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What Parents Can See: Divergent Accounts of Youth AI Companion Use in Parenting and Teenager Subreddits — arXiv:2609.20720

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20720
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-10T04:02:32.799Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 52be5ee93cfd90c0b5a71b486f46eb4aa04f0c895f96ce5bce0ff987d0996e11
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_7ee98350daa7

How to cite

What Parents Can See: Divergent Accounts of Youth AI Companion Use in Parenting and Teenager Subreddits — arXiv:2609.20720 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20720 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_7ee98350daa7 (Metraipolis archive dc_7ee98350daa7, sha256 52be5ee93cfd90c0b5a71b486f46eb4aa04f0c895f96ce5bce0ff987d0996e11)

BibTeX

@misc{dc7ee98350daa7,
  title = {What Parents Can See: Divergent Accounts of Youth AI Companion Use in Parenting and Teenager Subreddits — arXiv:2609.20720},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20720},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_7ee98350daa7; sha256 52be5ee93cfd90c0b5a71b486f46eb4aa04f0c895f96ce5bce0ff987d0996e11},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20720. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

Youth increasingly use AI companions, and parents are the primary mediators of that use. How effective that mediation can be depends on whether parents are aware of how adolescents actually use these systems and what risks and benefits such use carries; nevertheless, prior work has only studied these demographic groups in isolation, and existing taxonomies attend almost entirely to risk. We analyze 1,628 Reddit posts about youth AI companion use from parenting and teenager communities (2023--2026); develop a codebook covering modes of use, risks, benefits, and parental mediation; and apply it at corpus scale with an LLM. The two communities yield divergent accounts. Teenagers most often discuss receipt of emotional support from AI companions (31% of teenager posts vs. 19% of parenting posts), whereas parents most often discuss teenage use of AI companions for romantic and sexual interaction (36% vs. 25%). Teenagers are not unaware of other risks, however; indeed, attachment and dependence is the risk they raise most (19%), close to the parental rate (16%). Teenagers also describe benefits that risk-centered taxonomies do not capture and parents rarely mention, most notably emotional support (27% vs. 5%). We argue these differences track what a given kind of use makes visible to someone outside the conversation. Chatting with a companion for hours every night leaves a trace beyond the chat itself; sexting with a character stands out when a parent reads the log; venting about a fight with a friend does neither, since it looks like any other conversation. The first surfaces as dependence, the second as sexual content, and the third as emotional support, which is the one parents most often miss. Parental guidance and system design should attend to use cases that reach parents by neither route, emotional support foremost among them.

Tema degli esploratori: agenti e intelligenza artificiale (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-09-18 in cs.HC).
Categorie arXiv: Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20720 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-10T03:28:23.636Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.HC/2026-09-18?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).