My children don’t always like how I cook eggs. I adapt, I adjust—I predict their preferences as best I can. Still, I somehow miss: “They’re too wet!” “Too dry!” “Too much cheese!” “Not enough!” They don’t pay me enough for this particular kind of culinary criticism.

Then, a few mornings ago, I realized something profound that might be obvious: at 9 and 11, they’re old enough to make their own daggum eggs.

That small realization turned out to be another breakthrough in my ongoing experiment with parenting for the AI future. So yes, this is my guide to making eggs for the AI future.

The Thrill of Doing Things Themselves

I expected reluctance. Instead, I saw enthusiasm. It turns out making eggs is exciting when you haven’t yet spent years doing it half-awake before school. The sizzle of eggs hitting oil isn’t just satisfying—it’s thrilling when you’re nine years old.

But that first morning, they were clueless. Heating the pan. Whisking properly. Seasoning. They needed me almost every step of the way. Which, as it turned out, was perfect. This wasn’t just breakfast—it was the perfect opportunity for a very human skill: scaffolding.

The Art of Scaffolding

Scaffolding is one of the simplest and most powerful ideas in child development: help only as much as needed. If a child can do it, let them. If not, stand close by, ready to step in before frustration and defeat. Offer just enough support to keep the edges of the challenge tolerable—and then withdraw again.

It is an elegant dance that requires sensitivity, restraint, and attunement. Done well, it builds not just skill, but confidence and self-regulation. It’s the difference between raising a child who can follow directions and one who can direct themselves.

The Limits of Artificial Intelligence

Scaffolding also happens to be something AI cannot do. Not really.

An AI can generate flawless step-by-step instructions for cooking eggs. It can even sense hesitation from a user’s delay in responding. What it cannot sense is the human texture behind that hesitation: the wobble between excitement and fear, the moment when frustration turns to resignation, or pride silently veers towards confidence. It can’t read a child’s face, or certainly not my mischievous children’s faces—children who quickly make a fun game out of fooling the “AI that can read faces”.

More profoundly, it cannot offer what children crave most—real attention. Our attention is finite, effortful, and costly. We can always be somewhere else—scrolling, typing, earning. But that scarcity is exactly what makes human attention valuable, and why it nourishes children so deeply. An AI’s “infinite attention” is, paradoxically, hollow. Our attention contains something machines can’t simulate: care, effort, presence, pride.

The Emotional Weight of Hard Things

Hard things bring out our rough edges. My son, faced with difficulty, turns evasive. My daughter, furious. I get fidgety and reach for my phone. But shared struggle is developmental gold. It’s how we learn to tolerate discomfort, manage impulses, and regulate emotion.

That’s the hidden virtue of scaffolding: it enlarges not just skill, but emotional stamina. When I remain calm while they lose it, I’m lending them my regulation until they build their own. AI can guide technique, but not emotion. It cannot co-regulate. It cannot teach patience by practicing it alongside you.

And when I inevitably fail to be perfect—snapping over an egg on the floor or misplaced spatula—repairing that small rupture with an apology also models something important. I show them that frustration doesn’t end relationships, that we can make amends, and that imperfection isn’t shameful. No algorithm can be sincerely vulnerable and feel authentically apologetic.

Why We Must Stay Human

The experts tell us that in the AI age the very skills technology lacks—emotional regulation, empathy, adaptability, creativity—are precisely the ones our children will need most. Those capacities don’t emerge from instant answers or flawless precision. They arise from trial, friction, repair—from venturing outside of our daily routines into uncertainty and confusion. AI doesn’t do uncertainty. 

A lot of people incorrectly assumed AI would quickly replace the need for human scaffolding. The moment ChatGPT shocked us all, the race began to replace human tutors with flawless AI tutors. So far most attempts to replicate the human capacity for scaffolding have been disappointing, or even harmful.

Scaffolding is, in this sense, one of our last undigitizable arts. It’s a form of human instruction so rich with subtlety and feeling that no machine can match it. And the only way to pass it on is to practice it—imperfectly, attentively, sometimes over breakfast.

The Eggs They’ll Remember

Eventually, my kids found their ways. My son, Harmon, apparently prefers his eggs nearly burnt, crisp flakes of yellow and brown. Now those are eggs that are beyond critique. My daughter, Dela, was jubilant. “These eggs are delicious!” …after making them pretty much exactly how I make my inferior eggs. Apparently eggs taste best with one seasoning that no future AI family chef nor parent who does it all will ever provide: the taste of personal accomplishment and independence. 

For all our talk about coding, automation, and “future-proofing” our kids, maybe it still begins here—with messy eggs, small frustrations, and a parent who resists the urge to do too much. In an age of smart machines, to scaffold patiently is to remain stubbornly human.