By Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, CNN
(CNN) — The book was wrong, my 4-year-old insisted as we read about bugs before bed. “Cockroaches lay hundreds of eggs, not millions,” he said, displaying wisdom beyond his years.
“Oh!” I said. “Did you ask Siri, baby?”
Surely, Siri was the only thing he knew how to operate.
“Siri is really only good for the weather, Mama. If you want to know real things, you have to ask ChatGPT,” he said matter-of-factly.
He’d fact-checked his bug book by asking the artificial intelligence app on his dad’s phone a week earlier. Cockroaches, it turns out, lay hundreds of eggs in their lifetime, not millions as the book claimed. His dad was proud. I was worried.
I wasn’t 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’t whether they should use it, but how, because many already are.
Screen time isn’t passive with AI
As a pediatrician, I’ve 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.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t 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.
The danger was never going to be simple hours spent using AI, but what happens when children start to rely on it too heavily — 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’s age and developmental stage matter tremendously.
Children of various ages understand AI differently
Young children are wired to trust information delivered confidently by adults. It’s part of how they learn language, absorb rules and build their understanding of how the world works.
A 6-year-old doesn’t 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.
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’t actually thinking, feeling or forming a relationship with them.
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.
For younger children, there’s another layer: They may not fully understand what they’re talking to. It’s not quite a toy. It’s not a person. But it talks like one, and it often sounds like a knowledgeable adult.
Teenagers generally understand that AI isn’t a person. But intellectually knowing that and emotionally experiencing it that way aren’t always the same, especially at 11 p.m., when they may be alone, anxious or sad, and they’re not in the mood to call a parent for support.
Can AI interfere with early childhood education?
The goal isn’t to keep children away from AI forever, because we probably can’t. But we can guide them as their ability to understand it changes.
With young children, there’s an even more basic question: Do they need to be using AI at all? As a pediatrician, I don’t believe children should use AI in early education. Young children need the chance to struggle with a question before someone — or something — hands them an answer.
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’t wasted time on the way to learning; it is learning. There is so much learning and creativity in the space between “I don’t know” and “I figured it out.”
Artificial intelligence is extraordinarily good at collapsing that space. For adults, that efficiency can be useful. But for a developing brain, efficiency shouldn’t always be the goal. Sometimes the best response to “I don’t know” is still: “What do you think?” That’s true even if it takes our kid — and us if we are helping with homework — longer.
When younger children do encounter AI, I’d use it alongside them rather than hand it over for independent use. Name what it is plainly: “This is a computer program that generates answers. It isn’t a person, and sometimes it gets things wrong.” Keep its role relatively narrow — something you might use together to answer a factual question, not something a young child turns to whenever they don’t immediately know an answer.
Are teens using AI as a substitute for real relationships?
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 — 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?
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 — 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.
That is why, in the end, the goal isn’t 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’s 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 — showing our children what AI is useful for and, just as importantly, what it isn’t.
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.
The-CNN-Wire
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