Your kids are being taught to cheat

How American culture is giving domination over moral integrity

The one and only Banksy

Last week, while helping my kid with his math homework, he showed me how to take a picture of any math problem, send it to My AI on Snapchat, and immediately get the answer. Rather than learning formulas, he's learning how to cheat.

To be fair, My AI helped me considerably in that moment while trying to remember how to solve for m = (y2 - y1)/(x2 - x1). Thanks to this quick, shonky kookums hack, I was able to tutor my son. (I found the videos and textbook to be very unhelpful.)

Still, I was horrified. But not surprised.

There are lots of reasons why children struggle and might turn to AI as a quick fix. Schools are taxed, teachers are burned out, kids are chronically sick, and even further behind due to the residual effects of the pandemic. But teachers aren’t at fault. Nor are their peers.

The part that no one says out loud is that society is pulling a do as I say, not as I do on our little whippersnappers by modeling the very behaviors we’re telling them to avoid.

When results > process

As they say in writing, “Show, don’t tell.” Yes, we teachers and parents can preach about ethics until we’re blue in the face — and we do — but actions speak louder than words.

In mainstream American culture, we’re showing our kids that who you are doesn't matter as much as what you achieve. We are a results-driven society. Look at who we place on pedestals: Winning athletes. Hollywood action heroes. The Kardashians. Almost every childhood recreation has morphed into some form of competition — even reading books!

Our culture celebrates, rewards, and institutionalizes power and domination. Take, for instance:

• Robber baron capitalism (because “baron” sounds fancier than “person who hoards wealth while others starve”)

• Manifest Destiny (a.k.a. “I saw it, I wanted it, I took it” but with patriotic music)

• Wall Street

• U.S. politics

• Income inequality

• Sports and athletic culture + school athletics

• Who gets scholarships

• Competitive grading

• Standardized testing (because one-size-fits-all works just fine for assessing children and women’s bathing suits)

• Military spending ($886 billion in 2024, or 13.3% of U.S. budget)

And on and on and on.

Middle School: Lord of the Flies with Smartphones

Middle school is ground zero for observing how conformity, power, and domination equate to safety in our social hierarchy. (I’m a mother of two tweens and a middle school Spanish teacher, plus a cultural anthropologist in a previous life, so I got receipts.)

My children are growing up in a culture that polices the cracks and punishes, fears, incarcerates, and pathologizes “the other.” I watch my middle-school son navigate a world where dominance means survival and safety — and then watch the same pattern repeated in boardrooms and government chambers. Instead of deciding who gets to sit at the cool lunch table, they're deciding the fate of nations. Same energy, bigger missiles.

Our culture rewards results and achievements over personal worth and ethical behavior. This is why people who learn differently or navigate the world in so-called “non-productive” ways are often less valued and struggle to find a place in schools and the workplace.

The powerful get more power, the system is rigged, and children witness it all. Thus there remains little motivation not to game the system. Who knows, next thing we know, our kids will be selling the United States for parts to colonize Mars!

Finding a Moral Compass in a Technological Storm

When it's so easy to cheat, what intrinsic motivation exists to act ethically? When all systems are divided into win/lose binaries with such high stakes, what’s stopping anyone from cutting corners?

Now that everyone, including children, has a supercomputer in their pocket, we need to teach our kids how to use this power responsibly. But how much of a difference do our words make when the rules are redrawn every time our children step into society?

We need to present our children with a moral compass that doesn't spin like it's caught in a magnetic storm. Some point to religion as a solution. But critical thinkers (yes even children) can spot empty performance masquerading as ethics faster than a teenager can spot an adult trying too hard to be cool. Nothing says "ethical behavior" like politicians who attend church on Sunday and then spend Monday through Saturday doing exactly what Jesus would definitely not do.

We can teach ethics in schools and at home, but again, it’s just lip service. Talk is cheap. We need to show ethical behavior. Grown-ups need to model this behavior, in boardrooms and politics, and beyond, if we want to raise kids who do the same.

Which begs the question: Are we adults willing to do things the slow, ethical way, even at the expense of our power and dominance? Are we willing to compromise our competitive edge, our time, our resources?

In a world where answers come instantly through AI, the more important questions remain: What kind of people are we becoming? And what example are we setting for those who will inherit this accelerating world?

Last night, my son said he needed his phone to catch up on work he had missed while out sick. I said I’d rather he do ¼ of the assignment the right, ethical way, even if it meant getting a bad grade.

So, without his phone, he did the assignment the slow, old-fashioned way. It went faster than he anticipated. He finished the whole thing. When he was done, he was so cheery! He was uncharacteristically agreeable and kind to his little sister. They played together and got along, which never happens!

When we do the right thing, we feel good about ourselves. We like ourselves, so we have more capacity to like others. We treat others better. And it spreads like bees pollinating flowers.

Perhaps that's where real hope lies—in the choices we make to choose the harder right over the easier wrong, and to show our children that the journey to the summit matters more than reaching the peak.

Thank you for reading! Below the paywall, I’m including suggestions for ways to foster ethics with your kids when societal modeling can be less than ethical.

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Thank you! Summer