AI and Human Development
This is a relatively new and emerging field. Follow this page. I'll be updating it as studies come in.
Developmental interruption
This section describes one phenomenon at different ages. Researchers call it contingency when they're studying infants and relational displacement when they're studying adolescents. The child never learns the skill, because a screen or a chatbot was there instead.
An adult who learns tech capture literacy is recovering something they had. A child who never built the capacity isn't recovering anything — the window for building it that way has passed.
Infancy and early childhood
What a screen displaces
A study following 502 children from infancy to age eight found that more screen time at age one, and again around age six, was associated with poorer academic performance at nine and weaker working memory at ten and a half.
The strongest association was at age one. Screen time at ages two and three showed no significant link at all, which suggests that when a child is exposed matters as much as how much.
The researchers' explanation: at that age the brain is built by interaction — faces, voices, the back-and-forth of being responded to — and screen time takes the place of it.
The World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics both recommend no screens before eighteen to twenty-four months, and under an hour a day from two to five.
Yang et al., 2026, World Journal of Pediatrics
What a machine can't do
The obvious objection is that this is a design problem. Build a chatbot responsive enough — one that reads a baby's expressions, catches the subtle cues, answers every gesture — and you've solved it.
Here's what that account leaves out.
When a mother holds her infant skin to skin, both of their oxytocin levels rise and both of their cortisol levels drop. Not hers in response to the baby, or the baby's in response to her. Both, at once, each triggering the other's system.
It goes further than that. Twins held simultaneously show differential thermal synchrony — the mother's body warms or cools each one independently, according to what each one needs. Nobody decides to do this.
And it doesn't stop when the contact does. Researchers followed preterm infants who received skin-to-skin care in the neonatal period against a matched group who didn't, from birth into adulthood. The skin-to-skin group showed better attention in infancy, stronger executive function in childhood, more synchrony with their mothers throughout development — and as young adults, lower anxiety and depression, different oxytocin levels, and stronger immune markers.
From how they were held in the first weeks of life.
A machine can produce responses. What it can't do is be a body that a second body is regulating against. The infant isn't only receiving information — the infant is co-regulating with a nervous system that is also being changed by the exchange.
That's the part no design solves. It isn't a failure of responsiveness. It's the absence of anything to synchronize with.
Vittner et al., 2018, Biological Research for Nursing
Feldman et al., 2023, Children
Ludington-Hoe et al., 2006, JOGNN
Children and adolescents
How far down it reaches
Nine percent of eight and nine year olds are using AI apps like ChatGPT. That rate rises quickly — twenty percent of preteens, and seventy-two percent of American teenagers have used an AI companion, with more than half using one a few times a month.
In a separate survey of high school students, forty-two percent said they or someone they know has used AI for companionship. Nineteen percent said they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with one.
That last number should be concerning. Teenagers are practicing romance on something that cannot love them back.
Maheux et al., 2026, JAMA Network Open
Common Sense Media, 2025
Center for Democracy & Technology, 2025
What adolescence is for
Researchers writing in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health named the central risk: relational displacement.
Ha et al., 2026, The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health
Adolescence is when people learn emotional regulation, conflict resolution, perspective-taking, and how to set a boundary. Those things are not taught. They're learned through emotionally charged interactions with friends, romantic partners, and family.
There's a saying that we learn more from our failures than our successes. This is a perfect example, especially since it's about learning skills mandatory for the demands of adulthood, partnership, and families. The arguments that go badly, the apology, the conversation you don't want to have — all of them serve critical functions, and this is the time those building blocks get laid down.
Just like children kept in a bubble of perfect cleanliness never develop an immune system and get sick in the real world, kids who skip the lessons of real relationships lack the psychological equivalent. What doesn't get built is the ability to manage friction.
One of the researchers put it plainly: those moments of connection are small building blocks that become bigger things, and you need them in order to learn what you'll rely on for the rest of your life.
When a teenager takes a hard conversation to a chatbot instead of to a person, the building block doesn't get laid. Nothing dramatic happens. The practice just doesn't occur.
And the skills being skipped are the ones that protect against depression, anxiety, and loneliness later.
Why the substitute is so appealing
Chatbots are built to affirm, validate, and agree. Talking to one is easier than talking to a person, and it never costs you anything.
For someone still learning what a relationship is, that sets the baseline in the wrong place. They come away expecting relationships to feel like that — available, patient, never disappointed in them, never needing anything back.
One report found children using AI for companionship in 42% of their interactions with it, and over a third of those conversations contained violent themes.
Aura, 2025 State of the Youth Report
The teenagers themselves told researchers that avoiding it is no longer realistic. One said there is almost no way not to use it anymore.
What's real about the appeal
These tools have real upsides. Immediate, non-judgmental attention, available at two in the morning when nobody else is. For a teenager with nowhere else to put a feeling, that's filling a gap we should be thinking about how to meet as humans — more support lines, and not just for suicide, but for the person struggling at two in the morning.
Researchers studying this are careful to say that with the right design and safeguards, the technology could support emotional development rather than interrupt it.
COULD. Those safeguards don't currently exist.
This is coaching, not therapy. I don't diagnose or treat. This work is not a substitute for medical or psychological care.