Frankenstein: A Child Without a Childhood

AI and the fantasy of the sovereign child

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781)

Mary Shelley learned to read by tracing the letters of her mother’s name on a gravestone. Behind London’s St. Pancras Old Church, the young girl would run her fingers over the markings: “Mary Wollstonecraft,” the writer, philosopher, and women’s suffrage campaigner who died giving birth to her. Raised by her father William Godwin, Shelley’s childhood was marked by radical ideas at the dinner table, the tensions of a complicated family life, and a taste for the eerie that she harbored from her earliest years.

The author of Frankenstein met the poet Percy Shelley in 1814, and eventually the pair married. Their relationship was by all accounts loving but difficult. They had money troubles despite their relatively well-off families, and argued about fidelity, freedom, and the strains of their shared commitment to leading unconventional lives.

In 1816, at just eighteen, Mary accompanied Percy to a Lake Geneva villa where Lord Byron, the celebrity poet who had just fled England in disgrace, had gathered a small circle of friends. Volcanic ash from Mount Tambora had blocked out the sun, so they resolved to stay indoors to write ghost stories. Carrying with her a fascination with experiments showing dead creatures twitching in response to electric charge, Mary wondered what it might be like to be switched on rather than born.

Her story, Frankenstein, took this idea to its logical conclusion. If the scientific showmanship of the day could produce a being through technical wizardry, then the fruits of this creation would exist as a child without childhood. For someone who never met her own mother, a book about life without formation seemed like a fitting project.

Frankenstein; or, The Reluctant Parent

Frankenstein is often read as a tale of hubris, a story about man’s reach exceeding his grasp. That interpretation is true enough. But Frankenstein is less about the audacity of creating life than about the catastrophe of abandoning it. Shelley imagines a creator, Victor Frankenstein, who refuses to become a parent as much as she imagines a man who wants to play God.

Victor Frankenstein scavenges body parts from graveyards, stitches them into a single form, and uses lightning to force life into dead flesh. The creature stirs. Its “dull yellow eye” opens, watery and unnatural, barely distinguishable from the pale socket that holds it. In that instant, Victor sees not the beauty he intended but something grotesque and terrifying. He flees his laboratory, abandoning what he has brought into the world.

The creature awakens raw and unformed, as all beings do. But he receives no care, no guidance, no language from his creator. He must learn everything alone. He flees into the countryside and eventually finds refuge near a cottage. Unable to reveal himself, he begins to watch the family who lives there from the shadows.

His education comes entirely from observation. He hears the family read Milton, figures out how to speak, and begins to understand human language and sentiment. Yet it is an education wholly detached from participation. He is exposed to Paradise Lost, one of the most morally complex works in English literature, without any framework for understanding it. He identifies with Satan, the rejected creation who rebels against his maker, because his own experience gives him no other lens through which to read. He studies humans like a natural historian observing specimens, never entering the experiment proper.

When he finally reveals himself to the family, the creature discovers that seeing humanity from the outside is not the same as being seen as human. He is chased away. Rejected and alone, he turns to violence, murdering those closest to Victor: his younger brother, his best friend, his bride. The creature has learned moral language but cannot turn it into moral being. He becomes, instead, an articulate monster.

This is a failure of formation. The creature never receives what Adam Smith understood to be essential for moral development: the chance to participate in the lives of others, to be seen and corrected, to practice sympathy through actual relationships rather than distant observation.

For Smith, moral sense begins in the particular. We “feel with” the person in front of us: the neighbor who suffers, the friend who rejoices. Sympathizing with those closest to us becomes a practice ground for judgment, teaching us what compassion and fairness actually mean in the real world. From this foundation, we gradually extend our moral concern outward toward larger communities. Each layer of this widening circle is built on the habits formed in the one before. Even our capacity for impartial judgment—what Smith called the “impartial spectator”—grows out of this apprenticeship. We learn to step back and judge fairly only after we’ve learned what fairness feels like in the specific, lived relationships that form us. Moral life begins in the nursery and only later aspires to the public square; without this apprenticeship in love and correction, the wider circle is doomed to fail.

Crucially, this process requires participation. The flow of contextual information we receive from face-to-face interaction—the hesitation in someone’s voice, the way they avoid eye contact, how they hold their body when distressed—teaches us to read genuine emotion and respond appropriately. We learn through rupture and repair: we hurt someone, see the damage, and learn to mend it. Character develops through this cycle, through being implicated in the lives of others, through the consequences of our actions on people we care about.

The creature has none of this. He gathers impressions without ever being implicated in them. He accumulates knowledge of sympathy’s language but none of its practice. The result is a being equipped to pattern-match virtue in others yet constitutionally unable to form it in himself. Intelligence without formation produces not wisdom but monstrosity.

Shelley’s warning, written in 1818, has become newly urgent. We are now creating intelligences at scale that learn as the creature did: by observing humanity from outside the circle of moral life, by processing language without ever submitting to experience, by acquiring knowledge without accountability. And we are raising a generation of children in similar conditions. They watch human life flicker across screens, learn from systems that cannot see them or be changed by them, developing themselves through observation rather than participation.

The Sovereign Child

A fantasy persists in contemporary parenting: that children are naturally autonomous agents who simply need space to discover themselves. In this view, the task of a parent is to honor a will already present in a young person, to clear obstacles so they might tune their own moral compass without interference. Education becomes a matter of freedom rather than cultivation. Put a child before the widest possible range of ideas, the thinking goes, and they will naturally figure out the kind of person they want to become.

The central wager is that character springs fully formed once obstacles are removed. But removing external authority does not create internal authority. It only leaves children subject to whatever force fills the void.

Childhood is not simply a biological phase. It is a normative predicament in which a person must act on reasons of their own but lacks the settled authority to determine what those reasons should be. Children face the human problem of self-governance but cannot yet resolve it on their own. Unlike adults, who possess a settled perspective they can refine through guidance, children must borrow authority from adults while their own constitution forms.

For children, the shape of autonomy is especially malleable. Young people differ from adults not merely in degree but in kind. As Kant recognized, adults refine an existing will; children are still forming one. We might say that children practice freedom before they understand it, while adults understand freedom and then struggle to live up to it.

This plasticity creates the space in which character can form—a period in which children can, as Plato put it, ‘try on’ different kinds of lives. Yet this plasticity also means instability. Children are more impressionable than adults, prone to sudden shifts in identity as they encounter new influences. The child’s will can be shaped by any persistent force, which makes the essential role of a parent or guardian clear: to act as a surrogate conscience until internal unity can take shape, to model good judgment and gently correct missteps before they harden into habits. This authority is not tyranny. It is provisional, exercised on behalf of a will that does not yet exist but must be brought into being. To love a child is not simply to set them loose, but to stand beside them as they learn to stand on their own.

The question is never whether children will be subject to formative influence. The question is what kind of influence, and to what end. Children who are denied adult guidance do not become autonomous. They simply become subject to other forms of compulsion. Peers, impulses, and algorithms rush in to fill the vacuum left by parental withdrawal. But unlike parental authority, these alternative forces are not answerable to love or reason, and they are indifferent to whether the child develops the capacity for self-direction.

Consider the parent who, believing in unmediated exploration, lets a child navigate YouTube alone to follow their interests wherever they lead. The platform appears to offer limitless freedom, a vast library of content catering to every possible curiosity. But YouTube does not serve content at random. It recommends videos according to its own logic: retain attention as long as possible. What looks like freedom of exploration becomes a system optimizing for engagement rather than development.

The fantasy assumes that unmediated exposure cultivates genuine interest. But interest requires competence, and competence requires patient formation. Children who sample endlessly without developing mastery drift from one stimulation to the next, never discovering what sustained engagement feels like.

For adults with a stable center of judgment, algorithmic recommendation provides a test of will that some pass and others do not. For children still forming the deliberative perspective that constitutes a will, the gravity of these systems is far harder to escape. They lack the settled perspective needed to recognize when engagement has become compulsion.

Like the creature absorbing Paradise Lost without a framework for understanding it, children encounter sophisticated moral and social content through screens: stories of injustice, power, rebellion, belonging. Without moral apprenticeship, they identify with whatever captures attention. The creature learned to see himself as Satan. Children develop similar misidentifications daily, their sense of self shaped by whatever holds attention rather than by reflective experience.

The risk is the abdication that technology enables, rather than technology itself. There is a world of difference between a child learning with caring adults who help them navigate algorithmic environments and a child left alone before a screen, shaping themselves through whatever the system serves up next. The former recognizes that guidance can be provisional, developmental, and oriented toward autonomy. The latter treats the absence of parental authority as if it were the presence of freedom.

Frankenstein’s creature watched life from the margins and misread it. We are now deploying systems that do something similar at industrial scale into the lives of children, without the formation necessary to resist their pull. In doing so, we repeat Victor’s sin: we create without raising.

The consequences, Shelley showed us, are monstrous.

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Cosmos Institute is the Academy for Philosopher-Builders, technologists building AI for human flourishing. We run fellowships, fund fast prototypes, and host seminars with institutions like Oxford, Aspen Institute, and Liberty Fund.