logo
Nearly Third of Kids Now Look to AI for Emotional Support—Report

Nearly Third of Kids Now Look to AI for Emotional Support—Report

Newsweek4 days ago
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
A new study has found that nearly a third of children are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) for emotional support.
While therapy and school counselors have historically been keystones of mental health resources for kids, the current younger generation has a new technology option to turn to.
Why It Matters
AI has skyrocketed in popularity, offering tools to boost productivity in workplace tasks and school assignments.
While children often use technology to assist with research for their papers, AI has also proven particularly effective in helping humans address their mental health issues. However, limited research has been conducted about the possibility of long-term effects.
In a May 2024 YouGov survey, 50 percent of respondents said the 24/7 availability and immediate access made AI chatbots helpful for mental health purposes. And 38 percent cited the chatbots' non-judgmental interactions as a pro.
What To Know
A new report from Norton found that 28 percent of parents said that their children turn to AI for emotional support. This trend is also reflected in the experiences of mental health clinicians.
"I am seeing that a lot of children and young adults are returning to AI resources for emotional support," Kathryn Cross, a licensed professional counselor with Thriveworks, told Newsweek. "We also see this as a trend on social media. We are seeing people find comfort in AI responses, partly because they are receiving answers based on what they are looking for, rather than evidence-based advice."
Children are facing unique mental health challenges, with 24 percent of parents in the Norton report saying their child has been cyberbullied. Roughly 41 percent also said their children turn to AI for companionship.
Since many children are using tablets by the age of 2 and parents routinely give their kids phones before age 12, according to the Norton survey, the youngest generation may be facing loneliness and searching for meaningful relationships in a new and unprecedented technological environment.
An April Gallup poll found that 79 percent of Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, had used AI tools; however, 41 percent reported experiencing anxiety with the technology. Adult Gen Z-ers were more likely to say that AI made them anxious (53 percent) than their younger, school-age Gen Z-ers (21 percent).
File photo of a smartphone displaying the ChatGPT logo resting on the keyboard of a laptop also displaying a ChatGPT logo.
File photo of a smartphone displaying the ChatGPT logo resting on the keyboard of a laptop also displaying a ChatGPT logo.What People Are Saying
Kathryn Cross, a licensed professional counselor with Thriveworks, told Newsweek: "While AI can provide what feels like useful insights on personal issues, it can also do damage, seeing as AI tools are unable to ensure long-lasting treatment based on evidence and real-life responses to crises. AI provides emotional support based on an algorithm, and it is programmed to give a response that is suitable for a person based on the wording used and the history that the program is picking up based on an individual's usage."
What Happens Next
The long-term risks of AI usage for therapy or emotional support are unclear, but experts warn that it cannot adequately support people in crisis like a trained human therapist.
"The risk is that if someone is using AI tools as a replacement for therapy or other mental health treatment, these tools are unable to be hands-on with someone who is really in need of an interpersonal relationship," Cross said. "Nothing really compares to human to human contact and support."
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Google's Sundar Pichai just became a billionaire—but could have been up an extra billion if he hadn't sold stock
Google's Sundar Pichai just became a billionaire—but could have been up an extra billion if he hadn't sold stock

Yahoo

time19 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Google's Sundar Pichai just became a billionaire—but could have been up an extra billion if he hadn't sold stock

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has officially joined the billionaire ranks, reaching a net worth of $1.1 billion largely through long-term compensation and a 0.02% stake in the $2.3 trillion company. While far behind Big Tech founders in wealth, Pichai's stake has been boosted by Alphabet's AI-fueled rally—even as he regularly sells shares under prescheduled trading plans, demonstrating a disciplined and well-known approach amid booming investor enthusiasm. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has joined the glamorous ranks of the world's billionaires, after the tech giant's class A share price bubbled up 13% over the past month. Pichai's net worth has hit $1.1 billion, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index recorded, courtesy of significant cash reserves and the CEO's 0.02% stake in the company with a market cap of more than $2.3 trillion. Unlike many of his Magnificent Seven peers, the Big Tech boss didn't found the company which has afforded him a 10-figure fortune. Compared with contemporaries like Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, or Tesla cofounder Elon Musk, Pichai's net worth is considerably lower given the fact he hasn't held a significant sum of shares since the early days of the company. Pichai's path to billionaire status has also been altered by the fact that he has sold shares in Alphabet which were awarded to him as part of his compensation package. For example, Pichai has sold a reported $650 million in Google-owner Alphabet stock over the past decade he has served as CEO—sales that today would have amounted to more than $1 billion in gains, winning him a net worth of some $2.5 billion per Bloomberg's index. For example, in June Pichai offloaded some 33,000 class C Alphabet shares for a price of approximately $169 apiece, totaling some $5.5 million in sales. But at the time of writing, those shares sit at a little over $193—which would have resulted in a value of more than $6.4 million. Google declined to comment. Advance planning But the CEOs of the world's largest companies are not playing the highs and lows of their company's share prices the way retail investors or Wall Street analysts may be. Many of Pichai's recent sales have been pursuant to Rule 10b5-1, which allows stock sales to be set up in advance by officers of publicly listed companies to avoid any accusations of insider trading. The rule has a number of stipulations, chief among them that a formula (not a person) determines the number, price, and date of the trade. A third party who cannot be influenced by the client must also be employed to conduct the sales. Pichai's sales on July 16 and June 4 of this year were both pursuant to 10b5-1, for example, as were sales made in previous years. This tactic will be of no surprise to Wall Street watchers. Fortune reported last summer that Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, for example, was offloading $14 million in stock on a near-daily basis, all pursuant to the same regulation. At the time, James Reda, managing director at Chicago-based consultancy Gallagher's HR and compensation practice, said moves for such executives make absolute sense: 'Ultimately, if you don't sell the stock you're gonna have to be like Elon Musk and some others that are putting stock up for collateral and getting these humongous loans. 'That just makes everybody more leveraged, why do that? Peel off a little stock on a regular basis and sell it.' The AI billionaires While Alphabet beat market expectations this week with its second quarter results, the majority of the rally behind the company at the moment comes from (no surprise) AI. Pichai isn't alone in thanking artificial intelligence for his good fortune. Last year the world's richest, from Musk and Zuckerberg to Oracle's Larry Ellison, added $585 billion to their fortunes largely thanks to the technology. On the company's earnings call Wednesday, the phrase 'AI' was used some 90 times. Alphabet reported revenues up 14% year over year to $96.4 billion, confirming Google Search, YouTube ads, Google subscriptions, and Google Cloud all delivered double-digit growth in Q2. A key concern for investors—particularly when looking at the market leaders in the AI race—will be whether companies can keep the talent to stay ahead of competitors. OpenAI, for example, has lost some of its staff to Meta's newly created AI unit. Pichai shrugged off such fears, telling investors on the call: 'We've gone through these moments before. We have obviously always deeply invested in talent, including in AI talent, for well over a decade now. I think we have an extraordinary both breadth and depth of the talent. 'In my experience, the top people look for a combination of—they want to really be at the frontier driving progress, and so the mission and how state-of-the-art your work is matters, so that's super important to them, access to compute resources, and access to your peers, working with the best people in the industry,' he added. 'I think we are pretty competitive on all those fronts.' This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data

5 Brilliant Growth Stocks to Buy Now and Hold for the Long Term
5 Brilliant Growth Stocks to Buy Now and Hold for the Long Term

Yahoo

time24 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

5 Brilliant Growth Stocks to Buy Now and Hold for the Long Term

Key Points Alphabet's AI strengths are being overlooked by the market. Amazon is using AI behind the scenes to become more efficient and drive growth. Meta Platforms and Pinterest are both using AI to drive advertising revenue growth. 10 stocks we like better than Alphabet › The artificial intelligence (AI) boom continues to drive growth and transform industries, but it's not just infrastructure players that are benefiting. Some of the best long-term opportunities are with companies deploying AI behind the scenes. Let's look at five brilliant AI-related growth stocks to buy and hold for the long haul. 1. Alphabet Investors continue to underestimate Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL), as they worry about AI disrupting its search business. But that view ignores what Google, its major component, actually does. This is a company built around content discovery -- not just traditional search -- and it's integrating AI into tools billions of people already use. And no other company is better at monetizing that content discovery through advertising than Alphabet. Its search data and digital ad network just cannot be matched. The Chrome browser and Android operating system give it unmatched distribution; Chrome is the default search engine on the majority of devices, giving it a huge built-in advantage. And a recent Oppenheimer survey revealed that users found Google Search's new AI Mode more helpful than not only traditional search but also ChatGPT. YouTube remains the world's largest ad-supported streaming platform. Google Cloud, Alphabet's cloud computing unit, is growing fast, helping companies build, train, and run AI models. Google is also becoming a chip leader. Its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are helping to power AI development, while its Willow quantum computing chip may be a future growth driver. And Alphabet subsidiary Waymo is expanding its robotaxi footprint. Taken altogether, Alphabet is one of the most innovative companies in the world, and one you want to own. 2. Amazon Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is using AI to become even more dominant. While it's best known for e-commerce and cloud computing, the company's behind-the-scenes work is where the real long-term value is being built. On the logistics and warehouse side, Amazon is using AI to determine where to store inventory, create more efficient delivery routes, and even navigate hard-to-find drop-off points. Its robotics division just passed 1 million deployed units, and some of its AI-powered robots can detect damaged products or even repair themselves. Amazon also created a new AI model called DeepFleet that coordinates its entire robot fleet to help boost throughput. The company's largest and fastest-growing business is Amazon Web Services (AWS). It helps customers build AI models and apps with tools like Bedrock and SageMaker, and then has them run those programs on its infrastructure. It's also developed custom AI chips that give it a cost advantage, and continues to invest in AI infrastructure to meet rising demand. Overall, Amazon is well positioned for an increasingly AI-focused world. 3. Meta Platforms Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) owns one of the world's most valuable digital advertising businesses, and AI is making it better. Its Llama models are driving more engagement across Facebook and Instagram, boosting user time spent on the apps. That gives Meta more ad inventory to sell. It's also using AI to help advertisers create better campaigns and target potential customers, which is increasing demand and leading to higher ad prices. But Meta's growth story is just getting started. The company is only now beginning to serve ads on WhatsApp, which has over 3 billion users. It's also rolling out ads on Threads, its new social platform, which had 350 million users at the end of the first quarter. With two massive platforms still early in their monetization cycles and AI continuing to drive performance, Meta looks like a long-term winner in the AI-powered digital economy. But the company is not stopping there. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is spending aggressively to poach top AI talent. This is all part of an effort to -- as Zuckerberg says -- "deliver personal superintelligence to everyone in the world." If it's successful, Meta could become the top AI stock to own. 4. Pinterest Meta isn't the only social media company using AI to drive growth. Pinterest (NYSE: PINS) has been using AI to evolve into a more shoppable and advertiser-friendly platform. The company has built a multimodal model that understands both images and text, allowing for better personalization and powering new features like visual search. Users can now click on items within images and shop for similar products directly, making Pinterest far more transactional and more attractive to both users and advertisers. It's also working to simplify advertising on its platform. Performance+, its new AI-powered ad product, automates everything from campaign creation to targeting and bidding. That makes the platform easier to use for advertisers and helps them save time and drive better outcomes. Pinterest has a global user base that has historically been undermonetized, especially compared to those of its peers. But with AI improving engagement, search, and ad performance, the company has a big opportunity to start to close that gap. If it can continue executing on its vision of merging content discovery with commerce, Pinterest could be a breakout growth story over the long term. 5. Toast Toast (NYSE: TOST) has become one of the leading software platforms for the restaurant industry. What started as simply a point-of-sale system is now a full-stack software platform that helps restaurants streamline operations and drive more sales. Its newest tools -- like the AI-powered intelligence engine ToastIQ and the agent and assistant Sous Chef -- are designed to help restaurants make better decisions in real time. Meanwhile, the company said a restaurant piloting its new menu upsell tool saw average order volume increase by 6%, while another restaurant group testing its new AI-powered advertising tool saw more than a "10x return on ad spend" with Google Ads. Toast directly benefits from its customers' success, earning a cut of sales through payment processing. That creates a strong alignment between the business and its customers, so the company continues to innovate to help drive restaurant sales. Toast added 6,000 new locations in Q1 and now serves more than 140,000 restaurants. It's also expanding into chains like Applebee's and Topgolf, as well as adjacent verticals like hotel food service and retailers. It's slowly expanding overseas as well. Toast's pace of innovation and expanding customer base give it a long runway of growth. This makes it a growth stock you want to own for the long term. Should you invest $1,000 in Alphabet right now? Before you buy stock in Alphabet, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Alphabet wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $636,774!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,064,942!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,040% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 182% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of July 21, 2025 Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet, Pinterest, and Toast. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Pinterest, and Toast. The Motley Fool recommends Topgolf Callaway Brands. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. 5 Brilliant Growth Stocks to Buy Now and Hold for the Long Term was originally published by The Motley Fool

Elon Musk's 'master plan': Is Tesla an EV maker or AI play?
Elon Musk's 'master plan': Is Tesla an EV maker or AI play?

Yahoo

time34 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Elon Musk's 'master plan': Is Tesla an EV maker or AI play?

Investors are wrestling with Tesla's (TSLA) uncertain future after the company missed on second quarter earnings and shifts away from being a pure electric vehicle (EV) maker while leaning into artificial intelligence (AI) and robotaxis. Gradient Investments analyst Lisa Schreiber and Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Allie Canal join Opening Bid host Brian Sozzi to discuss Tesla's delayed tech rollouts, slower EV sales, and challenges ahead without clear profit timelines. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Opening Bid here. Sign in to access your portfolio

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store