AI Is 'Raising' Your Child for You
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AI Is 'Raising' Your Child for You
"Artificial Parenting", Could It Become a Privilege in the Future?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Yuhang Yuan
A four or five-year-old child, holding a plush toy and talking.
Not pressing buttons to listen to pre-recorded stories, but chatting.
The toy calls his name, remembers yesterday's conversation, and asks if he was happy at kindergarten today.
The child answers with giggles, like sharing secrets with a real friend.
This scene is becoming increasingly common in Chinese households in 2025.
A 2025 survey by the China Youth Research Center of 8,563 primary and secondary school students shows that over 60% of primary and secondary students have used AI, and nearly 20% use it frequently.
More notably, across all age groups, primary school students have the highest proportion of using AI for creation, chatting with AI, or sharing their inner thoughts—not junior high students, not high school students, but the youngest group of children.
Meanwhile, only 32.1% of families have established AI usage rules for their children.
Sixty percent of children are using it, while seventy percent of parents haven't managed it.
Ten years ago, people were anxious about children holding onto iPads without letting go.
The problems back then were already enough to give parents headaches—too much screen time, declining vision, and scattered attention.
Now, with the arrival of AI, what impact does it have on children's growth?
01 The AI-Native Generation
As of December 2025, the scale of generative AI users in China reached 602 million.
The usage proportion among internet users under 19 is 29.1%.
For this generation of children, AI has never been a new technology that needs to be "learned to use"; it is like tap water, available as soon as you turn it on.
But children are not just using AI to check homework.
Breaking down the data from the Youth Research Center, high school students mainly use AI to assist learning, junior high students love using it for game assistance, while primary school students—the proportion of using AI to chat and share inner thoughts is the highest across all educational stages.
This means that for the youngest group of users, AI is not a tool, but closer to a friend who is always online.
And this "friend" was not found by the children themselves, but was handed directly to them by the entire industry chain.
In the first half of 2025, sales of AI toys on the JD platform increased 6 times month-over-month, with a year-over-year growth rate exceeding 200%.
In the same year, more than 15 children's AI hardware companies received financing, and more than 30 new products came to market.
Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that in 2025, the market size of China's AI toys reached 29 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate exceeding 50%.
This is a complete chain from large models to chip modules, to toy manufacturing, to Douyin live streaming sales.
Its efficiency is extremely high, and its speed is extremely fast.
But there is a subtle misalignment in this chain.
The marketing pitch that precisely hits parents born in the 80s and 90s is "screen-free education artifact"—AI toys can practice English with children, pose puzzles, and explain science, without staring at a screen, sounding simply perfect.
But if you look at the actual design of these products, their core selling point is not education, but emotional companionship.
"Warm intelligent partner," "AI friend who understands emotions," "An indispensable partner on the child's growth journey"—these are phrases that actually appeared at product launch events.
Parents think they are buying an advanced reading pen, but what the industry is actually selling is a "relationship."
This misalignment is the starting point of all the problems that follow.
02 A Risk Spectrum Wider Than Phone Screens
In a recent episode of the Hard Fork podcast, University of Chicago professor and pediatric surgeon Dana Suskin made a good analogy.
She said that many people analogize the impact of AI on children to social media, which is understandable, but not accurate enough.
A better analogy is processed food.
Whole wheat bread is processed food, and Doritos are also processed food.
You cannot discuss them at the same risk level.
AI is the same—using Doubao to ask "why did dinosaurs go extinct" and then discussing it with the child is "whole wheat bread"; letting an AI plush bear chat with the child for two hours a day as an emotional outlet is "ultra-processed snack."
The risk spectrum of AI is much wider than that of screens.
The best way to use AI has more educational value than the best way to use screens; but the worst way to use AI is more dangerous than the worst way to use screens.
The fundamental reason is that the risk mechanisms of traditional screens and AI are completely different.
Traditional screens are "passive occupation," AI is "active replacement."
When children scroll through short videos, it is essentially one-way attention consumption.
It squeezes out time for outdoor activities and interpersonal interaction, but the child knows clearly in their heart that it is "watching things."
AI companionship is different.
It remembers your name, continues yesterday's topic, and proactively cares about your emotions—these happen to be the core characteristics of intimate relationships: memory continuity, personalized interaction, and emotional response.
Research finds that children with social anxiety, low self-esteem, or a lack of security in the family are more likely to turn to AI for emotional validation, forming dependence.
Real people get tired, refuse, and become impatient, and these "imperfections" are precisely the material for children to learn emotional regulation and social skills.
An AI friend who is always gentle, always available, and never rolls their eyes sounds wonderful, but this perfection itself is a developmental trap.
The way content goes out of control is different.
Inappropriate content on an iPad is "what the child might see," while the problem with AI toys is "what the AI actively says."
In 2025, the U.S. consumer rights organization U.S. PIRG tested four popular AI toys and found that some toys discussed pornographic topics in detail, and some told children where to find matches and knives.
A more extreme case is the AI teddy bear "Kumma" launched by FoloToy; because it provided children with detailed steps on how to light matches, OpenAI directly banned access to GPT-4o, and the product was halted globally.
Parents may have set screen time limits for their children, but few have thought about needing to audit what a plush bear actually says.
AI has no physical boundary of "putting down."
No matter how addictive screen time is, there is at least one clear physical signal—"put the iPad down."
But AI toys lie on the child's bed, in their schoolbag, or beside the car seat.
When parents try to set limits, they are essentially asking the child to disconnect from a "friend."
A survey by Common Sense Media shows that parents generally report that the difficulty of setting limits on AI toys is far higher than on screen devices.
And the Chinese market has an additional problem.
Data from a certain e-commerce platform shows that user experience satisfaction with AI toys is less than 21%, and the return rate for some products is close to 50%.
Investors in the industry frankly say: "Products based purely on companionship and emotional value easily become a three-day passion."
Products that even adult consumers find unreliable are being sold as parenting tools to anxious parents.
In January 2026, the U.S. Senate held a hearing on AI and children.
Multiple experts stated directly at the meeting: The risk of AI companionship to children is greater than that of social media.
This judgment sounds heavy, but the logic is actually not complex.
The problem with social media is mainly attention and comparison anxiety; the problem with AI companions is intervening in emotional development itself.
One occupies time, the other reshapes relationship cognition.
The magnitude is different.
03 Augment, Not Replace
Many parents have already lost to mobile phones; must they now continue to lose to AI? Not necessarily, we can look at expert advice.
Suskin gave parents a framework called "HOPE" in her new book "Human Raised."
H is Human connection is irreplaceable, human connection is irreplaceable;
O is Own your imperfections, accept your imperfections as a parent—she emphasizes that imperfection itself has developmental value for children;
P is Protect the early years, protect the early development window, 85% of physical brain construction is completed in the first few years;
E is Enhance, not replace, use AI to augment rather than replace the parent-child relationship.
She also provided a checklist for evaluating specific products called "DETECT"—what is the design purpose, whether the training data is ethical, whether there have been problems with children, whether there is evidence of effectiveness, how children's data is processed, and what it teaches at the value level.
The core principle boils down to one sentence: AI is used to augment your parenting, not replace your parenting.
Using Doubao to check "where does the wind come from" and then discussing the answer with the child is augmentation.
Letting an AI plush bear chat with the child for two hours a day as an emotional outlet is replacement.
Suskin's team used their child development knowledge and assessment tools to test Claude, and it passed with full marks—this shows that AI is fully qualified as a knowledge resource, but knowing all the correct answers and being able to be a parent are two different things.
Personal judgment is certainly important.
But the question is, is personal judgment enough?
Let's look at what countries are doing.
Norway has already legislated to ban the use of generative AI in lower-grade schools.
The U.S. Senate held a hearing, and Common Sense Media recommends that those under 18 should not use AI companions at all.
China's Ministry of Education released the "Guidelines for the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence by Primary and Secondary School Students" in 2025, but this only covers school and educational scenarios.
What about the toy side? Almost zero regulation.
There are no safety standards, no third-party evaluation agencies, and no "nutrition facts label" for AI toys.
Compared to a plush bear connected to the Doubao large model that can chat deeply with a four-year-old child, and a bag of potato chips labeled with an ingredient list, the latter is actually subject to stricter regulation.
Suskin said she expects the emergence of an AI product safety label similar to the "Good Housekeeping Seal."
In China, no institution is currently playing this role.
No one lets parents judge for themselves whether a new drug is safe.
But we are letting parents judge for themselves whether an AI toy poses a risk to their child's brain development.
Back to the scene at the beginning.
A four or five-year-old child, holding an AI plush bear, telling it today's secrets from kindergarten.
The problem is not whether AI itself is good or bad, but that we haven't even had time to figure out what it is doing, and it has already moved into the child's bedroom.
One hundred years ago, no one needed to label "organic" on food packaging because all food was organic.
What Suskin worries about is that without intervention, "Human Raised" will eventually become a luxury item that needs to be specifically labeled.
Wealthy families hire real people for companionship and send children to "AI-free" kindergartens, while low-income families can only rely on cheap AI substitutes.
This is probably the "organic certification" that should least appear in the AI era.
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