Raising Human Children in the Age of AI: Music, Philosophy and Nature
Dr Sophia Peng
As the tools around us evolve ever faster, the age of AI has made parents more anxious than ever about what children ought to learn. Yet after raising two children, spending years in teaching and building an education venture of my own, I have become increasingly certain of something else: what allows a child to grow with emotional depth and ease is not simply learning more. It is the experience of having been deeply nourished.
For me, that nourishment comes down to three things: music, philosophy and nature. They are not hard skills. They are sometimes dismissed as the indulgences of the rich. If they do belong to the rich, however, it is only to those who are rich in inner life.
In the age of AI, perhaps that is precisely what we must try to raise: children with an abundant inner life, capable of resisting a new kind of servitude of the mind.
Music: giving feeling an echo, and the spirit room to breathe
Looking back, my elder child's musical education began almost by accident. Academic work came easily to him, leaving him plenty of time to play, and the violin became a demanding skill that he could also enjoy for its own sake. Later, after several musicians recognised his ability, I began to study more seriously the paths open to a young person with musical talent.
For a gifted child, learning an instrument can offer a relatively legible route forward: effort is exacting, but progress can be heard. My son did not pass through the succession of high-stakes examinations or the daily drill familiar from China's exam system. With my daughter, music came more naturally still.
I often tell her that her brother grew up in a household of musical outsiders, whereas she was “born into a musical family”: even in the womb she heard him practising. She is acutely sensitive to sound, and music can settle her emotions.
Before we moved to London, she repeatedly asked to learn the cello, but we never quite committed to beginning in Shanghai. Once in London, we discovered that although the city is hardly inexpensive, learning an instrument need not be prohibitively so.
London is one of the world's great musical centres. In any given week, performances large and small are taking place across the city. A child can regularly encounter a musician's breathing, concentration and minute adjustments in the moment. Each time my daughter enters a concert hall, she notices something new; the experience continues to surprise and excite her.
Music and the arts in London are not confined to street performance, theatres or national orchestras. They are woven into the ordinary workings of the city—from education to employment, they are fields with jobs, budgets and public support, not ornamental additions to “real” life.
I do not expect my children to become professional performers. I hope only that, when my daughter is older and one day feels wounded, overwhelmed or alone, a passage of music may offer consolation. When she needs to express herself under the gaze of others, I hope she will not be frightened by silence; and I hope her everyday life will not depend entirely on noise and commotion.
However absorbed my son may appear in his phone, the sound of his daily practice is still there. For a player at his level, entering the flow of performance makes the phone disappear altogether. In that modest sense, an instrument has acquired another use in the age of AI.
Nor need I fear that he lives only through a screen. For him and the friends who share his love of music, playing together is the most natural form of companionship. I often imagine that, one day, the deepest understanding between brother and sister may also come through music.
Philosophy: finding an inner order, and retaining the power to question
Philosophy was my third degree. People asked why, when my career had already reached its apparent height, I would turn back and study again.
It was not a return to the beginning, but a turning point. The detours I had taken eventually led me back to the most fundamental questions: how are we to live with ourselves, and how are we to live with one another?
In my own life, philosophy is not an advanced academic subject. It is an everyday instrument of the mind. It allows my partner and me, in moments of conflict, to leave room for difference without experiencing that difference as a threat. It has helped me, amid the pressures of marriage, parenthood and professional decisions, not to mistake anxiety for destiny, or define “success” too hastily whenever the road divides.
Philosophy does not teach us which choice to make. It trains us to live with the person we become after choosing.
That is why we brought philosophy into children's lives. It is often assumed to belong to adults. But, as our teacher Dahei puts it, children are philosophers by nature. In an Inchwise class, they ask: “Must rules always be obeyed?” “Does freedom mean doing whatever you want?”
These apparently simple questions are existential enquiries before they have been wrapped in formal concepts. Through language, children are trying to measure the shape of their world.
Philosophy does not make children prematurely adult. It makes them less willing to submit to a single authorised answer. It is foundational training for a future crowded with information and difficult choices: the ability to stand steadily in a world in which no standard answer is available.
What use is philosophy in the age of AI? One answer is plain. When machines can generate answers to almost anything, children need all the more to preserve the courage to ask questions of their own.
Nature: the body's surrender, and the child's way out
After years spent working at a desk, sitting and writing, nature became the thing to which my middle-aged body finally had to surrender. When my neck began to protest, my eyes grew dry and my attention scattered, I understood that human beings do not run on willpower alone. We need weather, wind, earth and light. I began, in effect, to write my own manual for inhabiting a middle-aged body.
In Shanghai, we launched Walking with Socrates, taking children into forests and holding philosophical conversations at nature camps. It was an early form of our idea of “doing philosophy in nature”. Children held soil in their hands, identified leaves and ran over uneven ground. In a world without Wi-Fi, their senses reawakened to the material world.
Nature is a teacher that never judges them.
It does not declare them right or wrong; it teaches them simply to exist. What children learn outdoors is more than movement or relaxation. They meet the uncertainty of the real world, and learn how to inhabit their own bodies. They acquire a felt sense of life that neither city routines nor a diet of screens can supply.
In the age of AI, nature provides a kind of foundation beneath the child, supporting balance of mind and body. Closeness to nature is, in this sense, a reserve of strength against the erosions of modern life.
The challenge of remaining fully alive
Music, philosophy and nature are the coordinates I have chosen for my children and for myself. I do not believe they must become anyone else's formula. Your own three essentials may be entirely different.
But every family—and every person—needs to discover some form of inner anchorage: things that may not produce immediate, measurable value, yet continue to sustain a whole human being.
The phrase “human presence” now appears everywhere online. Audiences recoil from people and institutions that seem to speak like machines. It is revealing that, in the age of AI, simply conveying the presence of a living person has become an achievement.
The greatest danger is not that AI will be able to do more and more. It is that we may gradually forget the texture, rhythm and scale of human life.
About the author
Dr Sophia Peng is a philosopher, former journalist and university lecturer, and the founder of Inchwise. Based in London, she writes on education, family life and human development across cultures.