Classroom devices, smartphones and, increasingly, AI chatbots are stunting children’s cognitive and emotional development and driving a youth mental-health crisis, experts warn.
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AI And Screens Fuelling A Generation of Depressed, Isolated and Gender-Confused Youth, Experts Warn
By Dylan Kresak, as published by Daily Caller News Foundation on 28 July 2026
The age of artificial intelligence is fuelling a generation of fragile, developmentally stunted and gender-dysphoric children, two analysts warned parents.
Classroom devices, smartphones and, increasingly, AI chatbots are stunting children’s cognitive and emotional development and driving a youth mental-health crisis, Michael Marinacio, executive director of the Centre for Responsible Technology, and Nicole Runyon, a former child psychotherapist and parent coach, said during an online event hosted by parental rights group Moms for Liberty.
“[W]e’re creating mental illness,” Runyon said. “[Children] don’t feel like they can trust themselves or that they’re capable of doing really anything.”
Runyon recalled that, as a counsellor, young people told her “they didn’t want to get married … They didn’t want to bring kids into this world … They feel like they’re this victim in a world that is falling apart.”
In the US, 67% of 12th graders said they were “most likely to choose to get married in the long run,” according to a 2023 Pew Research poll. This is down from 80% in 1993.
Runyon left the child psychotherapy field for parent coaching because she concluded screens and AI were creating the mental health problems that would not otherwise exist and the real work was upstream with parents.
“[AI]’s magnifying what we already were seeing with the screens,” Runyon told the Daily Caller News Foundation (“DCNF”). “[W]ith AI, it actually talks back to them and validates everything they say. So, it’s that much worse and that much more magnified,” compared to social media use.
The result is that children “don’t have to ever have a relationship,” according to Runyon.
The constant dopamine from screens leaves children “numb and disconnected” so they “don’t ever have to do the hard thing or contend with anything,” she told DCNF. In the real world, “It becomes that apathetic, purposelessness, meaninglessness … [T]hey’re lacking that sense of community or sense there’s someone outside of ‘myself’ to serve and to show up for.”
A Vitality in America 2024 study found that 67% of Generation Z reported feeling “loneliness,” compared to 65% of Millennials, 60% of Generation X and only 44% of Baby Boomers.
Meanwhile, Marinaccio highlighted the vast, unprecedented risks posed by these new AI tools.
“On its face, ‘artificial intelligence’ is a subset of screen time, which we already know is extremely damaging to young minds. On a deeper level, these new chatbot tools that kids are using are even more dangerous than the EdTech tools that came before them – ironically from the same rebranded companies,” he told DCNF.
Chatbot-based systems carry a range of serious risks to children, such as hallucinations, ethical bias, student-data harvesting, exposure to explicit content and sycophancy, according to Marinaccio. “We must always be ready to explain what education is and why chatbots are not beneficial to students’ perception of education and ultimately their cognitive development and educational outcomes.”
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU-Stern, predicted that the situation will get much worse for the youth.
“AI is going to intervene very early. The AI is going to be so much more responsive than the parent because parent has a job and the kitchen and two other kids … but the ‘AI teddy bear’ is always there for you,” he said in an interview with The Diary Of A CEO. “[S]o we’re gonna have a whole generation growing up having an attachment to AI generated holograms.”
“Gender confusion is skyrocketing as a result of rampant pornography, herd mentality in social media and just overexposure to awful, awful content,” Marinaccio said. He argued this trend was compounding a broader youth crisis, which he tied to rising youth suicide rates, increased sedentary lifestyles, declining belief in religion and record-low reading and maths scores.
Marinaccio traced these trends to what Haidt called the “great rewiring of childhood” or “the phone-based childhood replac[ing] the play-based childhood,” according to Haidt’s 2024 Substack essay on the matter.
“[T]een depression [ages] 12 to 17 has doubled since 2004. It’s bad for girls and it’s terrible for boys,” Marinaccio said.
Chatbots are even more dangerous, according to Marinaccio. A chatbot is “a speedy indexer … a next-best word guesser” that is only about 50 per cent accurate.
“[I]f you had a teacher in your classroom teaching at a 50% accuracy rating … if you had a teacher teaching at a 70% accuracy rating, you would be fired,” he said.
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Well that’s all in the plan, so no surprise.
Some can’t even spell their name!
This brings to mind the movie 2001 Space Odyssey where an onboard Ai computer called Hal takes over the ship. As Man vs. Machine HAL convinces the crew that a communication device on the ship is malfunctioning, but Bowman and Poole realize HAL is mistaken. Fearing disconnection, HAL eliminates Poole during a spacewalk and then kills the hibernating astronauts by shutting down their life support. Bowman narrowly survives after a tense showdown, ultimately disabling HAL in one of the most famous sequences in cinema. As HAL’s systems shut down, his voice slows to a haunting rendition of “Daisy Bell.” The thought at the time was horrific, Ai computer taking over a spacecraft & killing the occupants. But today it all seems plausible. Pastor Gary Boyd
Plausible, or inevitable, unless we refuse to incorporate the beast into our lives?
Let’s get back to the old fashioned way, kids should be outside exploring the great outdoors. They should be on their bikes trail riding, hiking, backpacking, camping, swimming, playing baseball, basketball, etc. At school they should not allow phones or laptops really anything electronic in the classrooms. Let’s get back to reading, writing, math, for the guys welding and shop classes and girls horticulture, and home economics. Problem solved.
If only parents would believe what they read here! They’ve been brainwashed from birth to “trust the experts” and do with their children whatever the experts say. But realizing that your entire understanding of how to raise kids is wrong is too painful for loving parents to face. It’s easier to just keep going along with the mainstream, denying whatever warnings come to your ears.
I my era, the child-rearing expert was Dr Spock. I did what he said to do. When it wasn’t working out well, I assumed I wasn’t doing it quite right. Years later, he publicly admitted he had been very wrong about many things, but my child was already grown, and the effects could not be erased.
Same with Sesame Street, the original child indoctrination tv show where kids learned to believe that always being friendly and polite, always compromising what you want with what somebody else wants, always giving away part of what you have — basically, always giving final authority over what you do and don’t do to others — will result in always having fun. And having fun is the most important thing in life. Goodbye, self-reliance, self-control, individual responsibility and good judgement.
The internet has replaced tv. There are a zillion Sesame Street-type programs always available, pushing various ideologies on your kids. There is AI, which individualizes itself to target your kid specifically and can go to the farthest extreme to manipulate him or her into believing and doing the worst.
I had it easier than parents today because my child grew up before the internet. But I should have turned off the tv. I should have thrown out the book and asked other women for advice: perhaps my grandmother, my mother, and an older woman or two whom I admired. Then I could have made my own decision as to what felt closest to right and done that.