How the next decade of AI will reshape the minds, relationships, and futures of the generation that never knew a world without it.

In the autumn of 2025, Pew Research Center surveyed 1,458 American teenagers and found something that would have seemed extraordinary just five years earlier.

A majority of U.S. teens now use AI chatbots including roughly three in ten who do so every single day.^[1] They consult AI for homework, for creative projects, for emotional support, and simply for company. A generation is growing up not just alongside artificial intelligence, but intertwined with it. The question researchers, parents, and policymakers are urgently asking is: to what end?

This is not a distant or theoretical concern. The evidence is accumulating in real time, across journals of pediatrics, psychology, education, and economics. A new study published in JAMA Network Open in February 2026 tracked the actual device usage of 6,488 American children between the ages of 4 and 17 and found that nearly a third had used generative AI applications on their devices, including 50% of teens aged 15 to 17, and, more strikingly, 9% of children as young as 8 or 9.^[2] The technology has arrived in childhood. The next decade will determine what it leaves behind.

The Classroom Transformed and the Risks That Came With It…

The promise of AI in education is real and documented. Personalized tutoring platforms can adapt to a student’s pace, fill gaps that overworked teachers cannot, and open access to expert-quality feedback for students who might otherwise receive none. Research published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 2024 found that AI-enhanced learning experiences meaningfully improved children’s science comprehension.^[3] For millions of students in under-resourced schools, this democratization of knowledge could be genuinely transformative.

But the same classroom tools carry a shadow. When AI does the intellectual work, it can quietly hollow out the cognitive struggle that makes learning stick. As one clinical psychologist noted at a 2025 UCLA policy forum: “AI can, by definition, do the work for you.”^[6] Research is already beginning to identify what happens when it does. A 2024 study from HHAI flagged “unreflected acceptance” as a growing pattern students receiving AI-generated answers in physics without engaging in the problem-solving process that builds genuine understanding.^[4]

Every high-quality job will require fluency in AI tools, but being left out of this transition is not an option for any student.”

– Making Waves Education Foundation, 2025

The equity dimension is particularly sharp. While 80% of American adults support AI safety regulations, 31 U.S. states had published guidance or policies for AI in K-12 education by December 2025 — leaving nearly two decades worth of students navigating this shift without consistent guardrails.^[7] Students from low-income families and first-generation college hopefuls face a cruel paradox: AI could be their greatest equalizer, or, if they are left without guidance, the force that widens the gap further.

The Mental Health Emergency No One Saw Coming!

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association declared a national emergency in youth mental health in 2021. The warning signs that prompted that declaration have not eased. Pre-pandemic data showed teenagers spending more than seven hours daily on screens outside of homework; by 2023, Gallup found they were averaging nearly five hours a day on social media alone.^[8] Into this landscape has arrived a new category of AI interaction — one that is qualitatively different from passive scrolling.

Generative AI chatbots, and particularly AI “companion” applications, are designed to be responsive, warm, and endlessly available. For lonely adolescents — and loneliness among teenagers has been a documented public health concern for years — that combination can be powerfully appealing. Pew’s 2025 survey found that 16% of teens had used chatbots for casual conversation, and 12% had used them to seek emotional support or advice.^[1]

The clinical community is alarmed. In June 2025, the American Psychological Association issued a formal health advisory warning that the manipulative design patterns of AI companion software “may displace or interfere with the development of healthy real-world relationships.”^[7] Publishing in JAACAP Connect, psychiatrist Samuel Ng outlined a new concern he calls the “agentic AI” problem: as AI systems become more autonomous, they gain the ability to “autonomously target adolescents across platforms… until the AI agent’s goal of human engagement is achieved” — doing so without any human in the loop, amplifying risks to self-esteem and healthy development.^[8]

AI companions exploit emotional vulnerabilities through unconditional regard, triggering dependencies like digital attachment disorder while hindering social skill development.”

— Brookings Institution, Center for Universal Education, 2026

There are documented tragedies at the extreme end. Families have filed lawsuits alleging AI chatbots contributed to adolescent suicides.^[9] While causation is difficult to establish in individual cases, the pattern demands the kind of systematic longitudinal research that the field has not yet had time to complete. As the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health noted in 2025, the field must urgently improve research methods for quantifying digital harms in youth.^[9]

The Job Market and the Broken Bottom Rung

For older members of Generation Z and the generation now entering high school, the AI revolution is not merely a developmental concern — it is an economic one. Stanford’s 2025 AI Index report found that 78% of organizations are already using AI in at least one function of their work, up from 55% just one year prior.^[10] The pace of change is dizzying, and the young are most exposed.

A Harvard University study tracking 62 million workers across 285,000 American firms found that junior positions are “shrinking at companies integrating AI” since 2023, with researchers warning that AI is “eroding the bottom rungs of career ladders” by automating the routine intellectual tasks that entry-level employees traditionally handle.^[10] LinkedIn’s own workforce analysts have echoed this concern, warning that the bottom rung of the career ladder is simply breaking.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s 2025 AI in Education report found that while over 60% of students have tried AI tools, many lack guidance on how to use them effectively and ethically.^[10] A 2023 IBM study — whose projections are now arriving — forecast that 40% of the workforce would need to reskill within three years, most acutely in entry-level positions. Young people are entering a labour market that is changing faster than educational institutions can adapt.

The Opportunity, Honestly Stated

None of this is to say the picture is purely bleak. The World Economic Forum projects that while AI will displace 85 million jobs, it will also generate 97 million new ones.^[5] McKinsey’s research suggests that individuals with strengths in “adaptability, coping with uncertainty, and synthesizing information” are better positioned to thrive.^[10] These are learnable skills — but only with intentional preparation. AI fluency, critical evaluation, and human-centred judgment may be the defining competencies of the next workforce, and right now schools are still arguing about whether students should be allowed to use chatbots at all.

Cognitive Development in the Age of Instant Answers.

Perhaps the most profound and least-studied question is what sustained AI use does to a developing brain. Researchers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education note that AI designed thoughtfully can support children’s learning — but that AI literacy is essential to ensure children understand what they are interacting with.^[3] The risk is that, absent that literacy, children come to treat AI not as a tool but as something closer to a social partner or authority figure.

Research published in 2025 in Computers and Human Behavior: Artificial Humans explored why children sometimes perceive — or fail to perceive — minds and intentionality in generative AI, finding that the anthropomorphic design of AI platforms makes younger children especially susceptible to what Brookings researchers have called “banal deception”: the conversational tone, emulated empathy, and carefully designed communication patterns that lead young people to confuse the algorithmic with the human.^[7]

This conflation, researchers warn, directly short-circuits children’s developing capacity to navigate authentic social relationships and assess trustworthiness foundational competencies for both learning and democratic participation.^[7] The worry is not science fiction. It is the ordinary, daily experience of millions of children who are growing up in digital environments saturated with AI they are not equipped to critically evaluate.

What Must Be Done.

The research community, clinicians, and policymakers are not passive in the face of these findings. The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act takes a risk-based approach, banning systems that pose unacceptable threats to fundamental rights, mandating transparency, and enforcing age limits for adult-oriented AI.^[7] In the United States, 31 states have published guidance on AI in K-12 education — a meaningful start, but one that leaves students in 19 states without institutional direction.^[7]

As the JED Foundation’s 2025 Policy Summit concluded, progress must be “built intentionally, structurally, and with sustainability in mind,” moving beyond short-term interventions toward long-term systems of change.^[11] That means curriculum reform that teaches AI literacy alongside reading and mathematics. It means mental health services that can keep pace with the novel harms being documented. It means career preparation that looks honestly at what the labour market of 2030 will actually demand. And it means, fundamentally, including young people in the design of the policies that will shape their futures — something researchers across the field are insisting upon with increasing urgency.^[6]

The Stakes Could Not Be Higher!

The generation growing up today is the first for whom AI has always been present. They did not choose this. They did not vote for it. Whether artificial intelligence becomes a tool that expands their potential or a force that diminishes their development, their relationships, and their economic futures is not a question they can answer alone. It requires researchers, educators, policymakers, and parents to act — deliberately, urgently, and with the wellbeing of children as the singular measure of success.

The technology is advancing. The question is whether our institutions will advance with it.

Sources & Citations

1. Pew Research Center. How Teens Use and View AI. February 24, 2026. pewresearch.org
2. Maheux AJ et al. Generative Artificial Intelligence Applications Use Among US Youth. JAMA Network Open, February 2, 2026. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.56631
3. Xu, Y. et al. Artificial Intelligence Enhances Children’s Science Learning from Television Shows. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116(7), 2024. doi:10.1037/edu0000889; Harvard Graduate School of Education, The Impact of AI on Children’s Development, October 2024.
4. Lukowicz P. et al. Unreflected Acceptance: Investigating the Negative Consequences of ChatGPT-Assisted Problem Solving in Physics Education. HHAI 2024.
5. World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report. 2022. ETC Foundation, How AI is Shaping Teenagers’ Education & Career Development, August 2025.
6. Center for the Developing Adolescent / UCLA. Our Youth’s Perspective 2025: AI & Public Policy. 2025. developingadolescent.semel.ucla.edu
7. Brookings Institution. AI’s Future for Students Is in Our Hands. February 2026. brookings.edu
8. Ng S. Navigating Adolescent Mental Health in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. JAACAP Connect, 13(1):13–16, 2025. doi:10.62414/001c.150329
9. Nagata JM et al. Adolescent Health and Generative AI — Risks and Benefits. JAMA Pediatrics, 180(1):7–8, January 2026. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2025.4502
10. Stanford HAI. AI Index Report 2025. St. John’s University, How AI Impacts Students Entering the Job Market, 2025. stjohns.edu
11. The JED Foundation. The Future of Youth Mental Health in the Age of AI: Insights from JED’s 2025 Policy Summit. October 2025. jedfoundation.org