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The Wise Child: How to Raise Kids Who Think for Themselves in a World of Screens, Social Media, AI, and Peer Pressure
Paperback
Series: The Middle Way Parenting, Book 5
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 22 2026
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.77
Height: 0.72 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Your child can find anything online in seconds. Can they tell when it's wrong, manufactured, or trying to sell them something?
Book 5 in the Middle Way Parenting Series turns from friendship and connection (Book 4) to the question every parent now faces and no earlier generation had to: how do you raise a child who can think clearly, question wisely, and choose deliberately, inside a world engineered - by algorithms, advertisers, influencers, and now artificial intelligence - to think and choose for them?
Drawing on the Kalama Sutta's ancient case for questioning confident claims, and on taṇhā (craving) and Right View - translated into ordinary parenting language, not spiritual performance - The Wise Child gives you a repeatable framework, Pause-Check-Choose, and shows you how to teach it at every age from preschool screen habits to a teenager's AI-written homework.
Inside, you'll find:
- 6 Parts and 29 chapters covering the attention economy, the inner filter (pausing, checking evidence, noticing effect, choosing on purpose), screens without panic, social media and comparison, AI and the future of thinking, and building a lasting inner compass
- A bonus Teach, Monitor, or Intervene? digital-safety decision guide, with a Five-Question Triage for the moments that are more than ordinary friction
- 29 field-tested Practice tools, one per chapter - including the AI Use Ladder, the Screenshot Test, and Explain It Back - gathered again in a one-page Toolkit for quick reference
- An Age-by-Age Discernment Checklist and 7 printable worksheets, including fillable trackers and reflection sheets
- 10 Case Labs on messy, real-world family situations - from a preschooler's autoplay loop to an AI-voice-clone scam - with no perfect answer, a Say This Instead phrasebook, and a Self-Coaching Space for the parent holding their own phone
This is a practice book, not a promise of a child who never believes something false, never wants something manufactured, or never gets pulled into a feed longer than intended - no book honestly can offer that, and this one will tell you so directly. What it offers instead is a repeatable way of responding, chapter by chapter, to the viral claim, the AI-written essay, and the everyone has one in front of you right now.
You do not need to have read Books 1-4 to use this one. The Wise Child stands completely on its own.
The child is learning. The parent is practicing. Neither job is ever really finished - least of all in a world that keeps changing the terms.
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