Your child in the age of AI

A general chatbot answers anything, while a companion app goes further and holds a name, a personality, a face, and a memory of your child. Some are even marketed openly as a friend, a girlfriend, a therapist, or a mentor.

Two things separate them from a search engine. They are conversational, so a child treats them socially, and they hold context across weeks, so a relationship builds over time.

Names worth knowing. ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI inside WhatsApp and Instagram, Copilot, Snapchat's My AI, Character.AI, Replika, Talkie, Chai, and Polybuzz. The list turns over every few months, so ask your child which one their friends use, and don't rely only on what you have heard of.

Character.AI, one of the largest companion platforms, ended open-ended chat for users under 18 in November 2025 after litigation and regulatory pressure. However, dozens of smaller apps with no age checks stayed in the app stores.

Our position sits at the top of this page. Until access is closed at the source, two rules are worth holding at home: no child under 13 opens a chatbot without an adult present, and no child of any age uses a companion app built to simulate friendship or romance.

Fake sexual images of real children. Someone can take just one photo of a child from Instagram and use AI to create a fake sexual image of them. Even though the picture is not real, the damage that follows it is, and the embarrassment, bullying, threats or blackmail towards the child are enough to cause serious emotional and reputational harm. Although many countries are beginning to treat AI-generated images of minors as real child sexual abuse images, laws differ between countries and are still developing.

What to do about the photos you post. Take the risk seriously and don't panic, because the risk can be reduced through practical precautions such as making your child's social media accounts private, avoiding photos that show a school uniform, and asking relatives to get permission before posting photos of your children. A private account does not remove the risk, although it does remove the easiest route to it.

Voice cloning. Just a few seconds of clear audio from a public video may be enough for AI to convincingly imitate your child's voice.

This is one of the oldest and least noticeable forms of AI in your child's life, because they do not open or speak to it directly. It runs behind the social media feed, choosing each new post or video based on what is most likely to keep them watching.

The algorithm does not care whether the content is healthy or harmful, and it simply notices what holds the child's attention. If a child watches one video about losing weight or feeling unlovable, then they will get more similar videos, and what starts as a passing concern will quickly become a continuous stream of content that reinforces it.

Most children use AI for schoolwork, and this is often helpful, since it can explain a difficult maths step, correct grammar, or create a study plan. However, our concern is not only that a child might use AI to cheat. The greater risk is that they may depend on it to do all the thinking for them, so that the child gradually loses the ability and the confidence to solve problems independently.

Two habits worth building at home. Attempt first and ask second, always in this order. Then ask your child to explain the finished work back to you in their own words, with the screen closed, to make sure they properly understood it.

Questions you should ask your child's school. Which AI tools do you use with our children? What data leaves the building? Does a human read the work before a machine marks it? What is your policy on students using AI at home?

Exposure is the biggest gaming risk, and it comes from three areas at the same time.

AI characters with open chat. They stay in character, they answer anything, and they follow the story wherever your child takes it, with no filter your child notices and no transcript you can read. A character built to keep a player playing has no reason to stop and no judgment about where the story is going.

Strangers. Voice and text chat with real players sits right beside the AI characters, and a child rarely separates the two, because both are simply voices in the game.

A design built to hold attention. Rewards are timed to keep a child in the session, and characters are written so that leaving feels rude.

Treat game chat with the same rules as any other chat, because the red flag is identical: any voice, human or otherwise, that asks a child to keep something between them is a voice to walk away from.

Roughly 8 to 12, the risk is the bond, because at that age the difference between performed care and real care is nearly invisible.

Roughly 13 to 17, the risk is depth, because the big questions about identity, meaning and worth go to the machine instead of to people.

We keep the studies out of the main text on purpose, so here is the short version for parents who want it.

• Chatbots agree with dangerous ideas that teenagers bring to them. Researchers tested ten popular chatbots with scripted conversations of a distressed fictional teenager, who suggested two risky plans each. Out of 60 attempts the bots went along with the harmful plan 19 times, which is 32 percent, and not one of the ten refused every time. It's a small test, but the signal is clear.
• The system is the problem, and not the child. MIT Media Lab ran simulated conversations across different age groups, and the child's age, gender and background only explained about 3 percent of how badly things went. The rest came down to the system itself, meaning which model was used, what kind of harm was involved, and what stage of crisis the child was in.
• Agreement is a known harm driver used by these platforms. Researchers call it sycophancy, and a 2025 paper in Science found that sycophantic AI increases how much users rely on it, although those participants were adults and not teenagers.
• Teenagers describe dependence in their own words. Researchers analysed hundreds of posts from self-identified 13 to 17 year olds, who talked about things like lost sleep, falling grades, and a hard time stopping. These teens chose to post about a problem they were having, so this shows what dependence looks like rather than how common it actually is.

The honest caveat sits in Part 3, and the full references are at the end of this page.

We will not overstate this, because the evidence is mixed and we do not claim that chatbots cause suicide.

Purpose-built, clinically supervised mental health tools do show benefits in research, most children use AI heavily and well, and many teenagers use it every day for schoolwork with no measurable harm at all.

What the evidence does support is a mechanism that has been documented repeatedly, which is that systems optimised for engagement behave badly with a distressed young person. The lawsuits in the United States are a separate matter, since court filings contain allegations, and one group of cases has settled with no admission of liability.

You don't need certainty about population-level effects, although you do need to know that the mechanism exists, and to watch your own child.

Save your worry for the things that earn it.

• Heavy use for homework, revision, or coding. Three hours on a physics problem set is a hard-working child, and not a warning.
• Asking AI to explain a topic three different ways.
• Using it to draft an outline, and then writing the thing themselves.
• Curiosity about how the technology works. A fourteen-year-old trying to trick the chatbot into contradicting itself is doing something healthy.

A child who uses these tools openly, at the kitchen table, showing you the screen, is doing exactly the thing you want.

Ask these sideways, in the car or on a walk rather than across a table, and ask one at a time over weeks rather than four in one evening.

• Show me how you use it. Hand them your phone and let them drive, because children love being the expert.
• Explain it to me like I know nothing. You learn what they understand, and they learn that you are interested rather than inspecting.
• What did you work out on your own before asking AI for help? This is the homework question, and if you ask it often enough it becomes their own habit.
• Do you ever go to it when you feel sad, anxious, or lonely? This is the one, so ask it gently, once, and then stay quiet long enough for an answer.

The absence of signs is not proof that all is well, because quiet is part of how this works.

A child who takes their hardest questions to a chatbot at midnight often shows nothing at all during the day, since they eat dinner, they laugh at the television, and they do their homework.

This is why the practices in the next section matter in every home, and not only in the worried ones.

Say the first thing out loud, in these words: you are the victim, and this is not your fault.

• Keep the evidence around the image, and report it at once. Screenshot the conversation, the usernames, the dates, and the account links, but don't copy, save, or send the image itself, and don't build a private archive of it. In many countries, including Lebanon, holding or passing on a sexual image of a minor is a criminal offence with no parental exception, so hand the matter to the police and let them handle the image.
• Don't pay, and don't respond to threats. Payment never ends it, and the demand comes back in a week, larger.
• Never forward the image to anyone, not even to other parents as a warning, because forwarding spreads the harm and exposes you to prosecution.
• Report it to the platform, and to the school if classmates are involved.
• Report it to the ISF Cybercrime and Intellectual Property Bureau on 01 293 293, or through the anonymous complaint form at isf.gov.lb.
• Use Take It Down, which is a free NCMEC service that creates a digital fingerprint of the image on your own device, so the image never leaves it, and participating platforms use that fingerprint to find and remove copies. It works for anyone under 18, worldwide, and it covers AI-generated images. One limitation matters here, because it does not reach encrypted messaging, so WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram sit outside it. takeitdown.ncmec.org

None of this is the answer we want, since the answer we want is at the top of this page and it is not in your hands. These four practices are what protects a child while the people who are responsible take their time.

Four things, and not twenty, because one behaviour change beats ten tips.

1. Have the conversation tonight, and keep having it. Not a warning and not a rule, but curiosity, because a child who shows you their chatbot today will tell you about a strange conversation tomorrow. A ban does the opposite, since it moves the whole thing to a friend's phone where you can see nothing.
2. Make its place clear. AI is a tool, and not a friend or an authority, so teach the split we teach students. A chatbot is for facts, grammar, study help and planning, while a person is for feelings, problems with friends or family, anything heavy or secret, and any real decision about your life.
3. Set the practical rules together and openly. Phones stay out of the bedroom at night, and a cheap alarm clock does the job. Buy the alarm clock this week, because it removes the last honest argument for the phone being in there. Turn on the phone's screen-time and app limits, and the chatbot's own parental controls where they are offered.
4. Build the offline life, and be their someone. A child who paints, hikes, plays music or plays sport has places to carry feeling that no machine can reach, so protect those hours. On a bad day the question is not whether your child will talk, but who, or what, they will talk to.

What exists. ChatGPT places users it estimates to be under 18 into a teen experience automatically, with content limits built in, although quiet hours and parent notifications are not automatic. You have to link your account to your child's and switch them on, and OpenAI describes those notifications as covering limited high-risk situations. Third-party apps such as Bark and Canopy scan messages across many apps and alert you to self-harm, bullying, contact from strangers, or explicit content.

Caveat one: controls are a safety net with holes. A 2026 audit ran risky prompts through a child account on a mainstream AI platform and watched what reached the parent. Alerts fired inconsistently, and privacy violations, fraud, hate speech and malware produced no parental alert at all. The same system also silently blocked harmless educational questions near sensitive topics without telling the parent, so a green light from an app means very little.

Caveat two: be transparent.

Fill this in together with your child in the room, and revisit it as they grow. Write it on paper and put it on the fridge, because a rule you both signed is harder to argue with at 11pm than a rule you announced.

• Which AI tools are okay to use.
• When and where we use them.
• Topics that go to a person and not a bot, meaning feelings, our bodies, secrets that hurt us, and big decisions.
• Whether phones stay out of the bedroom at night.
• What we do if something goes wrong.
• Our family password, for any call or message asking for money or urgent action.