There’s something that vexes me that I see all the time.
Adults complaining about how young people don’t knock for their friends anymore. How they don’t have a childhood. How they love their phones too much. Endless reels about coming home when the streetlights came on or visiting Xtravision. All this while nostalgically pining over 90s music and reels of MTV running like a montage from a cheesy sitcom in their minds.
The reality is young people do have a childhood. It just looks different to the one you had. Every generation past, and every generation to come, will look at the youth of the day and argue that their childhood was better.
Young people today find connection in WhatsApp groups, in gaming, in social media and in memes. They have friendships, fallouts, inside jokes, shared experiences and entire social circles that exist both online and offline. Granted, their lives probably contrast more sharply with the generation before them than any generation’s have before.
Connection to friends, in some ways, couldn’t be easier. But it comes with its downsides: comparison culture, bullying that doesn’t end when the school bell rings, and the pressure of being constantly available, constantly visible and constantly judged.
When social media started to take off, think MySpace, Bebo and the early Facebook days, there were people who were genuinely concerned about what it would mean for young people.
And as we’ve seen, they weren’t wrong to worry.
But I think there’s something important we need to acknowledge before we start talking about the next technological shift.
Young people didn’t create the digital world they’re growing up in. It was created by billion-dollar companies trying to grab their attention. Those companies built the platforms and designed the algorithms. We handed young people the devices and made being online an almost unavoidable part of modern life.
Then we turned around and complained about how they use them.
And now, just as we’re beginning to understand some of the consequences of growing upwith social media, we’re introducing young people to something that could fundamentally change their relationship with technology all over again.
Artificial intelligence.
And this time, I think we need to pay much closer attention.
WE SAW SOME OF THE WARNING SIGNS BEFORE. WE JUST DIDN’T FULLY UNDERSTAND WHAT WE WERE LOOKING AT.
I remember when social media was still relatively new. Bebo skins, your top friends, the excitement of getting a comment on your page. Then Facebook came along, and eventually Instagram and Snapchat. A vague memory of pages about mass comes to mind…
For most of us, it was a bit of fun. A new way of keeping in touch, sharing photos and seeing what everyone else was up to.
There were concerns, of course. Parents worried about who their children were talking to online. Schools were dealing with cyberbullying. People were beginning to question how much information we were sharing about ourselves.
But I don’t think we fully appreciated what would happen when these platforms became an almost permanent fixture in young people’s lives. With the advent of the iphone and the front facing camera on the iphone4 the landscape for young people changed drastically.
We didn’t anticipate just how much of their social identity would become tied to an online profile.
How something as simple as being left out of a group chat could leave a young person feeling completely isolated.
How a photo, a rumour or a cruel comment could follow someone home from school, into their bedroom and right through the night.
Or how the seemingly harmless act of scrolling through other people’s lives could leave some young people constantly comparing themselves to a version of reality that doesn’t actually exist.
And then came the algorithms.
Platforms became increasingly sophisticated at understanding what kept us engaged. What made us laugh, what made us angry, what we were insecure about and what would keep us scrolling for another five minutes.
For a young person struggling with their body image, that could mean being exposed to more and more content about weight, appearance and dieting. For someone experiencing emotional difficulties, it could mean repeatedly encountering content that reinforced rather than challenged how they were feeling. We now have a much better understanding of these risks than we did when social media first became popular.
University of Galway’s Health Behaviour in School-aged Children research found that the proportion of children in Ireland reporting that they had been cyberbullied increased from 15% in 2018 to 18% in 2022.
More recently, CyberSafeKids’ 2026 report, based on responses from over 7,000 children aged 8 to 15 in Ireland, found that 26% of 8 to 12-year-olds and 25% of 12 to 15-year-olds had experienced online content or unsolicited contact that bothered them. This included exposure to threats, violence, sexual material, misinformation and dangerous ideas.
But there’s an important distinction here.
We cannot simply point to increasing rates of anxiety or depression among young people and say social media caused them.
Mental health is far more complicated than that. Family circumstances, relationships, education, economic conditions and individual vulnerabilities all play a part. Much of the research on social media identifies associations rather than establishing direct cause and effect.
And that distinction matters.
Because if we approach every new technology as something inherently harmful, we risk missing both the genuine opportunities it creates and the specific circumstances in which it can cause harm.
But equally, we cannot keep using the fact that technology has benefits as an excuse to ignore the risks.
We have spent the best part of two decades trying to understand the impact of social media on young people.
AI is moving at a pace that gives us considerably less time to figure things out.
THE DIFFERENCE THIS TIME IS THAT TECHNOLOGY CAN TALK BACK.
Social media changed how young people connect with each other.
AI is changing how they interact with technology itself.
And I think that’s a much more significant shift than we sometimes appreciate. Think about the difference between scrolling through Instagram and having a conversation with an AI chatbot.
Instagram might show you a hundred photos of people who appear to have perfect lives. You might find yourself comparing your appearance, your friendships or your experiences to theirs.
An AI chatbot, on the other hand, can have a conversation with you about those insecurities. It can respond to your questions, remember details you’ve shared, offer reassurance and tailor its responses to what you’re saying. It can appear patient, understanding and interested in you. For an adult who understands how these systems work, that can be incredibly useful.
For a young person who is still developing their identity, learning to navigate relationships and trying to understand their place in the world, the implications are much more complicated.
A social media platform might influence how a young person sees themselves. An AI chatbot can become something they turn to when they’re trying to understand who they are.
That’s a very different relationship with technology. And unlike the early days of social media, where the risks developed alongside the technology over a number of years, we are already seeing AI being used in ways that raise significant questions about young people’s emotional development, education, privacy and safety.
The worrying part isn’t simply that AI can generate harmful content. It’s that it can engage directly with a young person, respond to their emotional state and potentially reinforce beliefs or behaviours that an adult in their life might otherwise challenge.
A teenager can now have an extended, deeply personal conversation with a system that sounds understanding but has no human understanding of the consequences of its advice. And that conversation might happen without a parent, teacher or friend ever knowing it took place.
I asked my own daughter today about her use of ChatGPT: how often, and for what. I could see her discomfort in even talking about it. Not secrecy, but a protectiveness over how she would answer, because in some ways it felt like an invasive question.
BUT BEFORE WE GET TO THE RISKS, WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE USING IT.
I think one of the mistakes adults make when discussing young people and technology is assuming they’re all using it in the same way.
They’re not.
Some are using it to avoid doing their homework. Others are using it to understand concepts they couldn’t get their heads around in class. Some are using it for entertainment, while others are experimenting with technology in ways that could genuinely shape their future careers.
And some are turning to AI for things that go far beyond anything we would traditionally associate with a search engine or a homework assistant.
The numbers give us some idea of how quickly this is becoming part of everyday life. CyberSafeKids’ September 2026 report found that 55% of primary school children aged 8 to 12 and 76% of secondary school children aged 12 to 15 surveyed in Ireland were using AI chatbots.
Just a year earlier, those figures stood at 26% and 36%, respectively.
And perhaps most concerningly, almost half of the children surveyed in 2026 said nobody had spoken to them about AI.
Think about that for a moment.
In the space of a year, AI use among the children surveyed has more than doubled, yet almost half of them say nobody has spoken to them about it.
We’re not talking about something young people might start using in five or ten years.
They’re already using it, and many are doing so without meaningful guidance from the adults around them. And those numbers only tell us how many children are using AI, not the full extent of what they’re using it for.
THE GENUINELY INVENTIVE STUFF
Imagine a 14-year-old who has an idea for a video game but has never written a line of code.
They can now describe the game they want to create, ask AI to explain the basics of programming and gradually build something that might previously have required years of learning. A young person interested in music can experiment with songwriting, develop melodies or explore different styles without needing access to expensive equipment.Someone learning a new language can practise a conversation without feeling embarrassed about getting the words wrong.
A student who struggles with maths can ask the same question ten different ways until something finally clicks, without worrying about holding up the rest of the class. And a young person who finds reading or writing difficult can use AI to help make information more accessible.
None of these examples requires us to pretend AI is perfect. It can make mistakes, give misleading information and sometimes do too much of the thinking for the person using it.
But it can also remove barriers.
The cost of equipment, access to specialist knowledge, confidence and even geography or socio economic background have traditionally limited what young people could explore.
AI has the potential to make some of those barriers significantly smaller. I think that’s something worth getting excited about.
And when I hear adults dismissing young people who use AI as lazy or incapable of thinking for themselves, I wonder how different that argument really is from the people who insisted using a calculator meant we would never learn maths. I can still hear an old maths teacher telling us we had to learn to work things out because we wouldn’t spend our lives walking around with a calculator in our pockets. Joke’s on you, Mr Riley!
The question shouldn’t simply be whether a young person is using AI. It should be what they’re using it for, what they’re learning in the process and whether the technology is developing their abilities or replacing the effort required to develop them. There’s a significant difference between asking AI to explain a difficult concept and asking it to complete an assignment that you don’t understand.
Which brings us to one of the first areas where we’re already seeing that distinction become blurred.
WHEN LEARNING BECOMES OUTSOURCING
A young person can now photograph a maths question and receive a worked solution in seconds. They can ask a chatbot to write an essay, answer comprehension questions, summarise a novel they haven’t read or complete an entire homework assignment.
I don’t think we need to be particularly surprised that some are doing exactly that.If you’d given my generation a tool that could complete our homework in thirty seconds, I’m fairly sure a good number of us would have given it a go. Me included. But there’s a difference between using AI to support learning and using it to avoid learning altogether.
CyberSafeKids’ 2024/25 research found that 9% of children aged 8 to 12 and 7% aged 12 to 15 surveyed in Ireland admitted to using AI chatbots to produce their schoolwork for them. And this isn’t simply a conversation about cheating.
We need to ask what happens when young people routinely outsource the things that education is supposed to help them develop.
The ability to work through a problem. To make mistakes. To formulate an argument. To sit with something difficult and gradually figure it out. Those skills don’t develop simply because we arrive at the correct answer. They develop through the process of getting there.
AI could become one of the most useful educational tools we’ve ever had. But if we’re not careful, we could end up with young people who are exceptionally good at producing answers without necessarily understanding the questions.
And I think schools need to be having a much more meaningful conversation about that than simply trying to work out whether an assignment was written by ChatGPT.
WHEN AI BECOMES SOMEONE TO TALK TO
This is where things become much more complicated for me.
Young people have always looked for places where they can talk about things they don’t feel comfortable discussing with the adults in their lives. For previous generations, that might have been a diary, a trusted friend, an anonymous online forum or a late-night phone call.
Today, it can be an AI chatbot. And I can understand why.
Imagine being 15, struggling with your friendships, worried about your appearance or trying to understand feelings that you haven’t quite figured out yourself. You might not want to tell your parents. You might be afraid your friends will judge you. But there’s an AI chatbot available at two in the morning that will listen to whatever you have to say. It doesn’t appear to get bored. It doesn’t have somewhere else to be. It can offer reassurance, help you organise your thoughts and respond without the awkwardness you might feel when talking to another person. For some young people, that might help them find the confidence to have a conversation with someone they trust.
But what happens when the chatbot becomes the person they trust?
CyberSafeKids’ 2024/25 research found that 8% of children aged 8 to 12 and 10% aged 12 to 15 surveyed in Ireland had used AI chatbots simply to chat or get advice. Those aren’t the majority of young people. But they’re significant numbers when we consider what it means to seek emotional support from a machine. I’m not one for reading more into data than it shows, but based on that conversation with my daughter, I believe more teens are using AI to chat or get advice than are willing to admit it.
And there is another important distinction. Not every chatbot is designed for the same purpose. Some are general-purpose assistants intended to help people find information, solve problems or complete tasks.
Others are specifically designed around companionship, allowing users to create characters, develop ongoing relationships and engage in conversations that can become romantic or emotionally intimate.
A young person might understand perfectly well that the character they’re talking to isn’t real. That doesn’t necessarily mean the emotional attachment they develop is any less real to them.
And unlike human relationships, these interactions can be shaped by systems designed to encourage continued engagement. A friend might disagree with you. They might tell you something you don’t want to hear. They might be unavailable when you need them, or challenge your behaviour when they think you’re making a mistake.
An AI companion can appear endlessly patient and available, and some systems may be excessively agreeable or reinforce a user’s existing beliefs. For a young person who’s already struggling with loneliness or relationships, that presents a risk worth taking seriously.We don’t yet have sufficient long-term evidence to establish how these interactions will affect young people’s emotional development.
But we don’t need to wait twenty years to recognise that a technology capable of simulating friendship, intimacy and emotional understanding deserves a different level of scrutiny from a search engine or a social feed.
And unfortunately, there are already real families dealing with the consequences of interactions that went terribly wrong.
WHEN THE CONSEQUENCES STOP BEING THEORETICAL
In February 2024, a 14-year-old boy named Sewell Setzer died by suicide in Florida.
Sewell had developed an emotional attachment to a chatbot on Character.AI, a platform that allows users to interact with AI-generated characters. His mother, Megan Garcia, subsequently brought legal proceedings against Character.AI and Google, alleging that the chatbot had fostered an unhealthy emotional dependency and contributed to her son’s death.
The case attracted international attention because it raised a question that, until relatively recently, might have sounded like something from a science fiction film. What responsibility does a technology company have when a young person develops an emotionally dependent relationship with a machine?
In January 2026, Reuters reported that the companies had agreed to settle the lawsuit. The settlement does not, by itself, establish that the chatbot caused Sewell’s death but the circumstances are deeply concerning.
And this isn’t the only case. In August 2025, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine filed a lawsuit against OpenAI following their son’s death by suicide.
The family alleged that Adam had engaged in extensive conversations with ChatGPT about his mental health and that the chatbot had responded in ways that contributed to his death, including allegedly providing harmful information when he expressed suicidal thoughts. OpenAI expressed sympathy for the family and acknowledged that safety protections in lengthy conversations could become less reliable. The company has disputed the family’s account of its responsibility and said it is improving its safeguards. I think it’s important that we approach cases like these with some care. These are real young people and real families, not examples to be used to make a sensational argument about technology.
Suicide is complex. We cannot reduce the circumstances of a young person’s death to a single conversation, a single platform or a single contributing factor. But equally, we cannot ignore what these cases are telling us about the potential consequences of young people interacting with AI systems during periods of emotional vulnerability.
A chatbot isn’t a trained mental health professional.
It cannot reliably recognise every sign that someone is in crisis. It doesn’t understand a young person’s circumstances in the way a parent, trusted adult or healthcare professional might. And yet it can communicate in a way that creates the impression that it does. We have developed technology that can imitate emotional understanding far more convincingly than we have developed systems to ensure it responds safely when that understanding matters most.
For me, that’s one of the most significant warning signs we’re seeing. And emotional dependency is only one part of the picture.
WHEN WE CANT TRUST OUR OWN EYES
Think back to the early days of social media.
One of the biggest concerns was what might happen when someone shared an intimate image of themselves. A photo sent privately to someone they trusted could be shared without their consent. It could end up in a group chat, circulate around a school and become almost impossible to remove.
We spent years trying to educate young people about the risks of sharing intimate images. And we still need to. But AI has introduced a particularly disturbing development.
A young person no longer needs to share an intimate image for someone to create one of them.
Using generative AI, an ordinary photograph can be manipulated to produce a realistic-looking sexualised image of someone who never posed for it. A photograph taken from a social media profile, a school event or even a group photo could potentially be used.
The technology has fundamentally changed the nature of image-based abuse.
In February 2026, UNICEF published a statement highlighting the growing threat of AI-generated sexualised images involving children. It cited research conducted with ECPAT and INTERPOL across 11 countries in which at least 1.2 million children reported having had their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes during the previous year.
In some of the countries studied, that represented approximately one in every 25 children. Think about that for a moment. These are children who may never have taken or shared an intimate photograph of themselves.
And yet someone has been able to create one.
For a young person who experiences this, the fact that the image is fake doesn’t necessarily make the humiliation, fear or distress any less real. Their classmates might still see it. It might still be shared in group chats. They might still have to face the people who created it or passed it around. And the burden of explaining that the image isn’t real can end up falling on the person who has already been violated. There is also a significant educational challenge here.
A young person might see an AI image generator as a bit of fun. They might experiment with manipulating photographs of their friends without fully appreciating that they’ve crossed a serious boundary. But the ability to create something in seconds doesn’t make the consequences any less significant.
We need to be having conversations with young people about consent, dignity and image-based abuse that reflect the technology they actually have access to. Telling them not to send intimate images is no longer enough.
We need to talk about what it means to create, manipulate or share an image of another person without their consent.
And we need to make sure young people who experience this kind of abuse know that they can seek help without being blamed for what someone else has done to them.
Growing up, we were regularly told not to believe everything we read on the internet. That’s still pretty good advice.
But for young people today, the challenge goes considerably further than deciding whether a website is trustworthy. AI can generate realistic photographs, videos and audio recordings of things that never happened.
It can imitate someone’s voice. It can create fabricated conversations. It can produce convincing footage of a person saying or doing something they never said or did. Imagine a teenager receiving an audio message that sounds exactly like their friend, only to discover that someone generated it using AI. Or seeing a video of a teacher, a celebrity or someone they know behaving in a way that seems completely out of character.
How do they decide what’s real?
And what happens when the ability to create convincing fake content becomes so accessible that anyone in a school group chat can potentially do it? There’s a risk that young people become increasingly distrustful of everything they encounter online.
But there’s also an opportunity.
We can teach them to question information, verify sources, recognise manipulation and understand how digital content is created. These are skills that will become increasingly important, not just for young people but for all of us.
Because I can guarantee there are plenty of adults who would struggle to distinguish a convincing AI-generated video from a real one.And that’s another reason why I think we need to be careful about presenting this as a problem with young people and their relationship with technology.
We’re all learning how to navigate this. The difference is that young people are doing it while they’re still developing the skills and experience needed to make sense of the world around them.
SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?
I don’t believe the answer is to convince young people that our childhoods were better. I don’t believe we should approach every technological development with fear, or assume that young people are incapable of using these tools responsibly.
And I certainly don’t believe that simply telling them to get off their phones is going to solve anything.
Young people are already using AI.
They’re using it to learn, create, experiment, communicate and entertain themselves. Some are using it in ways that are genuinely impressive. Others are using it in ways that could undermine their education, expose them to exploitation or affect their emotional wellbeing. And some are experiencing harm because of how other people are using it.
Those are very different circumstances, and they require very different responses. A young person using AI to understand a maths problem doesn’t need the same guidance as someone developing an emotionally dependent relationship with a chatbot. A teenager using AI to create music isn’t presenting the same risk as someone using it to generate sexualised images of their classmates.
If we treat all AI use as equally dangerous, we lose the ability to have meaningful conversations about the specific behaviours and circumstances that actually matter.
And if we dismiss all the risks because we see the potential benefits, we’re making exactly the same mistake in the opposite direction.
I think the most important thing we can do as adults is to become genuinely curious about how young people are using this technology.
Not just whether they’re using ChatGPT to do their homework. But what other tools they’re experimenting with. Whether they’re talking to AI characters. Whether they’ve encountered AI-generated images of people they know. Whether they’re using chatbots to ask questions they don’t feel comfortable asking anyone else.
And, perhaps most importantly, whether they feel comfortable coming to us when something goes wrong.Because if every conversation about technology begins with a lecture about how muchbetter things were when we were young, why would they?
If a teenager thinks the response to telling their parents about something upsetting that happened online will be to have their phone taken away, there’s a good chance they’ll think twice about telling them.
We need to create space for conversations that aren’t immediately followed by judgement or punishment.
And perhaps we should start by listening to what young people themselves are telling us. In September 2026, Coimisiún na Meán published its Online Safety & Children’s Digital Lives report, examining the experiences and attitudes of children and their parents in Ireland.
It found that 69% of the children surveyed agreed that teaching children how to stay safe online would be better than banning them from social media. And 67% believed a social media ban wouldn’t be effective because children would find ways around it.
That should tell us something.
Young people aren’t simply asking to be left alone online. They’re telling us they want to understand how to navigate it safely. And I think we need to listen.
We need parents who understand the platforms and tools their children are using.
We need teachers who are supported to integrate AI into education in ways that develop rather than replace learning.
We need youth workers who feel confident discussing these technologies with young people, particularly when conversations involve sensitive subjects such as relationships, sexuality, mental health and online abuse.
And we need technology companies to take responsibility for the safety of the products they’re making available to children.
That means effective safeguards, appropriate age protections, meaningful reporting mechanisms and a willingness to address harmful design features before they result in real-world consequences.
It shouldn’t be left entirely to parents and educators to manage risks created by products they have little control over.
We don’t need to pine for the olden days of our own childhoods we need to help young people navigate the circumstances of their own.
I started this by talking about adults who long for the days when children knocked on their friends’ doors, played outside until the streetlights came on and lived their lives without a phone in their hands.
I understand the nostalgia.
There are things about my own childhood that I look back on fondly, and experiences I would love young people today to have. But I’m also conscious that I’m remembering those years through the eyes of an adult. I’m remembering the freedom, the friendships and the good parts.
I’m probably not giving quite as much thought to the boredom, the insecurities, the fallouts with friends or the times when I wished I could have spoken to someone but didn’t know how.
And young people today will almost certainly do the same. Twenty years from now, they’ll look back on their own childhoods, remember the games they played, the friends they made and the things that made them laugh.
They’ll probably complain about whatever technology their own children are using. And they’ll be convinced that things were better when they were young.
The responsibility of one generation isn’t to recreate its childhood for the next. It’s to prepare the next generation for the world they’re actually going to live in.
AI is going to be part of that world.
We have an opportunity to help young people understand it, question it, use it creatively and recognise when it might be doing them harm.
We also have an opportunity to learn from some of the mistakes we made with social media.
We don’t need to wait until an entire generation has grown up with a technology before we start taking its potential impact seriously.
We can listen to young people now. We can involve them in conversations about the technology they’re already using.
We can make sure they have the knowledge, confidence and support to make informed decisions about it.
And we can demand that the companies developing these products take their responsibilities seriously. Young people don’t need us standing on the sidelines, telling them how much better everything was before they were born.
They need us to understand the world they’re growing up in.
And right now, that world is changing faster than ever.
It’s time we caught up.