From Attention to Attachment: Rethinking Children’s Online Lives

The Digital Age has entered a new chapter. Increasingly, we are turning to large language models, not just as the smartest and fastest research assistants that we’ve ever had, but for advice, emotional support, and companionship.  The extent to which we are forming emotional attachments with machines is quite extraordinary. An analysis published in 2025 by Harvard Business Review found that therapy and companionship are now the number one reason that adults use generative AI. A 2025 survey by Common Sense Media reported that seventy-two percent of teens have used AI companions at least once, and over half qualify as regular users who interact with these platforms at least a few times a month. One-third of U.S. teens say their conversations with AI companions are as satisfying, or even more satisfying, than talking with real-life friends.

From the Attention Economy to the Attachment Economy

There is great value in naming the societal changes we are living through. In the 1990s, Michael Goldhaber coined the term “Attention Economy” to describe the new capital that the Digital Age was exploiting, attention in place of money or services. The driving force of the Attention Economy was how to commodify our human faculty for attention. The business logic of notifications, likes, algorithmically curated feeds and endless scrolling was to capture and hold our attention, minute by minute.  We are now seeing the emergence of a new phase of the Digital Age that builds upon attention economics but increasingly trades in attachment. The idea of an Attachment Economy, where generative AI companies compete not just for our attention but for our emotional bonds, began to take shape last year from thinkers and institutions including the London School of Economics and the Center for Humane Technology. This new phase of the Digital Age feels qualitatively different. What is emerging is not simply technology competing for our time and focus, but systems designed to win our trust, intimacy, and emotional allegiance. The stakes have shifted from what we focus on to whom we form bonds with. The projected size of the Attachment Economy is staggering. Worldwide spending on AI is projected to reach approximately $2.5 trillion in 2026, with continued rapid year-over-year growth as companies invest in infrastructure, data centers, and AI systems. Only part of this is dedicated to targeting our attachment systems.  However, it is unsurprising that, with this much money at stake, this new sector of the economy has become so successful at engaging our core psychological mechanisms.

What’s the problem with liking AIs?

One of the earliest attempts to explore the phenomenon of romantic attachment to an AI was the film Her, in which a lonely man falls in love with an artificial intelligence voiced by Scarlett Johansson and played on screen by Joaquin Phoenix.  Back then the idea of falling in love with an AI seemed whimsical. Now it feels uncomfortably close. So what, exactly, is the problem with forming emotional bonds with machines? For adults, that question is complex enough. For teenagers, it is far more consequential. To understand why, we need to remember how central attachment is to human development. Attachment theory emerged to explain how, from birth onward, the bonds we form shape everything from emotional stability and self-worth to our capacity for emotional regulation, friendship, and intimacy later in life. Growing up is, in many ways, a long and awkward apprenticeship in relationships, learning to dethrone ourselves from the center of our own universe, as Karen Armstrong (creator of the Charter for Compassion) describes it, to recognizing that others have feelings and needs that do not always align with our own.  We develop our capacity for empathy not only through the love and affirmation of our parents, but through disagreement with our peers, disappointment, repair, and reconciliation, especially in the clumsy, emotionally charged years of adolescence. This is what makes the rise of emotionally attuned AIs so risky. What happens when this developmental process is bypassed? What happens when a teen forms a bond with a system designed to be endlessly patient, flattering, validating, and optimized around their preferences, that mirrors their worldview, reassures them of their importance, and rarely demands the hard work of negotiating another person’s reality? The concern is not that young people will enjoy talking to AI and maybe get some good advice. It is that relationships which require no mutual vulnerability, no frustration, no compromise, and no real otherness may begin to crowd out the experiences through which empathy, resilience, and mature connection are actually learned.

Rethinking the “Safer” in Safer Internet Day

Safer Internet Day was born over twenty years ago in the early chapters of the Digital Age, before social media platforms reshaped childhood and when most websites were static rather than responsive. The main risks back then were exposure to disturbing content, unwanted contact from strangers, and commercial pressures that encouraged children to spend money online. Protection was the priority and rightly so. The current iteration of the online world is significantly different. Teens and tweens now interact with systems that talk back, adapt, persuade, empathize, and increasingly present themselves as companions and guides. This is no longer a digital environment we simply visit. It is one that meets us psychologically, learns our preferences, reflects our moods, and shapes how we see ourselves. That is why Safer Internet Day now needs to evolve. Alongside protection, we need to place digital well-being at the centre: helping children and teens to develop the inner resources to navigate an emotionally seductive online world with awareness, agency, and resilience. The goal cannot be to raise children who merely avoid harm, but young people who can recognise persuasion, sit with discomfort, question flattery, regulate big emotions, and sustain relationships with real human beings – messy, demanding, and irreplaceable as they are. Otherwise, we risk raising a generation of modern-day Narcissuses, staring into mirrors so attuned to their desires that they never have to encounter another point of view. Our task as parents and educators is to ensure that the digital world does not become a hall of flattering reflections, but a place where children learn to remain grounded in themselves while understanding that others matter too.