uses Claude – When an appliance error flashed and a tax letter arrived, a family moving from Connecticut to Las Rozas de Madrid relied on Claude to get unstuck—then watched their kids learn the habit of asking better questions.
I was writing the week’s menu on the Miele fridge in our Spanish apartment when the freezer temperature indicator started flashing two dotted lines. I didn’t know what they meant.
So I pulled out my phone, opened Claude, and described what I was seeing. Within seconds, I was troubleshooting it. My 7-year-old watched me go from clueless to unstuck in under a minute.
Nine months ago, I moved my family of four from Connecticut to Las Rozas de Madrid. We’re all learning Spanish one day at a time. I expected plenty of figuring things out on the fly. What I didn’t anticipate was how much my kids would absorb the process—not passively, but quietly.
I use Claude all the time now. In the last few weeks. I used it to chat with a doctor via our insurance app when my son came home from school with a hematoma. I also used it to translate bloodwork results and research the right supplements to order. And when an audit letter from Agencia Tributaria—the Spanish tax authority—arrived about a package our neighbor had sent us months earlier. I used Claude to understand what it meant.
On the bus to school, my 7-year-old experiences Claude as a kind of magic answer machine. When he wants to learn everything there is to know about diamonds. I open it up and we go deep together. He asks questions, I read him answers, and those answers spark more questions. He doesn’t know the technology. He just knows he can get answers to the things he’s wondering about.
I love that my not knowing doesn’t mean he hits a dead end. I learn alongside him.
My 10-year-old knows exactly what Claude is. He’s been watching me use it for months. Recently, we used it together for the first time on something important to him.
He wants to write a fantasy novel. He has the whole thing mapped out in his head, but he’s a perfectionist. The gap between the big idea and finishing a 30,000-word book felt impossible. He could visualize it, but he couldn’t see the steps—and he got paralyzed.
So I told him Claude could help.
We sat down together, and he watched me write a detailed prompt. From that, Claude built a road map—and I watched my son shift from stuck to gleeful as he read it. Every phase and milestone was broken down into small steps he could take to turn his dream into reality.
For the first time, the thing he wanted so badly felt doable.
I asked Claude to build him a printable workbook to work through character development, plot, setting, and scenes. With a goal of 250 words a day, he can have the first draft done in four months.
He nodded along to many of Claude’s suggestions. Then he pushed back on others. He disagreed with the editing process. He had a better way. It might take longer, he said, but it would make the final product better.
In that moment, I felt a kind of pride I didn’t expect—because it wasn’t blind acceptance. He thought critically. He took what made sense and discarded what didn’t.
The road map didn’t write his novel. It cleared the way so he could start.
Without that support, the dream might have been abandoned entirely.
As a mom, I’ve kept wondering whether any of this is good for them—whether I’m modeling curiosity and resilience, or whether I’m handing them an easy button to outsource the hard parts.
Then I look at my older son on that bus. He didn’t hand his thinking over. He used a tool to get out of his own way so he could start the thing—and then trusted himself to take it from there.
And I think about my youngest, who’s full of questions all the time. The answers Claude gives don’t dim his thinking; they intensify it.
Here’s what I think they’re absorbing: not knowing doesn’t have to be a dead end. Sometimes you just need to know the right question to ask.
We’re still learning Spanish. Most of the time, I still don’t know what I’m doing. But I open Claude, ask a question, and keep moving forward. My kids are learning to do the same. And honestly, it’s one of the best things I can teach them—that everything really is figureoutable.
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