro.
Balkans are stoic. Reserved. Shocked 11-year-old Laaha. She was used to solo errands. Here? Asking a stone-faced vendor how to bag veggies felt too big.
For weeks. She didn’t try.
Then. She walked the historic streets. Met Maria. Thirty-something selling boat tours near old walls. Fast friends.
Laaha saw past the coldness. Found the warmth. Two months later. Birthday. Maria knocked. Brought a gift. A card.
When we left? Tears. Real ones. I’ll never forget them.
Beautiful bond. Hard work. Unglamorous. It required staying in the hard moment. No exit. That’s the skill children are losing.
Sitting with not knowing.
Being bored without filling the silence.
Staying in a room with confusion long enough for understanding to arrive. Instead of closing the tab.
This doesn’t come from curriculum. It comes from friction. Intentional discomfort. No rescue by parent. Or app. Or an answer arriving before the question finishes.
Back to Mahaan. Syros. Greece. Three months later. Age ten.
I made him figure out the washing machine.
No English manual. Greek symbols. Unknown panel.
He sat there. All afternoon. Trial. Error. Deduction.
When the first load spun. He looked at me.
Not relief. Pride. Specific pride. The kind only from solving what wasn’t given to you.
Who knows what the future looks like? Nobody does. Honest starting point. With AI. Or without.
I don’t want them ahead on facts.
I want them to walk into the unfamiliar. New country. New job. Weird person. Stay. Figure it out.
How?
Real practice. Repeated. Uncomfortable. Not a tool doing it for you.
So I resist. I don’t hand them the answer when they look stuck.
Hard. But necessary.
The struggle is ours. While we can still choose. We protect it.
