The thing an AI chatbot can't give your kid (and who can)
Part 2. It's almost never another diagnosis, another program, or a better app. Here's what the Harvard research points to.
If your young adult is pouring themselves into an AI chatbot at 1:00 AM or talking to no one at all, you’ve probably been told the problem is the AI. Or their autism diagnosis. Or their screen time and phone addiction.
Here’s my version of it:
When I was a teenager, I spent two years in a wilderness therapy program and a residential treatment center. I was supervised around the clock and evaluated every month on my behavior (literally a monthly “therapeutic report card”). There were professionals in the building at every hour of the day. And in all that time, I did not have one relationship with an adult that felt real or positive.
I was surrounded at any given time by 50 other teenage girls who were struggling, and with them I learned how to build positive relationships with my peers. But the only reason I learned to have a vulnerable relationship with other girls my age was that we were literally evaluated on it lol. So that part of the “troubled teen industry” experience was actually a net positive for me.
However, with the adults, i.e. the people I was supposed to go to for advice and support, I never really connected with any of them. My treatment environment didn’t foster that for a myriad of reasons, and out of the 25+ adults who were responsible for the 50 girls, zero of them actually knew me. Most of them hadn’t been in my shoes, so, naturally, I wasn’t going to be real with them or truly listen to them. I felt like the adults were building relationships with us, but they had absolutely no stake in our success.
It wasn’t until recently that I began to understand that this was the actual problem I had with treatment, and it wasn’t just a side detail. The setup I lived inside back in treatment, and the chatbot that a stuck young adult talks to now, are failing at the same job from opposite ends.
Treatment gave me oversight with no warmth. AI chatbots give young adults warmth with no stake. Neither one is someone who actually needs (let alone wants) us to become someone we’re proud of.
Which leaves parents the only question worth asking once you stop panicking about the chatbot:
“What actually gets a stuck young adult moving again?”
As I’ve said before, it’s almost never another diagnosis, another program, or a better app. It’s one real relationship.
And here’s the part I want to be precise about: this is not just any relationship.
It’s a relationship with someone who has something at stake in who they become.
So, because I know this is true in my personal story and in the stories of all the young adult clients we work with at Not Therapy, I wanted to see if I could find research to back it up.
What the research keeps saying (and it’s kind of relentless about it)
Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child has spent years on one question: Why do some young people go through serious hardship and come out functional, even strong, while others don’t?
Their answer, tbh, is kinda unglamorous. They found that the MOST common factor in kids who do well is having at least one stable, committed relationship with a supportive adult.
Hello Harvard, yooo??? I was kinda shocked that this was one of their primary findings. They call it the “active ingredient” in resilience. Not a nice lil supplement to the real treatment. The active ingredient itself.
Then they draw a line that should stop every anxious parent cold. Stress isn’t automatically harmful. With a supportive relationship in place, hard experiences become tolerable, even useful, the kind of stress a person grows from. Without that relationship, the same stress turns toxic and tips toward bad outcomes. The relationship is the hinge between adversity that builds someone and adversity that breaks them.
And there’s another finding in there I’ve been thinking about a lot, because it describes the young people we work with exactly. Some kids respond more intensely than others to everything, the bad and the good (*raises hand at the back of the class*…). Story of my life. These kids struggle more in cold environments and light up dramatically in warm ones. Which means the kid who looks like they’re doing the worst, the one who feels everything too much, is often the one MOST LIKELY to turn around fastest once a real relationship finally shows up.
Let that sink in.
I have, in fact, found this to be true in my own life more times than I can count. Like when I got out of treatment, one of the first mentor-type relationships I developed was with another young woman, only 5 or 6 years older than me, who became my sponsor back when I was in a 12-step program. I could call her every day, and she would always answer. I’d call her to freak out about something that was actually probably not a big deal, and she’d help me level set. I’d call her just about navigating relationships with other college students while being sober, and she encouraged me to own it and be myself. She wasn’t paid to care about me, and she wasn’t my parent. She could just see a bigger life for me than I could see for myself at the time, and she stayed close enough, long enough, to hold me to it.
That one relationship changed the entire trajectory of where I was headed.
Another research-backed point, in case you're stuck on the idea that this important relationship needed to be present in childhood. It didn't. The brain is most malleable early on, but the same Harvard researchers make it clear that resilience continues to build throughout a person's life. In their words, it is never too late.
All of this doesn’t just apply to relationships with a mentor you meet and develop a relationship organically. It also applies if you’re sitting in a therapist’s waiting room right now. Decades of psychotherapy research keep landing in the same place. The single most reliable predictor of whether therapy helps is not the modality. It’s the strength of the relationship between the client and the person across from them. That bond predicts outcomes more than the technique does. It also matters more the longer and stronger it grows.
Just to say it again, we are not anti-therapy, and tbh a lot of our families have therapists we love and collab with. I’m pointing at what the therapy research itself keeps saying is doing the work. The thing doing the most work isn’t the credentials or the technique. It’s a person the young adult is bonded to, the one who is invested in them.
That’s the stake. That’s the ingredient the AI chatbot can’t fake, no matter how good it gets at sounding like it cares.
I’ll be honest about what we haven’t proved yet
Okay, real talk tho. I couldn’t find a randomized controlled trial showing that relationship-based coaching changes outcomes for stuck 18-28-year-olds. That study doesn’t exist.
Yet.
This is exactly why Not Therapy is building the proof. We track real outcomes, with real young adults, over time, so that a few years from now this isn’t just a belief we hold. It’s a result we can show you. We already have preliminary outcomes from our first 2.5 years of coaching young adults and supporting their families. But of course, in the first year or so, we were still ironing out how to define what we’re building, so we hadn’t started gathering quantitative baseline data yet. Dw, it’s coming.
In the meantime, what we have is the weight of the resilience and relationship literature pointing one direction, plus our own lived experience of having been the young people in question.
And from our experience, here’s the part your young adult can’t quite say out loud:
I’m not choosing talking to AI (or straight up silence) over you. It’s just the thing that’s there at 1:00 AM, and it’s the only thing that doesn’t make me feel pressure to act or think a certain way. It doesn’t make me feel like a disappointment. If I had a person like that in real life, I wouldn’t need this other one.
So what do you actually do with this as a parent
Understand what’s currently standing in for a relationship in your young adult’s life.
Then, take a look at how to actually help your young adult find a mentor. [LINK] Talked about it a few weeks ago.
What you’re helping them identify is one real relationship. Daily, low-stakes, consistent. Someone who asks how they are and cares about the answer. Someone with something actually at stake in who they become.
Here’s the difference. A real person can want a bigger life for your young adult than they want for themselves right now, and they can stay close enough, long enough, to hold them to it. An AI chatbot can’t want that, and even if it acts as if it does, it can’t actively reach out to and be there for them unless prompted. It has nothing at stake, and never will, no matter how good it gets at sounding like it does.
As always, comment or reach out to me with your thoughts on this as a parent. I appreciate the feedback, and I want to hear more from your perspective!
Talk next week.
💚 - Hayley