AI chatbots seem so convenient. They’re available at the touch of a button, they give the impression of privacy, and they have an entire internet’s worth of knowledge within their reach. It’s no wonder kids (and adults) reach out to them for answers, especially to some of their most personal and private questions.
There are a few problems with that, but when it comes to our kids, the most pressing ones are the direct dangers to the users, especially those who are vulnerable and inexperienced.
Generations have proven that just telling our kids not to engage with a given technology, substance, or experience doesn’t work. What does?
Honesty Is The Best Parenting Policy
The first thing we have to do is be honest with our kids about the dangers of AI chatbots, without fear-mongering. (The ‘without fear-mongering’ part can be hard, because honestly, as a parent, the risks are terrifying and it’s hard to balance being honest without emphasizing that aspect.)
Our kids need to know the very real risks. Other kids have died, and lawsuits have been filed, alleging that chatbots encouraged these kids to end their own lives.
There are also less dramatic risks, including the possibility that a chatbot could encourage delusions or lean into what your child wants to hear rather than what they need to hear.
Start With A Conversation About Therapy
Ask your child what a therapist does, and what a chatbot can do.
Through this conversation, you can help your child understand that a therapist should help a client understand their own struggles better and see patterns in them. That may include a client’s own role in their struggles.
By contrast, a chatbot’s job is to make a user want to use the chatbot more. This is largely done by giving the user answers they like, regardless of whether those answers are good, helpful, or correct.
Your child may already have experience with chatbots. You can ask them if they’ve ever seen an AI program get something wrong. (If they’ve ever interacted with a chatbot on a topic about which your child already knows the answers, that’s likely to be a yes.)
Discuss with your child how these kind of errors can be more serious when they’re about mental health.
Ask Your Child Questions, & Listen To Their Answers
About one in every eight kids is using an AI chatbot in place of a therapist, according to Brown University School of Public Health.
Two-thirds of those kids use a chatbot for mental health advice at least once a month, and most say they believe they’re receiving helpful advice.
They could be right, at least initially. After all, chatbots scrape their answers from a variety of resources, so if your kids are turning to them with common questions (how to use grounding techniques to calm down, how to talk to a friend about a disagreement, whether they’re the only one experiencing this feeling of loneliness and exclusion), then it’s entirely possible the chatbot is grabbing good answers from strong resources.
However, more in-depth questions have bigger risks. So, ask your child how they’re using AI, and what they know about how others use AI. Ask if they have ever asked AI to help solve an interpersonal or emotional problem, and how well they think the programs handle these issues.
Offer Valuable Resources
The most valuable resource for therapy is a therapist.
Sometimes, there genuinely is no access to a therapist. This can be due to insurance or financial restraints, or living in an area where there’s limited access to mental health resources. Or, it may be that even with a therapist, you know there are topics on which your child is unwilling to open up to another person. In that case, they may still seek out information in a way they think is private.
For these moments, you can offer your child access to trustworthy resources.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has a teen resource page that can help. There’s also the Teen Talk app, which lets teens offer support to one another. (It’s anonymous!) For LGBT teens, there’s also the Trevor Project.
Remind your teen that anyone (even a licensed therapist or a parent) can get things wrong, so they should always apply their own good judgment to any advice they receive. These and other legitimate resources will be more reliable than a chatbot.
Be A Valuable Resource, Too
One of the most important things we can do as parents is to keep listening, keep learning, and keep talking to our kids.
It’s not always easy to withhold judgment and hear out a situation or concern, but it’s something we all need to practice. The more we are able to be a safe, comfortable person to speak to, the more our kids can trust us, even during the scariest and most serious events in their lives.
It’s not that we should be so permissive and low-key with our kids that they never expect corrections or that we feel we can’t make rules, set boundaries, and disapprove of behaviors. It’s more than our kids need to feel that when they do make mistakes (which they will, just as we do, because they’re human too), they know we’ll be there with support.
The American Psychological Association’s advice is to “build connection before correction.”
Keep Advocating For Protections
You can start by having conversations with your child and using parental controls on their devices as you deem appropriate for their age, maturity, and situation. Keeping devices in open spaces to the degree that’s age-appropriate and feasible can also offer some internet protections.
However, our kids live in a world full of devices and connections. The fact is that unfettered use of AI to serve in place of legitimate therapy has massive implications for our individual children and for their generation.
Mental health experts acknowledge that AI chatbots aren’t going away and say that if they’re to be used for mental health support, developers should create responsibly and coordinate their language models with therapists.
According to Columbia Teachers’ College, this could include settings in which a chatbot encourages a user to talk to a human under certain concerning conditions, such as requiring age verification and offering parental controls.
Parents can advocate for these changes and other protections directly with companies and through their legislators.
