{"id":855509,"date":"2026-09-21T14:20:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T14:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/855509\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T14:20:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T14:20:19","slug":"ai-programs-can-interfere-with-childhood-heres-what-parents-can-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/855509\/","title":{"rendered":"AI programs can interfere with childhood. Here\u2019s what parents can do"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez is a primary care pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. She hosts the American Academy of Pediatrics Healthy Children podcast<\/a> for parents.\n<\/p>\n

\n The book was wrong, my 4-year-old insisted as we read about bugs before bed. \u201cCockroaches lay hundreds of eggs, not millions,\u201d he said, displaying wisdom beyond his years.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cOh!\u201d I said. \u201cDid you ask Siri, baby?\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Surely, Siri was the only thing he knew how to operate.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cSiri is really only good for the weather, Mama. If you want to know real things, you have to ask ChatGPT,\u201d he said matter-of-factly.\n <\/p>\n

\n He\u2019d fact-checked his bug book by asking the artificial intelligence app on his dad\u2019s phone a week earlier. Cockroaches, it turns out, lay hundreds of eggs<\/a> in their lifetime<\/a>, not millions as the book claimed. His dad was proud. I was worried.\n <\/p>\n

\n I wasn\u2019t prepared to have a conversation about AI with my preschooler. I thought that talk would come later. But when it comes to technology, even little ones may know far more than we realize. When it involves artificial intelligence, the question isn\u2019t whether they should use it, but how, because many already are.\n <\/p>\n

\n As a pediatrician, I\u2019ve spent years discussing screen time with parents, but artificial intelligence is not something we discuss as regularly. When it comes to screen time, the risks feel tangible and familiar: Excess time spent on a screen can be detrimental for the developing brain, and content quality matters, too. Thinking about the risks AI poses to children requires a new framework.\n <\/p>\n

\n Artificial intelligence doesn\u2019t just sit there; it talks back in ways no TV, iPad or even interactive video games can. It remembers what your kids asked yesterday. It responds, specifically, to them, in real time, with something that looks an awful lot like human attention.\n <\/p>\n

\n The danger was never going to be simple hours spent using AI, but what happens when children start to rely on it too heavily \u2014 when they outsource their lives. They may have fewer opportunities to practice reasoning because homework answers arrive before they can work a problem or develop friendships because a bot quietly edges into the role of a confidant without anyone ever deciding that should happen. But as with screen time, a child\u2019s age and developmental stage matter tremendously.\n <\/p>\n

Children of various ages understand AI differently<\/p>\n

\n Young children are wired to trust information delivered confidently by adults. It\u2019s part of how they learn language, absorb rules and build their understanding of how the world works.\n <\/p>\n

\n A 6-year-old doesn\u2019t yet have the cognitive tools to question a source consistently, weigh its credibility or recognize when something that sounds authoritative might be wrong. A 14-year-old is much more capable of skepticism. A 6-year-old is still developmentally primed to believe.\n <\/p>\n

\"Chasing<\/p>\n


\n Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta
\n <\/a>
\n Is AI Rewiring Your Kid\u2019s Brain?<\/a><\/p>\n

Parents have spent years worrying about screens. Now the screen talks back. Dr. Sanjay Gupta asks early child development expert Dr. Dana Suskind what AI may be doing to kids\u2019 brains \u2014 and why \u201cbrain rot\u201d may be the wrong worry. <\/p>\n

Resources mentioned in this episode: \u2022 Common Sense Media\u2019s AI resources for families \u2022 The Anxious Generation movement \u2022 Dr. Dana Suskind\u2019s book, Human Raised<\/p>\n

Sep 17, 2026 \u2022 32 min<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

\n The differences extend to relationships, too. Young children readily form attachments to things that respond to them consistently and predictably. An AI chatbot may respond every time a child speaks to it and mimic the back-and-forth of a real conversation without the child realizing that the thing responding isn\u2019t actually thinking, feeling or forming a relationship with them.\n <\/p>\n

\n Teenagers can form attachments to AI, too, but the appeal may be different. For an adolescent navigating friendships, rejection, identity and belonging, something that never judges them or gossips and is always available can be incredibly compelling.\n <\/p>\n

\n For younger children, there\u2019s another layer: They may not fully understand what they\u2019re talking to. It\u2019s not quite a toy. It\u2019s not a person. But it talks like one, and it often sounds like a knowledgeable adult.\n <\/p>\n

\n Teenagers generally understand that AI isn\u2019t a person. But intellectually knowing that and emotionally experiencing it that way aren\u2019t always the same, especially at 11 p.m., when they may be alone, anxious or sad, and they\u2019re not in the mood to call a parent for support.\n <\/p>\n

\"Homework<\/p>\n

\n The goal isn\u2019t to keep children away from AI forever, because we probably can\u2019t. But we can guide them as their ability to understand it changes.\n <\/p>\n

\n With young children, there\u2019s an even more basic question: Do they need to be using AI at all? As a pediatrician, I don\u2019t believe children should use AI in early education. Young children need the chance to struggle with a question before someone \u2014 or something \u2014 hands them an answer.\n <\/p>\n

\n These AI programs are interfering with key lessons of childhood, which is supposed to involve inefficient thinking. Kids guess, get things wrong, try again, argue about why and eventually figure something out. That process isn\u2019t wasted time on the way to learning; it is learning. There is so much learning and creativity in the space between \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d and \u201cI figured it out.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Artificial intelligence is extraordinarily good at collapsing that space. For adults, that efficiency can be useful. But for a developing brain, efficiency shouldn\u2019t always be the goal. Sometimes the best response to \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d is still: \u201cWhat do you think?\u201d That\u2019s true even if it takes our kid \u2014 and us if we are helping with homework \u2014 longer.\n <\/p>\n

\n When younger children do encounter AI, I\u2019d use it alongside them rather than hand it over for independent use. Name what it is plainly: \u201cThis is a computer program that generates answers. It isn\u2019t a person, and sometimes it gets things wrong.\u201d Keep its role relatively narrow \u2014 something you might use together to answer a factual question, not something a young child turns to whenever they don\u2019t immediately know an answer.\n <\/p>\n

\n As kids get older, the job shifts to teaching skepticism. Teach them that an answer can sound incredibly confident and still be wrong. Show them how to check a claim somewhere else. Talk about what information should stay private \u2014 since AI programs can collect and save your data. And watch for an important transition: When does your child stop asking AI things and start talking to it?\n <\/p>\n

\n By adolescence, the bigger question becomes what role AI is playing in their lives. Is it supplementing their social and emotional world, or quietly substituting for pieces of it \u2014 the text to a friend, the conversation with a parent, the appointment with a therapist? Teenagers should also understand that some AI products are designed to keep users engaged, and that an endlessly attentive chatbot may have incentives that are very different from those of a person who actually cares about them.\n <\/p>\n

\n That is why, in the end, the goal isn\u2019t just to put guardrails around the technology. It is to teach our children the irreplaceable human skills they need to operate in the world. There\u2019s no AI setting that can teach a child to bring a hard feeling to a person first. That reflex is built over years by keeping the door open for uncomfortable conversations and modeling our own relationship with this technology \u2014 showing our children what AI is useful for and, just as importantly, what it isn\u2019t.\n <\/p>\n

\n My son checking a bug fact with an AI program was never the problem. The question is whether he will be prepared in the future to discern what he should bring to his dad and me instead. We need to teach him that AI, even with its endless confidence and increasingly humanlike demeanor, will never care about him, love him or be ready to help him the way we are.\n <\/p>\n

\n Get inspired by a weekly roundup on living well, made simple. Sign up for CNN\u2019s Life, But Better newsletter<\/a> for information and tools designed to improve your well-being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez is a primary care pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":855510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-855509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/855510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}