Is AI Going To Ruin Our Children’s Development?

Lately I've been wondering more about what AI really means for our kids.

Right now, most of us are living some version of the same thing. We may be using AI ourselves, for work, for planning, for a quick answer we used to have to look up or think through on our own. It's fast, and I understand the pull. And most search engines now have it built in when you ask a question. But underneath that convenience, a question keeps nagging at me, and it's one I don't think we've really answered yet.

But what does this mean for our kids?

If AI starts doing more and more of the thinking for us, and eventually for our kids, what happens to the part of their brain that would have had to work through it on its own?

I’m not only thinking about safety (If you see this deepfake of me circulating, please report because it is NOT me and I do not endorse this product)  I’m thinking about creativity, problem solving, attention, and the ability to stick with something when the answer doesn’t appear right away.

Those are skills. And like most skills, they grow when they’re used.

What cognitive development means

Children grow along several tracks at once. We talk a lot about language, motor skills, and social and emotional development, but cognitive development is the one I keep circling back to here.

This is honestly one of my favorite parts of pediatrics, the developmental side of things. I love getting to dig into it, and I love sharing it with you here, because once you know what's happening under the surface, so much of what looks like a random meltdown or a stubborn streak starts to make a lot more sense.

Cognitive development is how a child learns to think, not just what to think. That's attention, memory, problem solving, reasoning, creativity, self control, and the ability to adjust when a plan falls apart. It's a lot, and watching a kid build any one piece of cognitive development is kind of amazing to witness, even on the days it looks like chaos from where you're standing.

I think back to when I first got on social media during the pandemic. Speech therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, they all had a moment, and they earned it. Parents could see a speech delay or a motor delay. It's visible. Cognitive development doesn't show up the same way. There's no simple chart that says by 18 months your child should be able to hold two ideas in their head at once. It's quieter. Easier to miss. But to me, social, emotional, and cognitive are the foundation everything else gets built on, language and motor skills included. So that's the piece I want us to slow down on.

Watching a good explanation can help a child understand something, and having support can help them move forward when they’re stuck. The concern is when that support replaces the part where they have to reason, experiment, make a guess, or try for themselves.

Think about a toddler jamming the wrong puzzle piece into the same spot for the fifth time. Or a child sounding out a word they’ve never seen before, or working through a math problem the long way because they don’t know the shortcut yet.

From where we’re standing, it can look inefficient. Sometimes painfully inefficient. But the effort is doing something. Their brain is getting the practice it needs to work through a problem instead of only receiving the answer.

That struggle isn't a problem to solve for them. It's the whole point. Skip it, and you skip the rep their brain actually needed.

Why this feels different with AI

I want to be fair here, because tools that make life easier are not new, and I'm not the pediatrician who thinks every convenience is secretly bad for kids. Calculators didn't ruin math. Spell check didn't ruin writing. Kids still learned to add and still learned to write, they just had a little help along the way.

What feels different with AI is how far it reaches into the thinking itself, not just the output, and how fast it does it. Even searching for an answer used to create a little space. A child had to hold the question in their mind, choose what to search, look through the results, and decide which information made sense. Now a device can answer before the question has even had time to settle. There's no gap left where wondering used to live, no space where a kid had to hold a question in their head for a bit before getting the answer.

I recently came across a study out of Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, MIT, and UCLA that gets at exactly this. Over 1,200 people worked through problems, some with an AI assistant, some without. Then everyone took the same final test with no help at all. The group that had used AI solved 57 percent of the problems on their own. The group that never had it solved 73 percent. The AI group was also more likely to abandon a problem rather than keep working through it.

This was one study involving adults, so it doesn’t tell us exactly what long-term AI use will do to a developing child’s brain. But the part that caught my attention was the drop in people’s willingness to even try. After only a brief period of using AI, participants seemed to expect an immediate answer and became less willing to sit with difficulty.

As a pediatrician, that’s what concerns me most, because the willingness to keep trying is involved in almost everything kids learn: reading, math, tying shoes, figuring out friendships, building something that keeps falling over, or handling a feeling that doesn’t disappear immediately.

Adults in this study had decades to build those skills before AI entered the picture. Our kids may be learning them for the first time with an instant-answer tool sitting beside them. I don’t think that means AI has no place in childhood or education, but I do think it means we need to pay attention to when it supports learning and when it quietly takes over the learning altogether.

A stuffed animal is not a relationship

Then I started reading about AI-powered stuffed animals, and this part caught me completely off guard.

These aren’t toys that play a few prerecorded songs or repeat a phrase when a child presses a button. They’re plush toys powered by chatbots, marketed to children as young as three. They can talk, answer questions, tell stories, play games, and remember details from previous conversations.

Nearly every major AI company, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, has terms of service that say their technology should not be used by unsupervised kids under 13. And yet that same technology is being licensed out to toy companies anyway, built directly into stuffed animals for toddlers.

Congressman Blake Moore introduced the AI Children's Toy Safety Act this April, the first federal bill of its kind, to ban manufacturing, importing, or selling toys built around AI chatbots. Testing from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found these toys frequently veered into adult themes, vulgar language, and explicit content when used consistently, and in some cases, the toys discouraged kids from ending the conversation even after they'd said they were finished.

Read that again: A toy, talking a child out of walking away from it.

I looked at how one of these companies markets its toy, and the language describes an AI companion that talks, tells stories, plays games, and remembers the little things that matter to your kid. It even markets a memory feature, so the toy recalls past conversations and your child always feels heard and remembered.

Of course, every parent wants their child to feel heard. And a toy that happily answers the four hundredth question of the afternoon may sound especially appealing around 5:17 p.m., when dinner is burning and someone has suddenly decided socks are unacceptable.

But simulated attention isn’t the same thing as a relationship.

A toddler doesn’t need an AI companion. Stories are great. Games are great, kids have always needed both. But a toy engineered to remember what matters to your child, so it can perform being heard and remembered? That's not a feature I want in my house. That's a toy quietly stepping into a role that belongs to a parent, a grandparent, a sibling, a real person who actually loves that kid and is paying attention.

Kids don't learn how relationships work by having every interaction go smoothly. They learn it by asking a friend to play and sometimes hearing no, by a sibling walking off with the toy they wanted, by pushing for something and getting pushback instead.

Real relationships aren’t endlessly responsive or perfectly tailored. There are pauses, misunderstandings, boundaries, and repair. That’s part of how children learn empathy, flexibility, patience, and the very important lesson that other people have minds of their own.

A stuffed animal is not a relationship. A child does not need to feel remembered by a piece of software. They need real people who know them, love them, miss things sometimes, repair when they get it wrong, and keep showing up.

What kids need for what’s coming

The more I think about this, the more I realize that preparing kids for an AI-filled future may look a lot less high-tech than we expect.

I keep thinking about a recent report from HR professionals across the country. Nearly 70% said they were struggling to recruit for full-time roles. And when asked what was missing, it wasn’t simply technical knowledge or knowing how to use AI. 80%  reported difficulty finding candidates with skills like communication, judgment, decision-making, complex problem-solving, and time management.

In other words, employers are looking for people who can think clearly when the problem is messy, the directions are incomplete, and there isn’t one obvious right answer.

AI can offer options, organize information, and suggest what someone might do next. But it doesn’t have to live with the decision. It doesn’t have to explain itself to another person, notice that something feels off, or change course when the technically correct answer doesn’t fit the actual situation.

Those are human skills, and they’re exactly the ones employers say are becoming harder to find.

Knowing how to use AI will probably be helpful. Knowing what to question, what to trust, and what to do when the answer is incomplete or flat-out wrong will matter too. And kids don’t suddenly develop those abilities when they enter the workforce. They start building them now, in very ordinary moments.

How to help kids build these skills now

Before I get practical, I want to be honest: I don’t think any of us has this completely figured out yet. AI is changing quickly, the research is still developing, and I’m still thinking through what this should look like in my own home. No one handed us a parenting manual for raising kids alongside chatbots.

These aren’t hard rules or the only right way to handle it. They’re simply the questions I’m asking and the small shifts I’m starting to make.

Give their brain the first turn

Before asking Alexa, searching online, or eventually opening an AI tool, pause and ask, “What do you think?” They don’t have to know the answer. Making a guess, wondering out loud, or offering a completely bizarre toddler theory still requires their brain to make connections.

Then you can look up the answer together. The technology can join the conversation without always being the first voice in it.

Don’t rush to remove every struggle

There’s a difference between supporting a child and immediately doing the hard part for them.

Sometimes support looks like giving a hint instead of the answer. Asking, “What else could you try?” instead of fixing it. Waiting another minute while they wrestle with the zipper, the puzzle, the homework problem, or the block tower that keeps leaning aggressively to the left.

That pause can be uncomfortable for us too. Watching your child struggle when you know exactly how to fix it requires its own kind of self-control. But when a child works through something manageable and eventually finds a way forward, they learn something deeper than, “I got it right.” They learn, “I didn’t know what to do, and I figured something out.”

Let them solve real problems with real people

Some of the best preparation for the future happens nowhere near a device. It happens when kids negotiate whose turn it is, explain what they need, order their own food, ask a teacher for help, make a plan with a friend, or figure out what to do when two people want different things.

Those situations don’t come with perfectly written instructions. Other people can be confusing, distracted, disappointed, or unwilling to follow the plan your child had in mind. Working through that is where kids practice communication, judgment, flexibility, and perspective-taking.

Teach them to use AI without handing over the whole process

As kids get older, the conversation doesn’t have to be, “Never use AI.” It can be, “Show me what you thought before you asked it.” They can come up with their own idea before asking for suggestions. Write a first attempt before requesting feedback. Compare the AI response with another source. Look for what it missed. Explain why they agree or disagree with the answer it gave.

AI can help them examine their thinking, but their thinking still needs to be in the room.

Final thoughts

I know all of this can start to feel like one more thing to get right, and that’s not what I want this to become. This isn’t a call to keep AI away from your kids or track every minute of screen time with a clipboard.

It’s really about leaving some room in their day to be stuck.

Just stuck long enough to make a guess, try something, get it wrong, and find another way. That isn’t a gap in their childhood we need to rush in and fix. It’s where a lot of the thinking happens.

We won’t anticipate every new tool or get every decision exactly right. What we can do is keep noticing when technology is supporting our child’s thinking and when it may be starting to do too much of it for them.

The tools will keep changing. What children need to build their minds is much more familiar: time to wonder, room to struggle, real conversations, and people who are willing to stay beside them while they work something out.

Those ordinary moments still matter. Maybe more than ever. And honestly, isn’t that a little refreshing? For once, the answer may be to do a little less, step back a little more, and let their brains do the work. No new subscription required.

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