I care about my children, deeply. If you have children, I’m sure you care about them deeply too.

Jonathan Haidt cares about his as well. He’s a widely respected social psychologist who has earned the right to be heard. I think he will be known to future generations as someone who courageously advocated for the well-being of all of our children. His research is ground-breaking and his wisdom is practical.

Haidt’s latest book is a best-seller. It’s called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Re-Wiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Do you remember that video of a government hearing for the executives of the major tobacco companies? They all denied knowing that cigarettes were addictive. I think that Haidt is a modern day whistle-blower on the tobacco companies of our own time. But who are those companies? They are the big tech producers and promoters of digital culture, including social media and artificial intelligence. Their products can be harmful and addictive. In some cases, they are ruining lives. I’m not just being alarmist. That’s what the research shows, even as most of the world twiddles it’s thumbs.

Last year on the Ezra Klein show, Haidt said that our kids are the least flourishing generation we know of. Gee, I wonder why.

The purpose of this short post is to highlight something Haidt said on a panel on HBO’s Overtime.

“A.I. is coming for our relationships. Social media came in, hacked kids’ attention, took it away with disastrous results for the education of their thinking. Now there are chatbots in teddy bears. Children are literally going to get attached to this very responsive chatbot rather than to their parents. So here’s something easy we can do. Say, ‘This is incredibly threatening to human development. Can’t we just keep it away from the kids? Can’t we just not let silicon valley do another experiment on the next generation?’” (February 13, 2026)

His comments made me wonder about our motives. Why do we want to fast-track these technologies into the lives of our children, even when we don’t know much about them (and even when we do)?

I’m not a luddite. I’m online, a lot. I leverage a variety of technologies. We have a series of devices in our house as well. I’m not advocating that we all run for the hills and adopt an Amish lifestyle, even though that might sound tempting from time to time.

But am I the only one who finds it deeply troubling that they’re making teddy bears with chatbots?

Here is what, in part, lies in the lurking shadows of our shared human condition. We love shortcuts. After a long day, it’s easier to put a kid in front of a screen (for longer than is reasonable). In a world gone mad, it’s easier to let young children have undisciplined access to social media platforms because we can’t stand the pressure of “everyone else is doing it.” Distraction is deception’s co-pilot. We’re pulled in so many directions that we’re losing the capacity to think straight.

And then we get our kids teddy bears with chatbots. Is this partly because it takes time and energy for us to emotionally invest in our own children?

And. We. Just. Don’t. Have. It. In. Us. Anymore.

Shortcuts.

Unfortunately, our society is embarrassingly naive about A.I. We tend to think it is morally neutral information pulled from the internet at break-neck speed. But it’s not that simple. (More on this topic in a later post and podcast episode.) When we adopt this kind of thinking, we are opening ourselves to deception and exploitation. Let’s just stick the nicotine feed directly into our veins, and into the veins of our kids too.

Proverbs 22:6 says: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs are principles that are generally true, not specific promises that are always true. I cite this particular proverb because it makes clear what we have taken for granted for generations, but are at risk of forgetting: That the parents are the ones who are supposed to be doing the training, not chatbots who nurture young, impressionable hearts and minds about the meaning of life, identity, relationships, atheism, sexuality, money, politics, parents, and the difference between right and wrong. ‘Oh, but Matthew, I’m sure these chatbots would never do anything like that.’ In response I ask, ‘Is it hard to breathe with your head that far deep the sand?’

Shortcuts.

In life, anything that is worth anything takes work. In other words, no shortcuts. It takes work to be your child’s parent rather than their buddy. It takes work to establish healthy boundaries instead of simply adopting what everyone else is doing. It takes work to explain that your convictions and choices proceed from a place of love. It takes work to emotionally invest in your children and to personally show up for their lives even when you feel like your tank is empty.

“Parent” is a noun, but “parenting” is a verb.

Let me quote Jonathan Haidt one last time:

“A.I. is coming for our relationships. Social media came in, hacked kids’ attention, took it away with disastrous results for the education of their thinking. Now there are chatbots in teddy bears. Children are literally going to get attached to this very responsive chatbot rather than to their parents. So here’s something easy we can do. Say, ‘This is incredibly threatening to human development. Can’t we just keep it away from the kids? Can’t we just not let silicon valley do another experiment on the next generation?‘”

Some shortcuts are good, like ones that get us to the park five minutes faster or which help us organize our playlists on Apple Music. But everything that glitters is not gold. Just ask the residents of Troy after they wheeled the large Trojan horse into their city and shut the gates.

Let’s make a choice to live not with eyes wide shut, but with eyes wide open. And let’s do it because we refuse to be naive about the crafty powers at work in the world, and because we are willing to show up personally for the children that God has entrusted to our care.

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