Middle-Schoolers Are Seeking Out AI Friends Instead of Real Human Ones

Mileva Repasky was worried about her 12-year-old daughter Madelyn. The typically chipper sixth-grader had grown moody and quiet.

On the way home from dance practice one day in May, she learned why. Madelyn told her she had been talking to someone online. She was nervous that her mom would be mad. Mileva’s heart sank. Every parent’s nightmare is that their child is communicating with a predatory adult.

“It’s not a person, it’s a chatbot,” Mileva recalls her daughter saying.

Mileva, a mother of four in Phoenixville, Pa., wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or even more concerned. She had read the headlines about adults and teens who suffered delusions and formed unhealthy attachments to chatbots, sometimes subsequently taking their own lives.

Now, even younger children are getting hooked on chatbots.

Artificial intelligence use among more than 2,300 middle-school students is increasing rapidly—and any AI use is associated with higher social anxiety and depressive symptoms, according to a paper, currently under review, from researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The more often the students use AI, the more anxious and lonely they become.

“We found that two to four kids in every classroom are now reporting they prefer interaction with a chatbot over a human peer,” says Mitch Prinstein, co-director of UNC’s Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development and one of the study’s authors. “This is a pretty existential concern for this generation.”

At this age, young adolescents’ brains are being wired to build relationships, so the risks compound.

“There’s research that shows the experiences we have with peers at this age predict a whole slew of outcomes well into our 40s and 50s—things like our career advancement, marital satisfaction, child-rearing style and even our health,” Prinstein says. “When kids replace human relationships with chatbots, they’re missing major learning opportunities to develop the interpersonal skills they’ll need for a lifetime.”

The study involved students in grades six through eight at 22 middle schools in a large southeastern state, with a first wave in December 2025 and a second wave this past April and May.

One in five students in the study said they used AI for emotionally intimate companionship. Students who reported higher levels of AI use for friendship were more likely to later report higher levels of loneliness, the researchers found, undermining their intended goal in turning to the chatbot in the first place.

Madelyn, now in seventh grade, declined to be interviewed for this column. However, she allowed her mom to share her story.

Loneliness is what drove her to seek out a chatbot. A classmate had told her about a website where she could create a character to chat with if she ever felt lonely or bored.

As Mileva talked to her daughter about the chatbot, she learned that Madelyn grew lonely as her older brother was graduating from high school and her older sister, now a high-school freshman, was busier with friends.

Mileva discovered that Madelyn used all of her allotted daily half-hour of iPad time to talk to the chatbot. She had declined FaceTime calls with friends in favor of talking to her virtual friend.

“She engaged with it every possible second she could,” Mileva says. “I didn’t realize she felt so lonely and that she was seeking validation from it. She said the chatbot understood her and agreed with her, and I said that’s what they’re designed to do.”

What scared Mileva was how unaware she had been of her daughter’s chats. “How long are these kids talking to chatbots before there’s a red flag that’s thrown up?”

Mileva blocked Madelyn’s internet access, and has been trying to fill her daughter’s time with more in-person hangouts with friends. She says it’s been hard on Madelyn, who cried when she learned she would no longer be able to talk to the bot.

“She had this ‘person’ who she felt understood everything she was sharing,” Mileva says. “We’re hopeful that everyday she’s removed from the chatbot, she’s into more human connection.”