A shop assistant recently told a columnist something that should stop every parent cold. Teenagers are struggling to tie their own shoelaces, so the shelves are filling up with Velcro.
The column, by teacher and journalist Olga Klimakhina, first ran in Russia's Gazeta.ru and was republished in English by RT this week. Her examples are blunt. First graders who can't dress themselves or pack a school bag. Parents still carrying the backpacks of 12- and 13-year-olds. Her conclusion is blunter: kids aren't lazy. Adults who do everything for them are training them to be helpless.
It's easy to read that and think "that's a Russia problem." It isn't. Bring it home to Cayman and the picture gets uncomfortable fast, because this island has built a childhood where a kid almost never has to do anything alone. And this year, a new babysitter moved in.
1. The car
Cayman kids don't walk to school. They get delivered.
The school run is so big it shapes the island's traffic. A Ministry of Transport survey, reported by the Cayman Compass in March 2025, found 63% of parents head out for school or work between 7am and 8am, and concluded that school schedules are a big part of the congestion. Anyone who drives into George Town knows the roads go quiet the week school breaks up.
Door to door, air conditioned, with a parent or a driver at the wheel. No bus stop, no walk, no crossing a road, no working out what to do when your ride doesn't show. Every one of those little moments is a rep, and most Cayman kids skip them.
To be fair, there are real reasons. Plenty of roads have no sidewalk, the traffic is fast and the sun is brutal. But "there's a reason" and "there's a cost" can both be true.
2. The helper
Domestic helpers and janitors still topped Cayman's work permit list in January 2024. In a lot of homes, someone else makes the bed, packs the lunch, irons the uniform and picks the wet towel up off the floor.
This is not a dig at helpers. In plenty of houses, the helper is doing more actual parenting than anyone else in the building. It's a question about the job description. Is the job to do it for the kids, or to teach the kids to do it? Those two jobs raise two very different adults.
3. The screen
This one, Cayman has already admitted. Since the first day of the 2026/27 school year on August 26, phones and other personal connected devices have been banned in government schools. Education Minister Rolston Anglin said the ban followed complaints from teachers and parents on every campus about distraction.
Good. But look at what the ban covers: school hours, in government schools. The final bell rings and the phone is back in their hand before the car leaves the parking lot. The ban doesn't solve the problem. It moves it into your living room.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose 2024 book The Anxious Generation argues for phone-free schools, puts the whole thing in one line: we overprotect kids in the real world and underprotect them online. Cayman could be the poster child. Gated communities, a ride everywhere, a GPS dot on a parent's phone. Then a device in the bedroom that will show them anything, at any hour.
4. The chatbot
Here's where it gets new. The original column barely touches AI. It should have, because the kid who never had to learn to tie their laces now doesn't have to learn to think either.
- More than half of US teens (54%) use AI chatbots for schoolwork, and about 1 in 10 say they do all or most of their assignments with chatbot help, according to Pew Research.
- 72% of US teens have tried an AI companion, and about a third of those teens have taken something serious to the AI instead of a real person, according to Common Sense Media.
- Closer to home, CXC, the Caribbean exam board many Cayman students sit, now allows AI in School-Based Assessments from 2026. The rules say use it to understand and brainstorm, cite it, and don't let it produce the work. Good luck enforcing that at 11pm.
- An MIT Media Lab experiment found that people who wrote essays with ChatGPT showed the weakest brain connectivity of three groups, and had the most trouble quoting essays they had written minutes earlier. It's a small study and not yet peer reviewed, so don't oversell it. But it's not nothing.
Put it together and you get what a reader below calls the "Call Center." A child asks why the sky is blue, why Grandpa died, whether they're good enough, and the answer comes from a machine that is never tired, never busy and never says "go and figure it out."
The bumpy road
Klimakhina ends on an image worth stealing. A parent's job isn't to pave the road. It's to teach the kid to walk on a bumpy one.
The research backs the worry, with a catch. A review of 38 studies found most of them linked helicopter parenting with more anxiety and depression in young people, but couldn't prove which causes which. Anxious kids may also end up with more hovering parents. Still, the loop isn't hard to picture. A kid who never gets to struggle never finds out they can cope. So they don't believe they can. So the adults keep stepping in. Round it goes.
AI just spins the loop faster. An over-helped kid used to at least have to sit alone with a hard maths problem at 10pm. Now they don't even have to do that.
Five uncomfortable questions for Cayman parents
- When did your kid last order their own food, or pay at the till at Foster's or Kirk Market without you hovering?
- Could your 12-year-old get to a friend's house or the nearest shop without a ride?
- If your helper went home for a month, could your teenager do their own laundry?
- When your child asks "why," who answers first: you, or a chatbot?
- Is the phone ban fixing anything, or just moving the problem to your sofa after the final bell?
Small rehearsals, island style
None of this needs a new law. It needs reps.
- Hand them the till. Card or cash at the supermarket, and you step back.
- Make them make the call. Booking a haircut or ordering takeout by phone is terrifying at 11. That's the point.
- Let them forget the bag. If they didn't pack it, they live without it for one day. Tomorrow they pack it.
- Rewrite the helper's job. From "do it for them" to "show them once, then let them do it."
- The AI rule: explain it back. Use the chatbot if you want. Then close it and explain the answer in your own words. If you can't, you didn't learn it. The machine did.
- Use the island. Snorkelling, fishing, sailing, a walk to the shop. Cayman is one giant classroom for learning to handle small risks, and too many kids only ever see it through a car window.
Choosing a school? Our guide to the Cayman school system covers public and private options. Need ideas that don't involve a screen? Start with the best things to do in Cayman with kids.
The real danger
The scary kid isn't the one who can't tie their laces. Velcro fixed that. The scary kid is the one whose first move, the second anything gets hard, is to look for someone, or something, to do it for them.
In 2026 that something lives in their pocket, never gets tired and never says "figure it out yourself."
So, honestly: who's raising your kids?
When Your kids ask questions,,, send them to the Call Center. «Ai» is raising them now.