The AI girlfriend thing is real

Hey Friends!

Happy holiday week! Whether you're firing up the grill for Canada Day, gearing up for the Fourth of July, or, like Nat, you’re claiming both, this is the stretch of summer where the days go loose and the schedules go out the window. We are here for it. The late bedtimes, the pool chaos, the second popsicle nobody officially approved.

But it's also the stretch where the screens can take over, and the phones in our kids' hands start doing things we don't always see. This week handed us two stories that go right to the heart of that. One that rattled us a little, and one that, surprisingly, left us feeling more hopeful than we've felt in a while.

So before we all disappear into a weekend of burgers and lake water, here's your Rundown.

Teen boys are "dating" AI girlfriends and most of us have no idea it's happening

There's a growing wave of teen and tween boys forming what they consider real romantic relationships with AI chatbots and the numbers are not small. A UK survey of 1,000 boys aged 12 to 16 found that 85% have talked to a chatbot, 20% know a peer who is actively "dating" one, and over a quarter said they prefer the attention of a bot to a real human relationship. Most strikingly, 58% said an AI relationship is easier because they can control the conversation. Yikes.

One relationship researcher reported that AI "validates, affirms, never tires, never pushes back," and that for an adolescent boy still figuring out who he is, that kind of frictionless attention can feel like real intimacy. The trouble is that all the uncomfortable parts of young relationships like the rejection, the awkwardness, and the working-it-out are exactly the parts that build a person.

And it's not like these boys are all going hunting for this stuff. Content creator Nate Webb recently pulled back the curtain on something a lot of parents have no clue about. Teen boys are being actively served sexually charged ads for AI chatbot girlfriends. The apps are being pushed on them, and they're packaged to hook a teenage boy's attention in exactly the way you'd fear.

Parents often have no concept this is happening because they're in a completely different algorithmic bubble than their kids and even two kids in the same house can be in different bubbles. You can't moderate what you can't see, and these apps are being marketed straight into feeds we never scroll.

So what do you do? Don’t panic. Get curious before you get worried. Ask your son if he's seen these AI companion apps, whether his friends use them, what he thinks the appeal is. You'll learn more from one honest, non-judgmental chat than anything else at the start. That said, the settings matter too, because a lot of these companion apps live one tap away inside platforms kids already have. Knowing how to spot them, restrict app downloads, and lock down age-appropriate content at the device level is exactly the kind of thing we walk through step by step in the Screen Sense Guide. And if AI is something you’re worried about specifically, our Parent’s Guide to AI is for you.

Teens want better conversations about social media

A new national study surveyed just over a thousand U.S. high schoolers and the headline finding is one every tired parent needs to hear. Most teens aren't getting meaningful social media education, and what they do get tends to focus on everything that can go wrong rather than how to actually navigate these spaces.

This study reported that parents came out as both the most common and the most trusted source of guidance, with 76% of teens saying they learned about social media from a parent and 69% naming parents as the most helpful source. We out-rank teachers, peers, everyone. The catch is what we tend to cover. Nearly three-quarters of teens had been taught about risks like cyberbullying and privacy, but fewer than six in ten said anyone had talked to them about social media's uses or benefits.

The study found that teens who learned about both the risks and the benefits felt more confident and empowered online than those who only got fear-based messaging. And there's a counterintuitive twist for those of us who default to lockdown mode: teens who reported more rules and restrictions actually reported lower confidence and more overwhelm navigating online spaces. So in general, teens aren't asking for fewer conversations about social media, they're asking for better ones.

So what do you do with that? The researchers laid out a few moves that we love because they take the pressure off being perfect. Start the conversations early, like before age 13. Treat it as learning together rather than lecturing down; let your kid show you their world, then offer perspective. Talk about the good and the risky, not just the scary. And maybe the most freeing one of all: prioritize trust over perfection. Meaning, you don't need every answer, you just need to be the person your kid feels safe being honest with.

We keep thinking about that last story. That our kids aren't asking us to back off, they're asking us to do this with them. After a week of headlines that could make anyone want to throw every phone in the lake, that one felt like a big deep breath. We're not failing at this. We're just being asked to trade the lectures for actual conversations. We can do that.

So this long weekend, let the to-do list go a little. The most important parenting tool you've got isn't a parental control… it's the porch, the car ride, the late-night kitchen chat where your kid finally tells you something real. None of that requires you to have it all figured out. It just requires you to be there, and to keep the door open.

Light a sparkler, stay up too late, let them win at cards. We'll see you back here next week.

—Cat & Nat