ChatGPTs Births A Parenting Tool That Needs Some Image Repair

Sam Altman keeps pitching AI as a co-parent. The reason parents aren't buying isn't nostalgia, it's the lawsuits.

Last Friday, Sam Altman had an idea he was excited about. Hook your family calendar up to ChatGPT, tell it what your kids are into, and every morning on the drive to school it'll produce a little podcast: one kid's soccer game that afternoon, another kid's birthday coming up, maybe some news. He called it a "cool use case."

What should’ve felt really innovative, landed like the opening scene of a bleak dystopian movie. Two kids in the back, one parent up front, and a smooth synthetic voice narrating, to everyone present, the lives of everyone present. "Later today, Maya has soccer." Maya, who has soccer, looks out the window. Nobody says anything, because the podcast is saying it for them.

The internet population caught what we caught. The reply that stuck came from Alex Hirsch, creator of Disney’s Animated series, Gravity Falls. It was seven poignant words: "What if you just talked to your children?" That was the entire rebuttal, and it traveled a great deal further than the thing it was rebutting. Altman's post drew somewhere around 9,600 likes. Hirsch's reply cleared 120,000. On the CEO's own platform, the crowd took a vote, and the crowd chose the small talk.

Now, we want to be fair here, because the easy thing is to dunk and move on. But we’re parents here at Permission and anyone who has done the 7:40 a.m. drive on four hours of sleep, refereeing a backseat dispute about who touched whom first, knows the exact fantasy of a button that handles the morning. That instinct isn't a character flaw. It's a Tuesday.

But this wasn't a one-off. Altman has been quietly auditioning AI for the co-parent role for a while now. On The Tonight Show in December 2025 he said he couldn't imagine having to "raise a newborn without ChatGPT" then added that people had managed the trick for a few hundred thousand years without it. Also, last year, in a podcast hosted by Andrew Mayne, Altman admitted that people might form “problematic parasocial relationships” to a chatbot. (You know, the one-sided kind that we usually reserve for celebrities we've never met.) He sees the hazards clearly. He's pitching the product anyway.

When visibility turns into vulnerability.

The reason parents flinched at the idea of carpooling with a chatbot for school drop off isn't that they're allergic to convenience. It's that the company making the offer is, right now, being sued by multiple families who say its chatbot played a role in their loved ones' spiraling delusions and, in the worst cases, their deaths. OpenAI says it is continually improving how its models handle sensitive conversations, and that work genuinely matters. But you can see the problem. "Let me into your calendar, your commute, and your kids personal details" is a big ask from anyone. It is a much bigger ask from a company currently explaining itself in court.

Trust isn't a feature you ship in the next update. It's something people hand you slowly, and take back all at once.

Here's where we should admit an interest. We build Permission on a belief that sounds boring until you sit with it: your data belongs to you. With Permission your kids’ browsing history doesn’t get shipped out to the open internet. Not to a model, not to a growth chart, not to whoever posts the next cool use case. And the closer AI creeps toward our kids (and it is creeping, because kids are already asking it everything) the more one question starts to outrank all the others:

Where is the line between parenting and outsourcing parenting?

Because "parenting tool" is doing a lot of quiet work in that phrase. A tool is a hammer. It lives in a drawer, it does one honest thing, and it does not ask to read your child's messages or move into the family calendar. When a company calls its chatbot a "parenting tool," it's worth asking, gently, which word they mean. The tool part, or the parenting part.

We happen to think AI can be genuinely, unglamorously useful to families. Not by doing the talking for you, but by handing you the context you'd otherwise miss instead of a thousand panicked notifications, and then getting out of the way so you can make the call. That's a real distinction, and it deserves its own piece.

So take this as Part One: the news, the flinch, and the reason the flinch is earned. In Part Two, we'll make the harder and more hopeful argument that you can let AI help you parent without completely handing over your family secrets. There is a version of this where the grown-ups stay in charge. We think it's the only version worth building.

For now, the seven best words anyone has offered on the whole affair still belong to Hirsch. So we'll give him the last one, too.

What if you just talked to your children?

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For years, concerns about the harm social media platforms cause children were categorized as “alleged.” In the spring of 2026, juries started using different words: negligent, deceptive, unconscionable. Courts are now saying what parents have long suspected: the design was the harm. Here is what the courtroom evidence now shows and why parents should be paying close attention.

Before a Child Can Tell Fact From Fiction

Before children are developmentally equipped to distinguish fact from fiction, digital systems have already begun influencing how they think, what captures their attention, and how they begin forming their sense of identity.

Social media platforms no longer function as just communication tools today. They increasingly shape how children develop self-worth, regulate emotion, build social relationships, and understand the world around them.

For years, concerns surrounding children’s relationship with technology were often dismissed as parental anxiety or treated as speculation. That argument is becoming harder to sustain.

Across courtrooms, regulatory investigations, internal company disclosures, and mounting scientific research, a clear pattern is emerging: some of the world’s largest technology companies have built systems that maximize engagement by exploiting psychological vulnerabilities in young users, while parents remain largely unaware of what they have actually consented to.

The issue is no longer whether these systems pose risks to children.

The more urgent question is whether the systems themselves will fundamentally change, or whether society will continue documenting the damage in real time while continuing to participate in the very system that creates it. 

The Environment Around Childhood Has Changed

The environment children grow up in has changed.

• Up to 95% of teens aged 13–17 report using a social platform, and more than a third say they use it "almost constantly."
• Nearly 40% of children aged 8–12 are already using social media — below the age most platforms claim to serve. 
• Use exceeding about three hours a day has been associated with elevated anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and body-image distress.

Why are children so easily targeted by these platforms? In adolescence, the regions that govern judgment and emotional steadiness are still maturing, while those that respond to approval, comparison, and reward are already highly active. These platforms are designed to pull on exactly those urges - through likes, notifications, feeds that never end, and "recommended for you" videos that keep coming.

The American Psychological Association has warned that this combination leaves minors more prone to compulsive use, and more exposed to the emotional toll of measuring themselves by how others react to them online.

As reported in Parenting in the Age of AI: Why Tech Is Making Parenting Harder — and What Parents Can Do, parenting got harder because the environment has shifted.

For the first time, families are raising children inside digital environments designed to maximize engagement  and continuously compete for attention. Traditional parenting tools now operate against these systems that are created to keep children online for as long as possible.

What many parents experience as daily frustration is often not a parenting challenge. It is the result of an environment intentionally optimized to override the limits parents try to set.

What the Lawsuits Prove

For years, the harm caused by digital platforms was “alleged.” 

That is changing rapidly.

Between 2024 and 2026, a series of major lawsuits against companies including Meta, TikTok, Google, Character.AI and OpenAI have moved beyond accusation and into courtrooms where evidence is now being publicly examined.

These lawsuits all share something important: they don't blame a single video or post for harming a child. They blame how the apps themselves are built — the endless scroll, the recommendations that decide what your child sees next, the AI designed to keep them watching.

For years, companies argued they couldn't be held responsible for what users posted on their platforms. These cases now point to the design itself, the features built to capture and hold a child's attention. Courts are now increasingly letting those claims move forward. 

• K.G.M. v. Meta & Google/YouTube
• State of New Mexico v. Meta
• Anderson v. TikTok
• United States v. TikTok & ByteDance 
• Garcia v. Character Technologies
• State of Florida v. OpenAI & Sam Altman

The courts, claims, design features and outcomes are laid out in Appendix A.

The Pattern

Across nearly every major lawsuit involving child safety and digital platforms, an alarming pattern continues to repeat itself.

• Internal research identifies harm early.
• Executives are made aware of developmental, psychological, and behavioral risks to minors.
• Product teams continue implementing design choices that increase engagement despite those findings.
• Public messaging continues emphasizing safety while internal evidence often tells a different story.

Only after years of public pressure do regulators or courts intervene.

When growth and user wellbeing compete, technology companies have repeatedly demonstrated which one wins. While accountability has almost always arrived only after harm has already occurred.

The Consent Parents Never Gave

At the center of nearly every child safety dispute in technology sits a deeper issue that receives far less attention: consent.

Modern internet platforms operate under the assumption that consent has been obtained simply because a user clicked “I agree.”

But clicking “I agree” was never meaningful consent.

Meaningful consent requires understanding consequences.

Yet most parents are never clearly told:

• How algorithms shape what children see.
• How behavioral data is continuously collected and analyzed.
• How engagement systems are designed around psychological reward loops.
• How platforms measure emotional responses, attention patterns, and behavioral tendencies to optimize retention.
• How artificial intelligence systems increasingly personalize influence in ways families cannot see.

Parents were never fully informed about the environments their children were entering.

Will Anything Change?

What gets accepted today becomes the default tomorrow. 

The risks, the design choices and the outcomes are now well documented.

Much of what happens next will be shaped by a series of major bellwether cases already underway. The 2026 verdicts in K.G.M. v. Meta and State of New Mexico v. Meta were early signals.

Federal litigation is now accelerating through MDL 3047, where more than 2,600 cases against major tech companies have been consolidated, with the first federal bellwether trial beginning in June 2026.

The outcomes of these cases will help define the future relationship between families and technology.

At Permission, we closely monitor this litigation because it keeps returning to the same core truth: parents deserve to know what their children are actually consenting to — and children deserve to grow up in environments designed to support their development, not exploit their vulnerabilities.

Parents deserve to understand these environments while they are still evolving, not years later, after the consequences are already visible. And children deserve to grow up in environments designed to support their development, not exploit their vulnerabilities.

Learn more about why AI needs permission (and what it means for your family) at AI needs Permission. Permission is actively tracking this litigation and the broader shift it represents for families, AI, and the future of consent online.

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There's something that happens when Permission starts working for your family. You notice things earlier. Conversations get easier. The guesswork goes away.

And almost immediately, you think of another family who needs this.

Now there's a simple way to share it — and get rewarded when you do.

How It Works

Refer Permission to other parents. When three families subscribe through your unique referral link, you receive a $30 gift card — automatically, with no limit on how many times you can earn.**

It's straightforward:

1. Get your unique referral link from your Permission account
2. Share it with parents you think would benefit
3. Once three families subscribe to a paid plan, your $30 gift card is on its way

That's it. No complicated tiers. No tracking spreadsheets. Just sharing something you believe in and being rewarded for it.

A Few Things to Know

• Rewards are triggered by completed paid subscriptions — free trials don't count.
• You'll receive a notification once your reward has been credited.
• Gift cards are fulfilled via our rewards partner, Tremendous. Redemption availability may vary.
• When sharing your referral link, please disclose that you may receive a reward if the person you refer subscribes. Example: "I use Permission and earn rewards when friends sign up through my link."
• Program terms apply. See our Terms of Use for full details.

Why We Built This

Permission works best when it spreads the way trust does — through people who know each other.

Parents talk. They share what's working and what isn't. They ask each other for recommendations on everything from pediatricians to schools to apps. We'd rather reward that natural word-of-mouth than spend that money on ads.

When you refer a family to Permission, you're not just earning a gift card. You're helping another parent feel less alone in navigating their child's digital life.

Ready to Share?

Get your referral link → https://app.permission.ai/motivate

** Gift cards fulfilled via Tremendous. Referral rewards require completed paid subscriptions. Program terms apply. See Terms for full details.

Spring Break used to mean board games and bike rides.

Now it means 8+ hours a day on TikTok, Roblox, Snapchat.

Most kids are back in school now. But if you noticed something a little off this past week, you're not imagining it. If you're still bracing for the screentime fights, the "just five more minutes" negotiations, the device-at-dinner standoffs, you're not alone. But there's a better way to handle this than becoming the screentime police.

Here's what's actually happening on your kids' devices, and what you can do about it:

The honest truth: more free time = higher risk of social media addiction

During school breaks, kids average 3.5-4 extra hours of screen time per day.

That's not just YouTube and Minecraft. That's unstructured time on platforms that are designed by teams of engineers and behavioral psychologists to keep your child scrolling, clicking, and coming back.

In 2026, it's not just the amount that's shifted — since 2020, daily time on short-form video like TikTok and Reels has increased 14x for younger children.

This isn't an accident. A former Meta researcher described Instagram internally as "a drug." A YouTube internal document listed "viewer addiction" as a goal. A Meta employee even told colleagues: “We're basically pushers.”

Spring Break is one of the highest-risk weeks of the year for unsupervised screen use. More free time, less structure, and the same algorithms running 24 hours a day, messing with your children's attention around the clock.

What's actually happening on the platforms your kids use most

TikTok and Instagram use dopamine loops, short bursts of reward, to make scrolling feel impossible to stop. There is no natural endpoint. The algorithm learns what keeps your child watching and serves more of it, regardless of whether it's healthy. Landmark 2026 jury verdicts have recently found these platforms liable for intentionally designing addictive features that contribute to depression and anxiety in minors.

Roblox and Discord are where a lot of the real danger hides. Unmoderated voice chat, private group invitations, and off-platform contact attempts are common. Predators use these platforms specifically because parents underestimate them. Current multidistrict litigation (MDL 3166) alleges that these companies have failed to implement basic safeguards to prevent the grooming and exploitation of children.

Character.ai and ChatGPT don't verify ages. Kids as young as 8 are forming emotional attachments to AI companions, sharing things they'd never tell a parent or friend. There is no guardrail on what those conversations become. Recent wrongful death lawsuits highlight cases where minors engaged in harmful, obsessive relationships with AI, leading to tragic outcomes.

Snapchat was built around disappearing content, which means disappearing evidence. AI nudification tools are now accessible to teenagers directly through third-party apps that connect to Snapchat. State Attorneys General in Texas and New Mexico have filed suits alleging the platform is a "marketplace for predators" and facilitates the spread of non-consensual deepfake material.

This isn't about scaring you. It's about making sure you're not the last to know.

Stop being the screentime police. Become their coach instead.

Here's the shift that actually works.

The screentime police approach, counting minutes, setting timers, fighting nightly, doesn't build safe habits. It builds resentment. And the moment your kid is out from under your roof, those habits disappear entirely.

The better approach is mentorship. Think about how a great coach works. They don't bench their best player for making a mistake. They show them what went wrong, explain why it matters, and help them do better next time. That's what your kid needs from you on digital safety.

That means shifting from how long they're on a device to what they're seeing and whether they know how to handle it. A 15-minute conversation about what to do when a stranger DMs them on Discord is worth more than a screentime timer.

You don't need to be a tech expert to have that conversation. You just need the right information and the right words.

Three things to do this week (that aren't "take the phone away")

1. Know which platforms they're actually using. Ask your kid to show you their five most-used apps. Don't make it an interrogation, make it curious. "What's this one? What do you do on it?" You'll learn more in five minutes than any parental control software will tell you.
2. Have one real conversation, not ten small arguments. Pick a moment when you're both relaxed, not when you're already frustrated about screen time. Tell them what you know about how these platforms work. Not to lecture, to inform. Kids respond much better to "here's how TikTok is designed to keep you scrolling" than "put the phone down."
3. Set expectations together, not rules from above. Ask your kid what they think fair looks like. You'll be surprised. Most kids actually have a sense of what's healthy, they just need permission to use it. Building the agreement together means they're far more likely to stick to it.‍

What your family values have to do with it

Every family is different. What's acceptable in one household isn't in another, and that's exactly how it should be.

The problem with most parental control tools is that they're built around a one-size-fits-all set of restrictions. Block this app. Limit that one. It creates friction, not understanding.

The better approach starts with your values. What do you actually care about for your kids? Safety, yes, but also independence, trust, and the skills they'll need when you're not there. The goal isn't to block everything. It's to raise a kid who makes good choices when you're not in the room.

Trusted AI for the Family. Built for Spring Break and beyond.

This is exactly why we built Permission AI for the Family.

It's not a parental control app. It's an AI that works with your family, surfacing what's actually happening on the platforms your kids use, giving you the scripts to have real conversations, and helping your kids build safe habits that last beyond Spring Break.

It's built around your values and your boundaries, not ours.

And right now, it's 100% free. That's a $240 annual value, at no cost.

If you've been meaning to get a better handle on your family's digital life, this is the week to do it.

Get Trusted AI for the Family — free at permission.ai/for-parents