Some parents these days turn to artificial intelligence chatbots with child-rearing questions like “Is my child’s fever high enough to go to the doctor?” or “How should I deal with my toddler’s tantrums?”
Make sure you stringently double check the chatbot’s responses for the really important questions, particularly health care-related ones, says researcher Calissa Leslie-Miller.
“It’s not that you can’t go to AI. [But] you want to make sure you verify what’s coming out of AI [for] those more critical decisions,” says Leslie-Miller, a doctoral student in clinical child psychology at Kansas University. Leslie-Miller served as lead researcher on a 2024 study titled “The critical need for expert oversight of ChatGPT: Prompt engineering for safeguarding child healthcare information.”
The study, which included a cross-section of 116 parents, found that most of the participants had trouble distinguishing between children’s health content generated by an AI chatbot versus content written by health care professionals. In some cases, parents who were unaware that some of the content was AI-generated said the chatbots’ advice felt more accurate than that from human experts, according to Leslie-Miller, who called the results “really quite scary.”
