Creators, Not Consumers

The myth of the native

The phrase digital native was coined to flatter a generation and it has done real damage. In 2017 Paul Kirschner and Pedro De Bruyckere reviewed the evidence in Teaching and Teacher Education and found none for it. Children born into a world of screens are not information-skilled because of it. When they learn with technology, the authors wrote, they mostly consume passively. The same review dismantled the multitasking myth beside it: what looks like multitasking is task-switching, and it costs.

The international data say the same thing. The International Computer and Information Literacy Study tests eighth graders in dozens of countries on whether they can actually use a computer to find, judge, and make things. In the 2023 round, almost half of students fell below the baseline level, and not one country that took the test in 2013 and again in 2023 had improved. Ten more years of growing up with devices, and the skill went nowhere.

Here is the distinction that matters. A phone is designed so that a two-year-old can operate it. Operating it is not a skill. It is the absence of a barrier. The skill is on the other side of the glass, where someone decided what the two-year-old would see, and that side is where almost no child is being taken.

A teenager's screen day, drawn to scale.

Operating a phone is not a skill. It is the absence of a barrier.

Consumers with, creators with, creators of

I think of it as three rungs. On the bottom rung you are a consumer with technology. You watch, you scroll, you buy, you play what someone else made. This is where the 8 hours and 39 minutes go, and it is where the entire design effort of the largest companies in history is aimed, because your attention is their product.

On the middle rung you are a creator with technology. You use the same device to make something that did not exist before: a video you edited, a song, a spreadsheet that answers a question, a game in Scratch, a website, a business. This rung is open to every child alive. Scratch alone passed 100 million registered users in 2022, almost all of them children, and most of them got there without a class. Nobody on this rung needs to understand how the tool works. They need to want something to exist and to use the tool to make it.

On the top rung you are a creator of technology. You write the code, design the chip, train the model, build the tool the other two rungs use. Not every child will get here, and not every child should. But the children who do will shape what everyone else's day looks like, and the way onto this rung runs through the middle one. Nobody becomes a creator of technology who was not first a creator with it.

Seymour Papert saw this in 1980, before any of these children's parents were born. In Mindstorms he wrote about two futures for the computer in a child's life: one where the computer programs the child, and one where the child programs the computer and, in doing so, gains a sense of mastery over the most powerful technology there is. We built the first future and called it the second. The online world settled into the shape Jakob Nielsen described in 2006: in most communities, 90 percent of users only watch, 9 percent contribute a little, and 1 percent make almost everything. That is a description of audiences. It should not be a description of children.

The three rungs, and where the time goes.

Nobody becomes a creator of technology who was not first a creator with it.

Why AI raises the stakes

The children are already using it. Common Sense found in 2024 that seven in ten American teens had used a generative AI tool, most often for homework. Only 37 percent of their parents knew. Pew found that the share of teens using ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled in a year, from 13 percent in 2023 to 26 percent in 2024, and by 2025 more than half of teens said they had used a chatbot to help with schoolwork.

Here is why this is the moment. AI is the first technology that can sit on either rung of the ladder for the same child, with the same tool, on the same afternoon. Ask it for the essay and you have become a more efficient consumer: the thing got made and you were not there. Ask it to help you build the website, debug the game, draft the first version of the song you then rewrite, and you have just been handed the most capable collaborator any child has ever had. The tool does not decide which of those happens. The habit does, and the habit is formed long before the child can type.

It also changes what the top rung looks like. The World Economic Forum's 2025 survey of employers put AI and big data at the head of the fastest-growing skills to 2030, with technological literacy close behind. Those are creator-of skills. But the same report put analytical thinking first among the core skills employers want, and that is a creator-with skill: the ability to look at a problem, decide what should exist, and make it. AI will do more and more of the typing. It will not decide what to build. The children who can will be the ones who have been deciding what to build since they were six.

So the question for a parent is no longer whether a child will use AI. They will. It is whether they will meet it as a vending machine or as a workshop, and that is decided by which of those the rest of their technology already is.

The same tool, two directions.

The question is not whether a child will use AI. It is whether they will meet it as a vending machine or as a workshop.

What TEKids is for

I have been part of an organization in Morgantown called TEKids, now STEM Our State, which since 2012 has run afterschool, summer, and weekend STEM programs for kids from kindergarten through high school across north central West Virginia. With a Benedum Foundation grant it partnered with Fairmont State to take an inquiry science curriculum called EnergyMakers into elementary schools. Its afterschool program has cost seventy dollars for a season of two-hour weekly sessions, with scholarships for families who need them, because the point was never the families who could already afford a robotics kit.

What a program like that does is simple to say and hard to do at home. It moves a child from the bottom rung to the middle one by making them build something that has to work. A circuit that lights or does not. A program that runs or throws an error. A bridge that holds the weight or drops it. The feedback is immediate and it comes from the world, not from an adult, and a child who has felt that once knows something a thousand hours of watching will never teach: that the things on the screen were made by someone, and that someone could be them.

The other thing it does is put the child in a room with other children making things. That is not incidental. Mitchel Resnick, who built Scratch at the MIT Media Lab, organizes his whole theory of creative learning around four words, projects, passion, peers, and play, and the third is peers. Children learn to make things the way they learn to speak, from other people doing it near them.

What to do, from people who have studied it

None of this requires a parent who can code. It requires a parent who treats the screen as a workshop and insists, gently and for years, that something comes out of it. Here is what the research and the people who built these tools actually recommend.

What moving one hour does.

What I would tell a parent, in three lines:

Hand them the other side of the glass

Every child alive will be handed a screen. That part is settled. The only decision left to a parent is which side of the glass the child grows up on: the side where things are shown to you, or the side where you decide what is shown.

The first side is free, comfortable, and crowded, and it is getting more comfortable every year. The second side costs an hour a day, a room with other kids in it, and a parent who keeps asking what got made. It is the best investment I know of, and with AI it is about to pay like nothing else.

The world will hand your child a screen. You hand them the keyboard.

Every number on this page is here with where it came from, so you can check me. Where a figure was read from a report's own summary or press release rather than its tables, the text says about. The figures are schematic where they say so.