TikTok's comment section just changed

We did it! Nat's oldest is officially a university student, living in the coziest room possible. Everything we thought would make her feel more at home while she lived away from us was carefully collected and packed and finally unpacked in a space that isn't under our roof anymore 🤯.

And the whole thing hasn’t been sad in the way that we expected. It's sad in the quiet ways. The drive home that's so quiet. Setting the table for one less person. And at the exact same time, it's SO exciting. This is a kid who is ready, who worked hard to get here, who is about to have a whole life we only get to hear about secondhand and its going to be so so fun. Both things are true at once and if you're in this season too, whether it's your oldest heading to campus or your littlest starting kindergarten this week, we want to say however you're feeling about it, that feeling is allowed to be complicated.

It's also got us thinking a lot about connection and what our kids actually reach for when things feel hard, and who's on the other end of that. Which brings us to this week's Rundown.

When kids reach for AI instead of a person, it might be telling us something

A new study looked at nearly 40,000 students across four Ontario school boards, and the finding is one worth sitting with. About one in five kids said they'd turned to an AI chatbot for help with their feelings or advice about a relationship with a parent, a friend, or someone they were dating. That number was even higher among older teens.

The researchers were careful to say AI isn't the thing causing kids to struggle. Kids who leaned on a chatbot for emotional support were more likely to already be dealing with real distress, more loneliness, and a lower sense that they matter to the people around them. In other words, reaching for AI wasn't the problem. It was often a signal telling us they needed more human connection than they were getting.

With one of our own kids freshly launched into a dorm room hundreds of kilometres away, it's a good reminder that the antidote isn't a parental control setting, though those matter too. It's showing up. It's the text that just says "thinking of you," the phone call with no agenda, the being genuinely reachable when they're figuring out how to build a life without us in the next room. AI can answer a question at 2am. It can't replace being known by someone who loves you.

What you can do is ask your kid a real question and wait for the real answer. If they're the type to go quiet rather than come to you, that's worth noticing. It's often less about not wanting to talk to you and more about not knowing how to start. Sometimes just saying "I noticed you seem a little off lately, no pressure to talk about it, but I'm here" opens more doors than a direct interrogation ever will.

TikTok is adding voice comments, polls, and multi-photo comments

TikTok will be rolling out a bunch of new comment features including voice comments up to a minute long, polls creators can run right in their own comment sections, and comments that can now include up to nine photos or a "Live Photo" burst of motion. It's TikTok borrowing tools from messaging apps, and the goal is more engagement. The longer people linger in comments, the longer they stay on the app.

For parents, the headline isn't that any one of these features is dangerous on its own. It's that the comment section, which a lot of us think of being less risky than DMs, just got a lot more like a messaging platform. Voice comments especially are worth knowing about since it's one more way kids can interact directly with strangers under a video. Also, it’s another way your child’s voice ends up online risking it being run through AI and used without their consent. TikTok says the feature is rolling out to users 18 and older globally, though enforcement of age gates on features like this has historically been inconsistent.

What you can do is use this as your nudge to actually open the app with your kid this week and look at what their comment sections look like. Talk about who's talking to them, what kind of comments they're getting and leaving. It's also a good moment to talk about AI and how using voice notes to comment on public posts puts them at risk of having their voices used without their consent. We also suggest double checking the content and privacy restrictions on their device, since platform-level settings change constantly but the controls on the phone itself don't move on you. We walk through exactly which settings actually matter in the Screen Sense Guide, if you want the shortcut.

Welp. This week is going to feel weird for lots of reasons. If you've got a kid who just left, or one who's about to, do something for you today. We see you. It's okay to be proud and a little wrecked about it in the same afternoon. It's okay to text them something silly just to hear back. And if your house suddenly feels too quiet, know that it gets less loud in your chest, even if it never quite goes back to normal.

For everyone still in the trenches of littler kids and backpacks and first-day photos, enjoy the chaos while it's loud. It goes fast in both directions.

—Cat & Nat