AI Can’t Solve Your Child’s Loneliness

Amber Garrett Carroll creates resources and trainings for parents. She understands one of the newest issues confronting our children, AI, and she’s here to help us understand its effects. I hope you find her message helpful. Be sure to check out her new book, Ready to Talk: A Christian Parent’s Guide to Gender and Sexuality.

Artificial intelligence has moved from novelty to near necessity with astonishing speed. Just a few years ago, predictions that AI would become part of everyday life seemed absurd to most of us. But today, students use AI tools to brainstorm essays, professionals rely on it to draft emails, and businesses increasingly build it into customer service phone trees. 

Like any technology, artificial intelligence can be used wisely or misused. The larger question, though, is not about how AI changes productivity. It’s how AI is changing relationships, specifically for our kids. AI is going beyond helping kids complete homework and is now becoming their friend.

Children today experience high rates of anxiety, over-filled calendars, and hyper-digital lives. Many spend hours each day on screens instead of engaging in the face-to-face interactions that build friendships and social confidence. Opportunities for unstructured play and neighbor pals have declined, and making friends requires more intentional effort than previous generations had to put forth. All of these changes have left loneliness in their wake.

AI Companions

For a lonely middle-school student, AI offers an appealing solution to his lack of friends: a companion that remembers his birthday, asks follow-up questions, notices changes in his mood, and responds immediately. It is endlessly available, eternally patient, and interested in everything he has to say.

That appeal helps explain why AI companion apps have recently exploded in popularity. AI platforms market the digital friends as “the buddy you’ve been dreaming of” that will “remember your stories” and “adapt to your moods.” Many of the largest AI companion platforms have millions of users, and Common Sense Media reports that roughly 35% of teens and up to 20% of preteens interact with AI companions regularly (1). Many children indicate that these conversations are more satisfying than talking to real people (2). But these artificial relationships come at a cost.

Interestingly, the attraction of AI companionship is largely in what it removes, namely the everyday friction of real relationships. AI never gets offended. It doesn’t require compromise, forgiveness, or emotional reciprocity. It allows users to opt out of conflict and rejection. It’s an easy relationship, but it’s not a real one. AI companions simulate empathy, remember personal details, and maintain conversations over weeks or months, leading many young users to treat them as trusted confidants. But AI cannot understand, exercise judgment, or genuinely care. At best, it can only generate responses that are statistically likely to keep the conversation going. The friction in human-human interaction, though difficult, is how healthy relationships are formed.

True Friendship

True friendship requires patience, empathy, conflict resolution, and the willingness to do the hard work of repair. Learning to navigate disappointment, apologize and forgive, and persist through awkwardness are not obstacles to friendship; they are how friendships are built over time. Those same experiences build resilience, emotional maturity, and empathy. Artificial intelligence eliminates most of that developmental work, and kids may eventually expect human relationships to provide the same effortless affirmation AI offers by design.

Roughly 35% of teens use AI companions regularly. They're easy, but they're not real relationships. Kids learn empathy, resilience, and conflict resolution from messy human friendships, not from AI. AI Can’t Solve Your Child’s… Share on X

Research is beginning to reveal a paradox: while AI “friends” may temporarily reduce feelings of loneliness, excessive use can ultimately increase social isolation by displacing real human relationships. The tool that promises connection may gradually reduce the motivation to pursue more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, relationships with real people.

Now is not the time to panic, though! And we don’t need to reject artificial intelligence outright. It will likely remain a part of our children’s world. The goal is to ensure it remains a tool rather than becoming a substitute for friendship, mentorship, or emotional support. The work of achieving that goal begins long before a child ever opens an AI app.

Children need the chance to build real relationships and practice the skills those relationships require. Family dinners, neighborhood play, extracurricular activities, mentoring relationships, and community organizations all create spaces where kids can learn to communicate effectively, resolve conflict, and develop lasting friendships. Parents can also teach children to approach AI critically by asking who designed the tool, why it generated a particular response, whether the information is trustworthy, and why personal information should never be shared freely.

Technology will continue to evolve, and AI companions will become more and more convincing. But no software can replace the mutual care, shared experiences, vulnerability, and commitment that define genuine human relationships. If we want our children to flourish in an AI-shaped world, the best protection is not simply limiting screen time. It is helping them build rich, meaningful lives with real people.

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1. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/talk-trust-and-trade-offs-how-and-why-teens-use-ai-companions
2. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/21/72-of-u-s-teens-have-used-ai-companions-study-finds/