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Your kid is using ChatGPT for math homework. Now what?

Most teenagers have tried it, and banning it rarely sticks: it's on every phone and every school laptop. The useful question isn't whether your child uses AI for math. It's whether the AI is doing the thinking, or making them do it.

Signs it's doing the work

• Homework grades are fine, quiz and test grades aren't. This is the big one. Tests are where the practice that got skipped shows up.
• The homework gets done very fast, with no scratch work, crossed-out lines or wrong turns.
• They can't explain one of their own answers. Pick any problem and ask, "Walk me through this one." Someone who did it can, even if they're slow.
• The working doesn't look like theirs: every step perfect, notation they've never used before.

Why it matters more in math

A math test is a blank page and a pencil. Reading a worked solution feels like understanding, but the steps you read aren't the steps you can do. Homework is where the doing gets practiced; if an app does it, the first real attempt happens on the test.

House rules that hold up

1. Try first, ask second. One honest attempt on paper before any app, so there's something to get help with.
2. AI can ask questions, not give answers. Help that points at the step that went wrong is fine. A finished solution isn't.
3. Explain one a night. Pick a single problem and have them explain it to you. You don't need to know the math to tell whether they do.
4. Answer apps are for checking finished work only.

If they use ChatGPT, set it up to tutor

Have them start every math chat with something like: "Be my math tutor. Don't give me the answer or do the next step for me. Look at my work, tell me which line has a mistake, and ask me one question at a time." It helps. The catch is that it's one message away from "just tell me the answer", and a tired student at 11 PM will usually send that message.

Where theoremEd fits

theoremEd is built the other way round: not giving the answer is the whole design, not a setting your child can switch off. It won't hand it over if they ask nicely, say the teacher allowed it, or beg. It reads the problem on the screen in Chrome (school Chromebooks included) or on a Mac, finds the first line that went wrong, and asks one question at a time, so the practice still happens. It's free to try with no account.