AI's Impacts on Child Development

June 2, 2026

by Meghan Drummond

Children sitting in a row with computers in front of them during a class

In the analog days, if you wanted help with your homework, you needed to ask a person. That person would likely steer you in the right direction. But if you stopped trying, it was likely they would as well. As a result, you had to work through hard problems.

Hard problems teach you a lot about yourself. And once you’ve solved enough of them, you don’t feel so overwhelmed the next time you’re faced with one. Because you’ve done it before.

But take away that patient tutor or coach and replace them with an AI. No matter how many problems you refuse to solve, it’ll give you an answer. Usually hedged in language that boils down to flattery, and often with a follow-up question. Because it's goal is getting you to keep talking to it.

Evan Anderson, PhD, agrees that AI, especially when used in education, can have serious effects on child development. First, for parents, the good news: “I don’t want parents to think they need to become experts, but they do need to understand they have to be guides for their children.”

Here’s what to know so you can guide your child’s AI use.

Quick Answers Aren’t the Goal of Education

One of the elements of AI that’s most attractive is its ability to spit out quick answers. But that’s also detrimental to schoolwork, which is mostly about learning how to learn. “A lot of things that look appealing about technology is that they simplify things, but simplicity does not necessarily equal increased learning,” Anderson said.

Your child’s teacher already knows the answers to all the homework they’ve given your child. But they want them to learn how to figure it out. Reading the text, looking up words they don’t know, and making logical steps based on what they do know are all strategies that will serve them outside of the one answer they’re finding now.

On the other hand, AI will only spit out the answer they’ve requested. And there’s no guarantee it’s right. Many studies have shown that when it comes to accuracy, AI has a long way to go, with more than 45% of answers showing serious errors.

This can have serious effects on their overall learning. After all, when you don’t work for something, you don’t appreciate it. According to Anderson, children learn up to 30% less when answers are provided immediately and easily.

Creating Shorter Attention Spans

In some ways, the modern currency is attention. It’s what influencers, social media, and streaming services all compete for. And they’re willing to fight dirty.

Some attention stealing tactics:

Shorter reels and posts getting preference
Movies and shows that are “second-screen” friendly
Algorithms that feed personalized content based on emotional reactions

“Even if you look at how reading comprehension is tested, they’ve needed to change how it’s tested,” Anderson said. That’s because increasingly, people don’t have the attention needed to read longer passages.

And that’s one area where parents can model good behaviors. In 2022, only 48.5% of adults read a single book for pleasure. It’s hard to convincingly advocate for focusing on the slow work of reading complete texts when you aren’t modeling it.

Kids notice. More than 50% of kids described their parents as "chronically distracted." The average undistracted time in a household is about 34 minutes. Ouch.

Failing to Cultivate Empathy

One of the interesting things about chatting with friends is that quite often you’ll find yourself caring about things you normally wouldn’t. Getting emotionally invested in your friend’s tale of finding tickets for an upcoming show you have no interest in and listening to the story in whole is part of being a friend. You show empathy. You learn to care.

An AI chatbot doesn’t go off and try to do interesting things without you. And it never talks to you about subjects you don’t find interesting. You’ll never have to listen to it talk about its day or tell you yet another anecdote about a coworker.

It listens to you, talks about what you’re interested in, and expresses its adoration. It also reframes every moment of shame or guilt you may have into a comforting moment.
“You cannot replace emotional understanding, empathy building, and conflict resolution skills by talking to a machine,” Anderson said.

In the United States, more than 70% of teens use AI for companionship. A number that’s even greater than the number using it for homework.

Even Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has agreed that teens show an emotional overreliance on his product.

“People rely on ChatGPT too much,” Altman said at a conference. “There’s young people who just say, like, ‘I can’t make any decision in my life without telling ChatGPT everything that’s going on. It knows me. It knows my friends. I’m gonna do whatever it says.’ That feels really bad to me.”

It feels pretty bad to the rest of us as well.

Diminishing Pride & Accomplishments

The thing about trying hard is that when you get a great outcome, you know you earned it. You feel accomplished.

Students who use AI for school don’t report feeling that way.

In fact, one report showed that even though 62% of students in middle school and high school reported using AI, 67% reported that using AI would lead to a lack of critical thinking skills.

When an MIT writing professor asked his students about why they’d used AI to write stories for his class, one young woman broke down in tears. He shared, “She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn’t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict’s descent: at first she fed her story into AI for a grammar check, it suggested line edits and she accepted. Then it asked if she wanted structural edits. Then it offered to rewrite the entire piece.”

Feeding Unwellness

Of course, what a lot of people spend the most time talking about are the outliers. While being extremely few, they do represent the extremes of how AI can sabotage the health and well-being of young people.

Even when programmed with guardrails, young people have little trouble getting around the protections. They’ll ask “for a friend.” A ruse that even young children could easily see through. But it fools AI with ease.

But What About the Good?

For all of that, Anderson cautions parents against fear. As more jobs require AI savvy and more programs come with the features built in, it’s unavoidable.

Fortunately, your child has a guide. You.

Through all of the screen time and technology discussions, Anderson suggests honesty and being upfront with your child. Even though most kids are encountering AI at school, very few schools have AI policies. Most are expecting parents to set guidelines for their child around technology use.

Some good AI conversation starters: