The ‘Trojan Teddy Bear’: The Promise and Peril of Childhood in the Age of AI
But Suskind worries about what happens when AI starts to replace the kinds of human interactions that new brains have evolved to learn from.
In fact, Suskind says, his original, working title for the book was, “The Trojan Teddy Bear,” a warning that AI friends may seem cute and cuddly — but they have hidden dangers to a child’s development. Finally he went with her Raised by a Man because he wanted to emphasize the positive – and irreplaceable – role played by parents, teachers, and caregivers in shaping children.
“If we want children to be able to continue communicating with other people, to be able to think clearly, to be able to walk in the human world, we will have to make sure that the children get a childhood raised by a human being,” said Suskind.
Suskind is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he directs a program aimed at giving children hearing through cochlear implants. After he began doing this amazing work – literally helping children hear – he noticed that some children who had the procedure continued to understand spoken language and speak easily, while others had a much harder time. Hearing alone was not enough. And that led him to delve into neuroscience and social science to understand why.
Young children’s brain development, Suskind learned, is greatly influenced by the back-and-forth interactions they have with their parents and caregivers during the first few years of their lives. And he worried that there were too many children who weren’t getting the enriching connections their brains needed. So he founded the TMW Initiative, a research center that helps parents create the kinds of brain-enriching environments children need to reach their full potential. (You can read more about Suskind’s biography and previous work at Planetary Money newspaper from 2022).
Why Dana Suskind is sounding the alarm
With the explosion of AI, Suskind grew alarmed by the rush to introduce unprecedented technology into children’s lives without careful thought and rigorous scientific research into its effects on young minds. He is particularly concerned about AI friends and other programs that interact socially with children, which he fears many people will use instead of the human interaction that children so desperately need.
Since the beginning of civilization, people have used technology to make raising children easier. In Raised by a ManSuskind traces that history back to prehistoric times, when mothers used woven slings to carry babies while they worked. Over the past centuries, new technologies – such as televisions and tablets – have eased the burden of caregiving or helped keep children busy. Many of these technologies have been embraced out of fear that they will rot children’s brains.
But Suskind says AI may mark a fundamental shift. Interacting with a chatbot or a smart teddy bear is more than just a child glued to the television or iPad watching Sesame Street or Paw Patrol. AI systems conduct conversations that can sound human. They answer children’s questions, emotions, and fears. They form a kind of artificial social relationship – one that, Suskind says, could shape developing minds in a way that, until recently, only humans could.
Suskind cites research by renowned University of Washington psychologist Patricia K. Kuhl. Kuhl proposed what is known as the “social gateway” — the idea that children’s brains are biologically developed to learn through social interactions. Research has shown, for example, that children learn language much better from a live person than from a screen. Neuroscientists and psychologists suggest that this is because social interaction engages the brain in ways that media does not. Singing a song that adults naturally talk to children, smiling and other facial expressions, gentle gestures, eye contact, and back and forth all seem to help open that social gate and help learning and healthy brain development.
Although artificial intelligence is not like human teachers and caregivers, Suskind argues, it can open the door to connecting with young children in ways that previous technology could not. That makes AI a potentially strange — but also dangerous — teaching tool.
Companies are designing AI systems with their own goals, which can include increasing your kids’ engagement, keeping their attention, collecting data, and making money. They have no priorities as parents. And while those programs may mimic human interaction, Suskind says they can’t recreate everything that makes human relationships valuable in development.
“Eye contact, shared laughter, patient responses to ‘why’ questions use ancient circuits designed for communication,” writes Suskind. “This exchange provides a kind of feed that no algorithm, however sophisticated, can match.”
Human relationships are also messy and full of emotions. Parents do not understand their children. Children are frustrated. Families argue, reconnect, and then it’s easy. Suskind argues that those imperfect connections — and the “productive struggle” they create — are how children learn resilience, emotion regulation, flexibility, and how to navigate real relationships.
Unlike most humans, AI programs can be endlessly engaging, endlessly patient, and relentlessly convincing. Dealing with them usually feels less confrontational. Suskind worries that giving young children too much exposure to them might make them less ready for the messy, unpredictable nature of real human relationships.
AI as junk food for the young mind
Suskind compares AI’s relationship to highly processed food. “If all you eat is a fruit snack, which is an artificial kind of fruit, when you eat real fruit, you’re going to be like, “Hmm, they’re not that sweet,” she said.
AI can eventually be programmed to try to mimic real parents and caregivers even more closely. But Suskind argues that the problem isn’t just that today’s AI falls short of human relationships. That AI represents a new kind of social experience for children – one that already raises concerns based on what we know about child development and its long-term outcomes remains deeply uncertain.
Suskind uses an analogy from the 19th century, when a German chemist named Justus von Liebig created one of the first infant formulas, hoping to replicate the nutrition of human milk. But when a French doctor tested the formula on four newborn babies, they all died within days, and the episode sparked a heated debate.
The lesson, Suskind suggests, is that we have to be careful about assuming the position of engineering on something as complex as biological, emotional, and social as human care before we understand how those substitutes shape children’s development.
Given so much uncertainty about these rapidly evolving technologies and their potential effects on children, Suskind is writing a comprehensive book that provides parents with a practical guide to safely navigating parenting in the age of AI. He emphasizes that it is very important to protect children from AI during their early years of life.
He writes: “Older children and adults encounter AI with neural scaffolding already in place, but young children are still wiring the connections between learning and future relationships. “Introducing AI at this critical time presents a very different challenge with greater potential for harm.”
Suskind is open to the idea of using AI to improve the education of other children — but as a tool that enhances, rather than replaces, humans. She argues that human caregivers are the best way to cultivate what she calls the “Human Edge,” a set of social, emotional, and cognitive skills such as “critical thinking, interpersonal communication, creativity, empathy, and resilience.”
But, like time-strapped parents who rely on screens to buy some time for themselves today, there may be growing temptations to outsource parts of parenting to AI, especially considering the fact that childcare is incredibly expensive. Suskind worries that, in time, an entirely human-raised childhood could become a form of luxury — the way fresh, healthy food often is today. Families with the time and resources will provide rich human connections for their children. Everyone else may rely heavily on cheap, easy-to-use AI tools.
And children raised heavily by AI may not only be socially, emotionally, and intellectually regressive, but, ironically, may be less suited to an AI-driven economy.
Suskind points to a recent article by University of Chicago economist Alex Imas. Imas says that as AI automates more cognitive work, human jobs may become more focused on what he calls the “relational sector” — jobs where people are valued for their unique qualities, from education to health care to hospitality, the arts, and medicine.
