Earlier this year, I spoke with a dozen working mothers in North Carolina about the effects of AI on their jobs. A finance manager at a hospital there started to cry near the end of our interview. We had spent most of an hour on her work, her field, the slow way AI is moving into it. Then I asked what she wanted for her kids, and her composure dropped. “I’m sorry for the tears,” she said.

I end these interviews with some version of that question about their kids, and it is where the conversation changes. For most of an hour, each mother talks about herself: her career, her caregiving, her own footing in a market that AI is shifting under her. Ask about her children and something else comes forward. Not a plan. None of them had a plan. What they had was a posture: the mix of fear, resolve, and readiness a parent carries into a transition she cannot see the end of, and has already begun to hand down without quite naming it.

The finance manager’s posture took a few minutes to surface. She is the first in her family to go to college. “I didn’t have a lot of people to mentor me, to say this is what you should do,” she told me. Earlier in her life she had to walk away from a path she’d worked hard to get onto, not because she lacked the ability but because no one had prepared her for what it would actually take. What she carries from that is not regret for herself so much as a resolve for her kids. “I don’t want my children to feel afraid. I don’t want them to feel unprepared, held back for anything.”

I offered her a word for what she was describing, half apologizing for being a nerd about it: self-efficacy. The felt sense that whatever the future asks, you can meet it. She recognized it instantly. Self-efficacy sits right next to fear, not in place of it. The same woman told me the AI future “kind of still scares me.” Both are true at once. She is afraid of where it may go, and she is already preparing her children to live there. That is the posture: clear-eyed, not panicked. Afraid, and getting them ready anyway.

Another mother carries the same inheritance in a different form. She is a single mom with little financial cushion who lost two roles in a row as the budgets behind them shifted toward AI and software. And she has decided her young daughter will not be caught flat-footed the way she was. “I’m going to get her ingrained in it,” she said about AI. “I’m going to get her used to using it. That’s gonna be the future.” But in the same breath she drew a boundary: I’m “still gonna make her think for herself.” Her daughter is already accustomed to asking Alexa questions. The mother’s job, as she sees it, is to add the other half: to make sure that while her daughter is fluent with the tool, she is still the owner of her own thinking.

The next generation will meet AI already shaped by how their parents met it.

The details differ. One mother is steadying her kids against a fear she still feels. The other is drilling her daughter in the tool while teaching her to keep her own mind. The mechanism underneath is identical, and it is the oldest one there is: kids inherit attitudes before they inherit anything else. The next generation will meet AI already shaped by how their parents met it. These mothers are not only reskilling themselves. They are setting the stance their children will carry into a world neither of them can fully picture yet.

If AI is the once-in-a-generation economic shift it appears to be, then how we support working mothers through it right now is not separate from what happens to their kids. For the next generation, it is what happens to their kids.

Logan Currie is a Visiting Fellow at Capita’s Family Policy Lab.