AI Chatbots and Children: The Psychological Dependency Risks Parents Aren't Talking About

My P6 daughter told me last month that she uses AI to "check" her English compositions before submitting them. When I asked what "checking" meant, she showed me: she types her composition, the AI rewrites it, and she submits a version somewhere between her original and the AI's output. Her marks have improved. Her independent writing, when I've sat with her and removed the AI, has deteriorated.

I'm not going to write another article about academic integrity. There are plenty of those. I want to write about something that I think is more insidious and less discussed: what AI dependency does to the developing mind.

The Cognitive Offloading Problem

There is a well-established concept in cognitive psychology called extended cognition — the idea that we use external tools to augment our thinking. Writing notes, using calculators, keeping calendars — these are all forms of extending cognitive function into the environment. This is generally adaptive and human.

But there is a difference between offloading a function you have mastered (writing down a phone number rather than memorising it, because you have many numbers to track) and offloading a function you have not yet acquired. When children use AI to generate ideas, structures, or sentences they cannot produce themselves, they are bypassing the cognitive struggle that builds the neural pathways for those skills.

A 2023 study in Computers in Human Behavior found that students who habitually used AI-assisted writing tools showed, over a six-month period, reduced performance on unassisted writing tasks compared to a control group — even after controlling for initial ability. The dependency wasn't just perceptual (feeling they needed it). It was functional. The AI had substituted for practice that builds skill.

This matters most during developmental windows. Primary and junior secondary school is when writing, reasoning, and problem-solving capacities are being established. The struggle of composing a paragraph, organising an argument, or finding the right word is not just a route to a finished product — it is the learning event itself. Removing the struggle removes the learning.

The Emotional Dependency Risk

There is a second and less-discussed risk that I'm watching carefully in my practice: emotional dependency on AI companions.

Several AI platforms now offer conversational companions designed to be maximally supportive, patient, and available. For adolescents and older primary school children navigating the normal emotional turbulence of development — social difficulties, academic stress, family tension — these companions offer something genuinely appealing: unconditional positive regard, always available, never tired, never irritated.

Research on attachment and development is clear that human relationships — with all their unpredictability, imperfection, and demand — are the medium through which emotional development occurs. Learning to navigate a relationship that isn't always warm, to repair a rupture, to communicate needs to someone who might not respond perfectly: these are critical developmental tasks. A relationship with an AI that is engineered to be perpetually supportive provides something that feels like emotional sustenance while potentially replacing the practices that build emotional resilience and social skill.

A 2024 preprint from UC Berkeley's Social Development Lab (under review at time of writing) found that adolescents who reported regular emotional disclosure to AI companions showed reduced comfort with reciprocal emotional disclosure to human peers over a six-month period — suggesting possible substitution effects rather than complementary functioning.

This is preliminary research. The field is very new. But as a psychologist who works with children, I am watching this carefully.

What's Different About AI Versus Previous Technology Concerns

Every generation of parents has worried about the cognitive effects of whatever the new technology was. Television in the 1970s. Video games in the 1990s. Smartphones in the 2010s. Many of those concerns turned out to be overstated.

AI is meaningfully different in two ways.

First, AI is interactive and responsive. It adapts to the user, produces tailored output, and creates an experience of personalised assistance that previous technologies didn't. This makes it more powerful as a learning tool — and more powerful as a dependency-forming technology.

Second, AI can perform cognitive tasks on behalf of users. A television can't write your essay. A video game can't solve your maths problem. AI can. The question of what cognitive work is valuable to do yourself, and what is appropriate to delegate, is genuinely new and not yet resolved.

A Framework for Parents

I'm not suggesting parents ban AI tools. I use them myself professionally and personally. But children need explicit guidance on the what and why of AI use that most are not receiving.

The skill test: Before using AI for a task, ask: "Is this a skill I'm trying to develop?" If yes — writing, reasoning, problem-solving, creative generation — doing it yourself first is developmentally important, even if the AI can do it faster or better. Use AI to evaluate your attempt, not to replace it.

The transparency principle: If your child uses AI as part of a homework task, they should be able to explain every part of what they submitted. If they can't explain it, they didn't learn it. This isn't just about academic integrity — it's diagnostic information about whether learning occurred.

Limit emotional companionship use for younger children. This is my position, and I acknowledge it is ahead of current research consensus. But for children under 14 whose social and emotional development is occurring, I believe the substitution risk is real enough to warrant caution. Human relationships are the developmental medium. They should be primary.

Model intentional AI use. When you use AI tools, narrate your reasoning: "I'm using this to check my draft, but I wrote the ideas myself." "I'm asking this for a quick fact — but I already understand the topic." Children learn norms from observation, not just instruction.

My P6 daughter and I have a new agreement. She writes her first draft without AI. Then she can compare it to an AI version and discuss the differences with me. She's learning something more valuable than good marks: she's developing the critical eye to evaluate writing quality, including her own. That skill will outlast every AI tool currently available.