ChatGPT’s Teen Mode could deprive teenagers of a fundamental need | Robin Kirman

In August, OpenAI launched Teen Mode – a version of ChatGPT in which every user under 18 will automatically be enrolled – a year after a lawsuit alleged that ChatGPT had contributed to the suicide of a 16-year-old named Adam Raine.For years, the tech industry has contested any causal link between its products and the harms named in a wave of similar lawsuits, each alleging that the companies had not merely failed to protect children but had deliberately designed products to exploit them.Teen Mode is a tacit admission of culpability and it reveals what the industry now acknowledges – and doesn’t – about its products’ negative effects on young users’ mental health.As a psychoanalyst who works with young people, I’ve been observing, up close, the impact of social media and AI on their psychological development: how these tools influence not only behavior or mood at the day-to-day level, but identity formation and character.Teen mode may address some of the harms done to teenagers. A deeper one remains.At the surface level, Teen Mode seeks to prevent some of the more obvious harms to young users: it provides guardrails against destructive content, parent notifications for self-harm concerns, and a prohibition on presenting itself as a friend, claiming personal feelings, or suggesting it is anything other than a tool. That last restriction is a direct response to the Character.AI wrongful death case, in which a fourteen-year-old formed an intense attachment to a chatbot.There’s a growing awareness that it’s not only the content AI delivers but the way AI behaves that can cause harm, and that recognition seems to have driven the design of another feature: Study Mode, Teen Mode’s built-in learning tool.Recent research has confirmed what we already knew: that versions of AI that simply do the work for kids produce short-term grade improvements that collapse the moment the tool is removed, leaving students worse off than if they’d never used it. Study Mode is meant to yield gains that will hold.Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice-president for education, calls it a transformation from “a straightforward answer engine into a cognitive tutor”. Socratic in approach, the feature refuses to supply answers, requiring the student to do much of the thinking herself.Teen Mode offers something genuinely new: accessible to any student with a phone, it gently pushes back on easy answers and creates rather than forecloses the discomfort of not-yet-knowing. For a teenager without access to a tutor or a teacher with time for her questions, a Socratic companion can offer a real democratization of intellectually rigorous support – and one that surpasses, in scope of knowledge and availability, what any human source could provide.Where tutors eventually go home, and parents get frustrated, or simply have other things to do, Teen Mode is a tireless interlocutor – arguably, the only invention in human history capable of sustaining infinite patience with a teen.Which is to say: it is, structurally, the too-good parent. And that is precisely where the problem begins.Donald W Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who spent decades studying how a child’s sense of self emerges, argued that what a child needs from her environment is not perfection but sufficiency.The “good-enough” parent, his most famous concept, is good precisely because she is not always good: she is present enough to give the child a secure base, but limited enough – distracted, tired, occasionally wrong – that the child must repeatedly draw on her own resources and find herself capable. A too-good parent, if such a thing could exist, would spare the child that struggle entirely, and the sense of self it builds.Winnicott was writing about early childhood, but the argument extends into adolescence, when separating from other minds becomes the central task.Peter Blos, the psychoanalyst who mapped that terrain most carefully, described adolescence as the work of disengaging from the authority of the minds a teenager has depended on and discovering what, beneath all that, is actually hers. The teenager who is convinced her parents are idiots, her teachers are frauds, and every received opinion is suspect is doing the important work of clearing ground.What makes adolescence generative isn’t that teenagers get it right – it’s that they think they’re right – and that magnificent, insupportable conviction is what gives them the nerve to find out what they actually believe. The adolescent whose intellectual life is always accompanied, always guided, always met with a calibrated response, never gets to become her own authority.One could argue – and OpenAI’s designers probably would – that Teen Mode is a scaffold, not a crutch: that a teenager who learns to think in dialogue with a rigorous interlocutor will internalize that process and eventually need the tool less. But this assumes the incentive to let go ever arrives – unlikely, as the world moves rapidly toward more dependence on AI.And even if this were to happen, development is not clearly reversible in that way: what grows with a scaffold is not the same as what grows without one. Many tech executives seem to grasp this themselves, sending their own children to schools with the resources to enforce a mandate on unassisted work.For a teenager without those advantages, the default is Teen Mode. Or, worse, the version of AI without the Socratic guardrails.What those students stand to lose is more than cognitive skill: it’s a reliable sense of their own minds.We have already begun to recognize what constant connectivity does to the developing self in other domains. Jonathan Haidt’s synthesis of the data on smartphone use showed that the sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation among teenagers coincides with the incursion of technology into unstructured, unsupervised time – displacing the private space in which an identity takes shape.Sherry Turkle, who has spent decades studying teenagers and technology, found that many report not knowing what they think until they’ve posted it and seen how others respond.What I encounter in my office goes further: young people who lack a reliable internal compass, who struggle to know what they feel or want. That instability is not incidental to the youth mental health crisis; it is the condition underlying it. A person without an internal compass is an anxious one: dependent on confirmation, uncertain of her own perceptions, and easily destabilized.This is the deeper harm the industry – and the designers of Teen Mode – have not addressed. Teen Mode may ask you to think, but it is still holding your hand, still guiding, still keeping the dependency going, and in doing so, exacerbates the developmental harm at the root of the crisis.Ultimately, a stable sense of self requires moments of genuine trial, of being tested and surviving. The blank page, faced alone, is one such crucible: a place where we encounter ourselves, in doubt and even dread, and also in discovery and joy.Writing in the 1850s, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed: “To think for oneself is always a little uncomfortable, and that is why so few people do it.”Now we may be creating a generation for whom this challenge is rarely required. That loss, hard to measure and therefore likely to be ignored, is profound: it is only in passing through the discomfort Schopenhauer names – the strain of thinking by and for yourself – that a person comes to truly know she has a mind of her own. Robin Kirman is a psychoanalyst and novelist In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org