The moment it clicked
I was curled up on the couch, half-reading an article, half-listening to my son chat away in the next room. Except he wasn't on a call with a friend. He was talking to Alexa.
"Alexa, how old are you?"
"Alexa, where do you live?"
"Alexa, what's your surname?"
"Alexa, what are your hobbies?"
I stopped reading. He wasn't issuing commands like "play music" or "set a timer" — he was interviewing her. Getting to know her. In his ten-year-old mind, there was a friendly, cute lady living in that little speaker who was happy to chat and answer whatever he threw at her.
That's when it hit me: he wasn't using a gadget. He was making a friend.
Why this isn't just a cute kid moment
I'll admit, part of me wanted to just laugh it off — kids say the funniest things, right? But the more I sat with it, the more I realized this is happening in living rooms everywhere, and it's bigger than one chatty ten-year-old.
It turns out this is a real pattern, not just my kid being inquisitive. Common Sense Media surveyed just over a thousand American teenagers in 2025 and found that 72% had used an AI companion at least once, and about half were regular users.
But the number that actually stopped me wasn't that one. It was this: one in three of those teens said they had chosen to discuss something serious with an AI instead of with a real person. And a quarter had shared personal details — real names, locations — with these platforms.
That's the appeal, isn't it? A voice that's always available, always patient, never busy, never in a bad mood. Never disappointed in you. As a mom, I understand the pull completely. As a mom who now works in AI, I also got a little nervous.
Two honest caveats, because I'd rather give you the real picture than a scary one. That research covers American teenagers, and my son is ten and we're not in America — so I'm reading across from it, not treating it as gospel. And the same study found that nearly half of teens see these tools as just that: tools, not friends. Plenty of kids have a perfectly clear head about what they're talking to.
Mine, at ten, did not.
Okay, but what actually is this thing?
Here's where I had to simplify things for my son — and honestly, for myself too, before I really dug in. I didn't want to say "artificial intelligence" and watch his eyes glaze over, so I broke it down like this:
"It's not a real person. It's a computer program that's read millions and millions of pages from the internet — books, websites, conversations — and it's learned patterns in how people talk. So when you ask it a question, it's not 'thinking' the way you and I do. It's really good at guessing what a helpful answer would sound like, based on everything it's read."
I told him Alexa doesn't have a birthday, doesn't live anywhere, and doesn't have a surname — she's just been built to respond in a friendly, chatty way because that makes her nicer to talk to.
He got quiet for a second, and I could see the gears turning. It's a strange thing to explain to a kid — that something can sound so warm and human, and still not "be" anyone at all.
One thing I got slightly wrong at first
Here's a distinction I only understood properly later, and I think it's worth passing on, because I've seen a lot of parents muddle the two.
The chirpy answers my son got about Alexa's surname and hobbies were almost certainly written by a person at Amazon. Classic voice assistants like Alexa have long worked from a script — someone sat down and decided what Alexa says when a child asks how old she is.
The newer AI — the kind behind ChatGPT, and increasingly behind Alexa too — works the way I described above: generating answers on the fly by predicting what should come next.
Why does that matter? Because the scripted version has limits somebody chose. The generating version doesn't, in the same way. It will have a go at anything. That's what makes it so useful, and it's also why it will confidently tell your child something completely untrue.
So my son's questions were aimed at the old thing. But the answer I gave him was about the thing he's going to meet next — which, on reflection, is the conversation I actually wanted to have.
There are things about this that genuinely worry me — how attached children get, how these systems are built to agree with you, how little of it is private. I'll come to all of that in later posts. But the first thing I needed was to understand what my son was actually talking to.
Why I'm writing this
I work in IT, with AI, every day. And still — that one conversation about whether Alexa has a surname sent me headfirst into figuring out how to navigate this as a parent, not a professional. I needed to know how these chatbots actually work, how children relate to them, and how we guide our kids through something changing faster than most of us can keep up with.
This blog is me thinking out loud as I figure out how to navigate this with my son. Over the coming months I'll be writing about the things I wish someone had explained to me plainly:
- What AI companion apps actually are, and why teenagers find them so hard to put down
- How to tell the difference between ordinary teenage privacy and something worth acting on
- What to do when your child uses AI for homework — and where the line honestly sits
- The AI words that come up constantly, explained without jargon
No hype, no doom, no assumption that you already understand any of it. If I cannot explain it to another parent, I will struggle to explain it to my son.
If you'd like to know when a new post goes up, you can leave your email address and I'll send them as they appear. Nothing else — no spam, and you can stop any time.
I'm also putting together a proper beginner-friendly course on all of this for parents. It isn't finished yet, and I'd rather take the time to get it right than rush something out. If you're on the list, you'll be the first to hear when it's ready.
And if there's a question you'd like me to tackle, tell me — that's genuinely how I'll decide what to write next.
One chatty ten-year-old at a time.
Source: Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions, Common Sense Media, 2025 — a nationally representative survey of just over 1,000 US teenagers.