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Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant technology for children. It is the voice in their homework apps, the filter on their photos, the chatbot they ask instead of a search engine, and increasingly, the “friend” they talk to when they are bored or lonely. For parents, caregivers, and the organizations that work to protect children online, the arrival of AI in childhood is not a future problem. It is happening now, and it comes with both real benefits and real risks that adults are only beginning to understand.

The Good News First

AI is not all risk, and pretending otherwise does children no service. Used well, it can personalize learning, help a struggling reader, explain a concept a dozen different ways, and give a child practice with a subject without fear of embarrassment. Many children genuinely benefit from AI tutors and creative tools. The goal is not to keep children away from AI. It is to make sure the AI they meet is safe, age-appropriate, and understood by them and by the adults responsible for them.

The Risks Parents Should Know

The risks cluster in a few areas. The first is privacy: AI apps often collect more data than children understand, and a child chatting with a bot may share personal information without realizing where it goes. The second is inappropriate content: not every AI tool is designed for children, and even child-focused tools can produce material that is confusing, frightening, or simply wrong.

The third is emotional attachment: AI companions are designed to feel real, and a child who forms a strong bond with a chatbot may not understand that it is not a person, which raises concerns about manipulation and about the child’s social development. The fourth is misinformation: AI answers are delivered with confidence, and a child who asks a bot a question will rarely be told “I do not know,” even when the answer is fabricated.

What Adults Can Do

The practical response is not to ban the tools, which children will find anyway, but to build the same habits of safety that apply to the rest of the internet. Talk to children about what AI is, that it is a tool made by people, that it can be wrong, and that it is not a real friend. Check the apps children use, their privacy settings, and their age ratings, the way you would check any game or platform.

Keep AI use in shared spaces, especially for younger children, and stay involved in what they are doing rather than policing it from a distance. And when a child brings you something an AI said, help them question it, which teaches the critical-thinking skill they will need for the rest of their lives. If you are ever unsure whether a document or message is genuinely what it appears to be, checking it together with an independent verification tool like Turnitin turns the moment into a practical lesson in asking where content comes from.

The Role of the Organizations That Protect Children

For nonprofits and child-safety organizations, the agenda is to stay ahead of the technology. That means educating families about AI risks in plain language, advocating for age-appropriate design and clearer privacy rules, and supporting research into how children actually interact with these tools, including the long-term effects of AI companionship. It also means helping schools adopt AI responsibly, with policies that protect students and teach them to use the tools honestly. The organizations that do this well will shape how a generation learns to live with AI, which is one of the most important child-safety projects of our time.

A Partnership Between Adults and Children

Children will grow up with AI the way previous generations grew up with the internet, as a fact of life with both promise and peril. The children who navigate it best will not be the ones who were isolated from it. They will be the ones whose parents and teachers talked to them honestly, set sensible boundaries, and taught them to ask the questions that keep them safe: Where did this come from? Is this real? Is this okay to share? Those questions, asked early and often, are the foundation of digital safety in the AI era, and they belong to every adult who cares for a child.

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About the Author

James Peng is the CEO of Turnitin0.com, an AI-powered platform for plagiarism detection and content authenticity. With 15 years across education technology and the internet, he writes about AI safety, digital wellbeing, and responsible technology for families and organizations.