What to do when your teen replaces you with a chatbot
Many teens are forming intense relationships with chatbots, often confiding in them instead of their parents. This trend has raised concerns among mental health professionals about the potential negative impacts on adolescent well-being. Experts suggest that parents can help rebuild trust and communication with their children to counteract this dependency on AI.
- ▪Dr. Matthew Leahy treats adolescents who have developed strong attachments to chatbots.
- ▪Intense chatbot relationships can lead to isolation and reliance on AI for emotional support.
- ▪Recent surveys indicate that many young girls prefer AI for homework help and entertainment recommendations.
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Record
| Original publisher | Mashable |
| Canonical URL | https://mashable.com/life/teen-talks-to-chatbot-too-much |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T09:17:56.919Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T09:17:56.919Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | JYNAMp5-PHin |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Home > Life > Health & Wellness > Mental Health What to do when your teen replaces you with a chatbot A practical guide to getting your child back from a chatbot. By Rebecca Ruiz Rebecca Ruiz Senior Reporter Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca's experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes. Rebecca has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a masters degree from U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Mashable.
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