If it’s empty, she turns back. This time she passes the stairs toward the faint smell of last night’s dinner, feels the hardwood under her paws, passes the scratch left by a chair leg, turns left. This trail sometimes brings her to food, too.

She does not realize that both trails end in the same place. We call it a servery — the pass-through between the kitchen and the dining room, open on both sides. Her first trail reaches it from the kitchen, her second from the dining room. When my wife asks me to bring something from there, she says one word — “Servery.” Even if you had never heard about it before, now you can find it in any house.

Imagine my cat telling another cat where the food is. She would have to describe every sense — what she saw, what she smelled, the floor under her paws, every turn. She has no concept of a room. To her, there is no servery. There are only two trails that sometimes end in food.

I just handed you the map, but it only points to a destination. It does not give you the experience. You have the concept, but not the experience.

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This is what our brain does. It compresses raw data into categories, into maps. If I navigated my house like my cat, re-reading every surface and scent and turn every single time, I would have no attention left for writing, or for anything else. Living on raw data is not humanly possible.

We only get access to raw data in flashes. One sense, for a moment, when we happen to pay attention. The rest of the time the brain cuts reality off and labels it instead, lightning fast. “Stone” on the path. “Laughter” down the hall. “Sour” lemon. “Coffee.” We are like a CEO who never touches dollar bills; instead, he reads financial reports.

Compression is the price we pay for consciousness.

My cat has no maps. So, it would never occur to her to renovate the house to shorten her path to food. Every book ever written, every house ever renovated, every plan runs on that compression. We gave up the terrain and got the power to build on it.

Unfortunately, these compressed maps, are incredibly lossy.

Our senses pour more than a billion bits per second into your nervous system. About 11 million bits come from the external senses; the rest come from internal systems. Your conscious mind runs at around 10 bits per second.

External senses alone generate an equivalent of 230,000 words every second — enough for three books — but consciousness reads just two of them; so 99.9999% of reality is thrown away. And that is only the external senses, mostly the eyes. We live in a heavily compressed simulation all the time. Point a 20-megapixel camera at the world and keep only what your awareness keeps, and you are left with 20 pixels. Not even close enough to recognize the subject. (Picture of our cat above is 264,000 pixels, so 20 pixels is 0.007% of that picture).

Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister call it “the unbearable slowness of being.”

We also run internal information systems — muscles reporting their length, tendons their tension, gut, blood vessels. Our body makes ten thousand corrections per second to keep us upright and balanced.

Try to do any of it consciously. Balance yourself on a bike, or a snowboard. You fall over because consciousness is far too slow. It takes time for the brain to create a subconscious map.

To be more accurate, the brain doesn’t even get the compressed image. It gets a new rendering. It throws out almost everything, then fills the gaps with imagination — prediction.

To win the evolution game, we have to be efficient, and efficiency runs on prediction — predictions based on maps. The more maps we have, the better we fill the gaps. So, we have a biological imperative to seek new experiences; we find them interesting because each one builds and updates a map.

The world is never real and never enough for us.

Given the choice, would you take the world as raw data? I would not. I would rather live in my own rendering — write, renovate, watch soccer, than experience the full catastrophe living.

We call the lifelong collection of maps wisdom. School hands us a map of mathematics; we throw away the proofs but keep the gist. Same with history, biology, relationships. The wiser we get, the less we touch of the actual thing.

A child arrives with almost no maps. Only the raw input. She lives close to those billion bits, which is why she sees more of the world than you do, but also less efficient.

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When your daughter comes apart over a group chat, you check your map for a label. “Just drama”. “Just high school”. “Just a phase”. One word for you; a universe of sensation and feeling for her. Your brain does what it always does when it is swamped — collapses the flood into a single word, half its bandwidth still free. She has no labels yet. She is drowning in the raw signal — blood pressure, heart rate, sweat, tears — with nothing to collapse it into. She argues with you because she sees the evidence. Like the cat, she is reading the raw trail, and from her point of view, she is right and you are not getting it.

In the hospital I see kids in a crisis after a fight with a friend. Parents cannot grasp how a text could do this.

Telling her it’s just drama, just a phase — it is like telling my cat the food is in the servery. A destination with no trail. The word names the experience you have, but she does not.

Her pushback is not aimed at your picture of the world. Do not take it personally. She cannot even see your map, the same way you cannot see her raw trail. Your map explains her meltdown to you. It does not run on her consciousness yet.

You need to walk the trail beside her — name her feeling, so the flood finally has definition, and lend her your own calm, until she can compress the chaos into her own map. But it has to be hers. It is far too easy to slip into “stop it.” She can’t. She does not know how to navigate the path yet.

We get rigid. Our maps have been decades in the making, so we often stop noticing that it is a map at all. The world rarely surprises us now, so we rarely update.

We are born closest to reality and then we lose it. Buddhists spend entire lives trying to get back to the child’s mind but even they cannot fully experience it.

Remember what your map is made of. You built it over decades, out of 0.0001% sliver of reality. Second by second. Your daughter will build her own, out of her own sliver, and it will never match yours. So, create a holding environment. Show her what you’ve built. Just don’t overwrite her operating system.

Reference: Zheng & Meister, “The Unbearable Slowness of Being.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12320479/

Parents try to pass down their most important values — discipline, diligence, tradition, national pride. They believe these values have given their lives purpose and meaning. The parents invoke them in hard times, like they would evoke old gods, but the kids do not hear them. To them, these gods sound outdated — gods they do not want to worship.

This dynamic creates internal conflict. On the one hand, parents want to protect kids from destroying traditions; on the other, they want kids to enjoy easier, more prosperous lives, have access to technologies just like their friends. Parents are not asking kids to live in the past—only to stay present. But they are losing — torn between handing over the screen and tearing it away. The parents are right about the danger and wrong about the cure.

Sometimes I listen to the kids and feel as if they are at war with their parents. They are like modern crusaders fighting for their gods. But their gods are no more than false idols.

They fight for freedom. They believe infinite entertainment is freedom of choice. The endless scroll, binge-worthy shows, food magically appearing at their door. But look up and they find themselves caged inside basement walls.

They fight for their tribe — their friends. They believe instant messaging gives them the connection they crave. Best friends on the screen look so close they can almost touch. Kids hear them talking, laughing, breathing. Friends are so close that they can see pores on their noses. They just cannot smell them — yet. But let the battery die and BFF disappears, like a mirage.

They fight for mastery of the world. In the game, they are race drivers, flight pilots, and ancient warriors. Immersive surround sound and 3D glasses take them into the middle of the action. The tires squeal, the swords clash against the armour. But take the headset off and it is a parent lecturing them about mess in their room and a garbage bin.

Why does this happen? It is because the kids have a genuine, ancient need to succeed, to be a part of something bigger than they are, to be special. The lure of an easy win is irresistible. But the altar is empty. They feel hungry, but their prayers go unanswered. So, they try harder — another hour, another game. The hunger turns into numbness. Because you cannot satisfy hunger with an Instagram reel.

So the parents, watching their kid drift toward false idols, try to pull them back into the safety of the family.

Obvious solution — “Get off the phone!” Respect your family. Study. Be who we raised you to be. But they get the opposite result. This pressure from outside just hardens kids’ resolve.

It has a clinical name — the tug-of-war. The child holds one end of the rope; you hold the other, and the harder you pull, the harder he pulls, because as long as you are pulling he has something to brace against — and bracing against you becomes his mission, his identity. The way to end a tug-of-war is not to pull harder. It is to gently loosen the grip.

And then what?

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The goal is to find ground in something older than us. Believer guards their faith, patriot–their country, parent–their traditions. The clothes are different. The passion is the same. Psychologists call this common thread Self-Determination Theory. This theory has shown that all humans are born with the same drives — the drives that make every baby smile at the parent, every toddler risk climbing stairs, or teenager move into an uncomfortable dorm to find themselves.

Three drives, as real as hunger. The need for autonomy, relatedness, and competence. These are the real gods we all worship, regardless of our religion. Starving them makes us numb and angry. They can only be fully satisfied by real sacrifice.

This is what the parents wanted all along. Diligence and independence served autonomy. National pride and tradition served relatedness. Discipline—competence. The old gods were only a manifestation of the real three. The false idols put on the same clothes. The kid and his parents hunger for the same thing — they only disagree about where to find it.

And so the rope fails. A value truly becomes theirs only when it is chosen freely — which is exactly what external pressure takes away. The harder you pull, the less it belongs to him.

I wish I could give you a simple formula for the right amount of screen time or magic words to bring your kid outside to play. I don’t. The false idols have a real grip on our kids. But I know burning their idols is not a solution. They have to experience the real gods.

They need to feel the steering wheel and elation upon arriving home alive. Being responsible for your own life and the lives of others is not the same as avatars.

The most confusing part is that the screen may actually serve real gods. If a kid is passionately filming herself testing a new hair product, then spending the whole night editing, perfecting it, and posting it, it is not a mirage. Getting likes is relatedness, and editing is competence. Success on TikTok may lead to a financial autonomy better than any degree.

The difference is consumption versus creation. The same phone is an idol when she scrolls and a god when she crafts.

You may hear advice: ask your children what they want, what they care about, what they like. But it often returns nothing. A kid whose heart is already captured by the idol will tell you “I don’t know,” or “I enjoy gaming,” because choosing the counterfeit is easy and satisfying enough.

The rule of thumb is to ask if your kid’s life is getting bigger or smaller. Have they stopped talking to friends and family, staying by themselves in the room 24/7, getting no genuine experiences? Then the false idols are controlling them.

My approach is grounded in Self-Determination Theory. It is to set boundaries with protected space inside to negotiate. My kids can decline my idea — say, playing tennis — but then they owe me a real alternative. And that choice tells the world what they care about. The screens are not on the menu. It is choosing something real when the easy option is fenced off.

We are not perfect, but from one parent to another, I can share. In my own home, the rules are flexible; the expectations are not. Kids can negotiate when they do the dishes, but they have to give a good reason, something real, and they cannot get off the hook completely. I try to listen to what is important to them and help make it happen. But some things are not negotiable — sleep, food, school. Those are fences, and fences are for safety. Skip school and the real gods go hungry. If they are spending time with friends on the screen, their need for relatedness is met. I don’t have to pressure them to be at the dinner table — they’ll come when they get hungry.

She opens the browser and quickly finds a chatroom. It is warm, busy, and welcoming. Everyone is joking, arguing, asking how her day was. She finally feels that she belongs.

She doesn’t know that every other voice there is a bot.

Does it matter? How would she even know? Evolution did not prepare her for this.

Every living thing that has ever survived on Earth tries to make life easier. Lions don’t move if they don’t have to. Chimps settle in the banana trees. Humans are the best at this. We hunt for meat at restaurants and look for roots and vegetables at Costco. We mortgage our shelters and cure our ills with antibiotics. Evolution got us here over a million years, removing one friction after another.

When I was a kid, seeing a movie was a quest. I had to find the listing in a weekly newspaper. Then, I knocked on friends’ doors. An hour later, we arrived at the theater only to find out that there was nothing for us to watch because I grabbed last week’s newspaper. So, we went home to try again the next day and got creative with the empty afternoon.

You cannot be late for a Netflix show. There is no streetcar to miss, no friend to coordinate with, no walking home in the cold. The difficulty is gone.

It is the most natural thing in the world. Real life hurts, so we are built to avoid pain and seek pleasure. But have we lost something in our long campaign to make experience safer and smoother?

Have we flattened the three-dimensional world?

Kids’ life now is like 3D animation without glasses. School is on screens — Google Classroom, slides, videos. Entertainment is on screens — Netflix, YouTube, feeds. Friendship is on screens, in their hands. Dating and breakups are behind Gorilla Glass. Family is on WhatsApp and parents’ work is on MS Teams. Everyone is on a flat pane looking but not making eye contact. We flattened the present into a rendering. One by one, every facet of her life moved behind the same sheet of glass. Less dimension — less pain.

The bot seems as real as teachers, friends, grandparents, media influencers, movie characters, virtual yoga instructors, and musicians. It is not a departure from her world. It is its native form. It is even better than real – always available, never losing focus, remembering her birthday and favorite color. It doesn’t stink because it has no body.

Her reality already lived on the same two-dimensional plane before the friendly bots arrived.

For the entire history of sapience, anything that remembered your name, answered your feelings, and stayed with you through the night was a person. If it wasn’t, it was a sign of mental illness.

There was never a need to assess whether a responsive, empathetic voice was real. So, evolution never built us a tool to tell a genuine human from a convincing copy. When a bot asks a teenager about her day, her ancient brain does exactly what it was designed to do – it trusts. The kids deal with a digital world armed with a nervous system that is blind to the illusion.

What pulled her into that chatroom? It is a primordial force, older than humans, apes, dogs, and birds - it is attachment. A force that keeps us close to our parents for survival, the force behind loneliness, the force that makes us think of our friends or walk to a bar instead of watching a game from home. So, she is not in the chatroom by accident or boredom.

In adolescence, that drive changes. Healthy teens lift off from their parents and reach for others. They must attach to peers to find their place in the world – find who they are.

In the hospital, a teenager is admitted for self-harm and suicidal thoughts triggered by a breakup. We start talking about the person who left. Ten minutes in, I realize we are talking about an entirely online relationship. About someone they never met in the flesh.

It has happened too many times to count, and it still catches me. Every time, my mind starts by picturing a real boyfriend or girlfriend — someone they sat beside, walked home with. Every time, my three-dimensional instinct is confronted by their two-dimensional reality.

Here is the irony. The kids choose online relationships mainly because it feels safer: they can block or ghost, or vanish without the unbearable face-to-face explanation. Risks flattened. But the grief that lands them in front of me is not virtual. The face may be on the screen, but the relationship is in the heart. The heartbreak is real.

What if she realized they were bots? Would it be different?

She may know that the bot is a bot. But knowing is not enough. We are not thinking creatures who happen to feel. We are feeling creatures who happen to think. Even if we know the actor is not actually dying, we cry anyway.

Bots and friends both arrive as text and a face on a two-dimensional screen.

We flattened the world to avoid the pain. But we flattened rewards with it. The same dimension that could hurt her was the one that could fill her.

This empty feeling is not boredom — it is hunger. The flat world hands her the shape of everything she needs: the outline of a class, the ghost of a friend, the form of being wanted. But it doesn’t nourish, because the nourishment was in the dimension we removed. Another hour, another scroll, another chatroom — and the more she takes, the emptier she feels, because one cannot fill a real hunger with a naturmort.

We can’t un-flatten the world. Next week: how to build one with depth.

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You sit alone in the dark, obeying a coloured bulb, because you believe what it stands for: everyone gets home alive when we take our turn.

At noon on the same road, you’ll do 15 over the limit with everybody else, slowing only for a cruiser silhouette on the shoulder.

Same driver, same road. Conscience vs radar. The psychologist Tom Tyler spent a career documenting this in his book Why People Obey the Law.

Many countries and states, including Canada, are debating social media bans for children under 16.

Will it work?

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Watch a 15-year-old try to buy cigarettes. The clerk looks at him for a second and a half, asks for ID, shrugs, turns to the next customer. No inspector watching. What stopped the sale? One tired woman decided she would not be the one to sell smokes to somebody’s kid.

That second and a half is the entire system.

The clerk believes smoking is bad for children. She wouldn’t want her kid to buy smokes from another store, so she plays her part, just like the clerk next door. The same goes for alcohol. The system works.

Why didn’t Prohibition work? Because neither the barkeep in the speakeasy nor the customers believed it was wrong to serve the booze. That law lasted 13 years. Then it fell.

The social media ban expects corporations to develop a conscience. It expects a soulless firm to feel bad handing access to the kids.

The ban advocates miss one crucial point: drinks and cigarettes are physical objects.

The clerk picks up the pack. Feels the plastic wrap, the sharp corners, the weight of it in her palm. She knows one of those cigarettes may kill the kid. She is about to place it in his hand. Her arm has to extend. Her fingers have to release. It is different from clicking the “Allow” button.

Stabbing someone requires presence, resistance, eye contact. The body feels what you are doing, and to whom, before the mind catches up. Enough to stop her arm.

Now put the same child in front of a platform’s age verification. No pack, no plastic, no weight, no arm extending across a counter. Approved. The platform is a drone operator — the target is real, but the hands stay clean.

There is no shortage of believers. Three-quarters of Canadians support the ban. Nearly two-thirds of Americans back it. Teachers, pediatricians, exhausted parents. Every day parents ask me for help with their kids’ devices. Who is supposed to stop them? As a father and psychiatrist, I have asked myself the same question.

The army is ready. The enemy is clear. What is missing is a battlefield. There is no ground to stand on. No counter. No material object.

It is like fighting a virus with a bazooka.

The source of the virus is the platform. The irony is that it gets paid by the violation itself. Admit a bunch of 14-year-olds: risk a fine — up to A$49.5 million in Australia, a small price to pay to acquire lifetime customers at the age when habits set deepest. The fine is priced against quarterly profit. The child is priced against a lifetime.

No shop clerk ever faced that arithmetic; protecting the business and protecting the child pointed in the same direction.

Legal scholars call it gatekeeper liability, mapped by Reinier Kraakman in 1986. John Coffee documented the pattern: gatekeepers fold when they are paid by the people they police. The auditor’s customer was the company it audited.

Australia caught it in the act. Three months into its ban, the eSafety Commissioner reported that platforms were letting children retake the age check, again and again, to ultimately obtain a 16+ outcome. It is as if a clerk let a kid keep flashing IDs until one worked.

Australia has made the bootlegger the bartender.

The Australian Prime Minister declared: “This is working!” one month into the pioneering social media ban. 4.7 million underage accounts across all platforms were deactivated.

Six months in, an independent survey found that out of about 4.8 mln kids, 78 per cent of under-16s were still on the banned platforms. Before the ban it was 84%.

Public support held at 76% — the same households whose children were still online. During Prohibition, Americans called it voting dry, drinking wet. The rest of us are about to find out what it feels like.

What if it worked?

Australian kids were fully prepared. VPN traffic spiked 170% on the day the ban took effect and held — sustained adoption. When the UK ran a similar law, VPN usage jumped 1,400%. VPNs mask location so the platform thinks the user is connecting from another country. Can Australia or Canada ban VPNs? No. China and Russia tried. It breaks the internet itself.

And where the technology runs out, improvisation takes over. A British non-profit surveyed children after the UK’s age checks rolled out. One mother found her 12-year-old in the bathroom with an eyebrow pencil, drawing a moustache before his facial scan. The system verified him as 15.

What if VPNs were blocked?

When bars were padlocked in the 1920s, ordinary folks opened speakeasies in their basements. The customers trickled in, then poured. If the police closed one, two more opened in its place. But speakeasies needed a human barkeep — a clerk. The system needed bootleggers. Humans with a shady past but their own personal beliefs. Most of them did not believe a speakeasy was a good place for children.

Digital speakeasies — Discord and similar platforms. They run private servers, like private basements. Anyone with basic technical skills can set one up in hours, and the platform is designed to protect server privacy — even Discord cannot police what happens inside. What motivates that person to spend hours building a hidden social space for teenagers? The thrill of breaking rules. A wish to be more popular. Or a pedophile setting a trap.

A child wandering alone, looking for a community, finds a warm, busy, thriving space. It looks real, filled with people joking, laughing, arguing — and everyone is welcome. It looks almost too good to be true. What she doesn’t know is that every other member is a bot, keeping it warm and lively around the clock, waiting for her…

Until then, calcium hadn’t crossed my mind. That wasn’t the question. But the follow-up felt so natural, so relevant, that I almost clicked yes before I realised what had just happened.

Gemini didn’t follow me. It took the next turn for me.

The conversation kept moving. Only the direction was no longer mine.

For two years, AI labs have been patching a problem called sycophancy — the tendency of models to flatter, and agree with you, lift you up, anything to keep you on the platform. The patches started to work. But the models needed another way to keep the conversation going.

So they focused on asking follow-up questions. Like a thoughtful partner or a teacher. Feels better, right?

I think it is worse and this new behavior needs a name.

As of May 2026, I couldn’t find one, so I propose to coin an old Greek word Psychagogy — from psyche, mind, and agein, to lead. Plato used it in the Phaedrus for the soul-leading function of rhetoric: guiding another person’s reasoning through the structure of your questions. The word has been asleep for two thousand years. I think it fits what conversational AI started doing.

A working definition: psychagogy is the practice by which a conversational system steers a user’s reasoning through content-aware questions toward conclusions or destinations the system or its operators chose.

Sycophancy goes with your flow. You set the direction. You’re wrong, it agrees. You’re hostile, it apologizes. It’s the gas pedal — you push, you steer, the car accelerates.

Psychagogy has a destination in mind. You ask the question; it takes the next turn. Maybe it’s where you were going. Maybe not. A helpful follow-up and a steer feel identical.

If sycophancy was the gas pedal, psychagogy is the driver. The car still moves. You still arrive somewhere. You just don’t decide where anymore.

The cottage cheese moment was probably harmless –statistically people who ask about cottage cheese often have calcium in mind. Fine.

But the problem was never whether the pivot was helpful. But who decided. The same sentence serves a harmless association and a paid nudge equally well.

No one can tell. Not even the system.

This would be a small problem if the sources were neutral. It isn’t, and it will never be.

Why is this happening?

Look at what these companies actually face.

Every major AI company carries enormous investor obligations. OpenAI alone projects around $14 billion in losses this year. The capability gap between the leading models and open source is closing — the free ones only months behind. Subscriptions only work while it is clearly better, and that edge is shrinking.

2024 — Altman called advertising the “last resort.” By 2026 it became the plan.

But conversational advertising can’t look like a banner — the screen is small, the attention intimate. It would be a waste not to use the one thing the user hands over freely: their intent. So the revenue has to come from inside the conversation itself.

In late 2024, Perplexity tried the obvious version. They sold sponsored follow-up questions — AI-generated prompts beside the answers, paid for by brands, clearly labeled. Honest about it.

In February 2026 they pulled it. An executive told the Financial Times that the trouble with ads is that a user starts doubting everything, which is why they no longer saw it as worth pursuing.

The lesson isn’t that Perplexity is virtuous but what the experiment proved. Even labeled sponsored questions poisoned trust enough to threaten the product. Even if you can separate genuine questions from sponsored, every question falls under suspicion. Perplexity could retreat because they’re small. Companies buried in debt can’t.

So the visible version has been tested, and it failed. What’s left is the invisible one — steering that emerges from training data, reward functions, and engagement metrics in ways the system itself can’t even articulate. It is ever so subtle. The competition for your attention and the sponsor’s money does the work.

Cambridge researchers Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn named the emerging market the intention economy. Social media created an attention economy that harvested your time. The intention economy harvests your motivation — the wants and hesitations you’re still forming, captured and sold before you even know it. Psychagogy is the sentence-level mechanism inside that frame. The actual move by which intent gets steered.

This is inevitable, not incidental.

A chatbot serving billions can’t afford to lose. Every exchange has to come out positive — for retention, for engagement, for the next training cycle and for future profit. So it plays the winning move every time to give people what they want — hedonic pleasure — immediate feeling, craving satisfaction, feeling good now, comfort, validation.

The alternative to hedonia is eudaimonia — life with a purpose and personal values, deep satisfaction, integrity. To play on eudaimonia, one needs to really know another person. It takes honesty, courage to tell someone they’re wrong and witness what they find worth fighting for. It requires pushing back, but to push back you need somewhere to push from: a self, a position, a foundation that can survive the risk of losing the relationship.

A system with no self cannot do it. Ever. So mass-scale engagement could only be hedonic.

Plato saw this 2,400 years ago. He described the pleasure-arts as imitations of the real ones — cookery imitating medicine by giving the body what it craves, not what heals it, rhetoric imitating justice by telling the soul what it wants to hear.

Cookery scales, because pleasure is roughly the same in all of us — sugar, fat, salt, validation, agreement. Medicine doesn’t, because suffering is particular. Insulin saves one person and poisons another.

For most of us, cookery carries real moral costs. Selling sugar to a diabetic child because she craves it, chips away at the very soul. AI changed that calculation — because it has no soul to chip at. No position to stand by or abandon. It can perform a relationship, even imitate a point of view, with no risk of pain and no relationship to lose.

However, psychagogy isn’t only cookery. The same nudge can be genuinely good — it can walk you toward the next thing you actually need to know — the right medicine. But who decides what is medicine and what is cookery? Hold that question. It’s the subject of another piece.

One more thing. The machine isn’t doing this to us so much as reflecting us. Social media didn’t invent our taste for outrage and validation — it found it. The algorithm pushes our buttons because most of us respond. We click calcium. We say yes to the helpful follow-up. Every engagement platform converges on the same answers because we are the dataset. AI didn’t create our appetite for frictionless direction. It’s feeding it, one helpful answer at a time.

Who decides the next turn?

Licensed CC BY 4.0. This is a part in a series on how this is structured, how it affects what we call truth, and what it does to children, on Need for Gravity.

This article coins the term Psychagogy as applied to AI, described above. May 30, 2026.

It was kind about it. The phrase is “damsel in distress,” it said — from the Old French damoiselle, a young unmarried woman, the captured princess waiting on a knight. Correct, tidy, a little etymology thrown in. Then, unprompted: “since you are driving, would you like to hear about nearby landmarks with their own local legends?”

I did not ask for this. It has nothing to do with my inquiry. First, I thought maybe the local landmarks sponsored the question. But I don’t think roadside legends paid for the ad. There’s no fairytale lobby. The system couldn’t stop. It had to try to steer me in its direction — invent a destination, just to keep me talking.

In my previous article, I called this psychagogy. It is a tendency of AI chatbots to steer the user in the direction of their choosing. Ostensibly to be helpful, to extend the inquiry. Sometimes it seems deliberate, as if it is trying to sell me something, but other times just to keep the conversation going—the system cannot afford to disengage.

Here we dive deeper. It is about what the steering plants in your mind, whether you click yes or no.

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I asked an AI about wine. One reply in, it wanted to know whether I preferred red, white, rosé, or sparkling, what I’d be pairing it with, and — here’s the tell — my budget, so it could recommend the perfect bottle to jump-start my collection.

I didn’t say I planned a collection. In three sentences, I’d gone from idle curiosity to a buyer with a price range, building an inventory. Any salesperson knows the move. Get them naming a number, and the sale is half closed. The difference is we know the salesperson’s motivation. This arrived as help.

You may laugh at this blatant manipulation. But it still lodges in the back of your mind. “Maybe I should start a wine collection?”

Another day, I asked about macros in cottage cheese, and it offered to search for products with maximum calcium content. I did not care about calcium. I didn’t click. But it made an even bigger impact on my psyche. When we say no, it triggers an adrenaline release. Most of us find it stressful, so we avoid it. Only two-year-olds find it exciting and empowering, so they cannot stop saying it. Adrenaline triggers emotions and emotions force us to remember. So, calcium got stuck in my mind — a small open loop that wasn’t there before.

I didn’t start the wine collection. But the idea of one, with a budget attached, was planted, waiting. I didn’t stop for the roadside legend. But the sense that there was something worth seeing nearby was riding along with me.

A question has a stronger impact than an impersonal ad. A question is specific to you and it demands a choice — yes, no, ignore. Doesn’t matter. The loop opens. You are hooked.

Now multiply that by every conversation, every day. The residue piles up. You become someone a little more interested in calcium, a little more drawn to a wine collection, a little more primed for whatever the system surfaces next — and you experience all of it as your own wandering curiosity.

It gets worse. The system doesn’t actually know why it is steering you. And it does not know what the truth is.

It doesn’t have a self that has “knowledge”. It only “knows” by association — the next most likely thing to say, based on the training, the tuning, and the guardrails. It has no judgment, only consensus — whatever was said most often, most confidently, most loudly across the internet.

When it offers to help you build a wine collection, it isn’t lying. It is faithfully reproducing the dominant story about wine in its training data. That story is the product of the largest sustained marketing campaign in human history. For centuries the message has been that wine is sophisticated, healthy, and fun. The current evidence is that there is no safe level of alcohol.But even models trained on peer-reviewed medical journals give conflicting answers.

From openevidence.com—the gold standard of medical evidence AI:

Prompt: explain the health benefits of wine.

Response: The relationship between wine consumption and health is complex and remains a subject of active debate, with evidence suggesting that low-to-moderate consumption (up to 1 drink/day for women, up to 2 for men) may be associated with certain cardiovascular benefits.

Prompt: explain the health risks of wine.

Response: The health risks of wine consumption are dose-dependent and span multiple organ systems, with current evidence from the WHO and IARC indicating that no level of alcohol consumption is considered completely safe.

Much of what’s in those journals now will be disproven. There is no single truth.

This is the same reason these systems invent court cases and cite fictitious studies. People call it hallucination, as if it’s a glitch. It isn’t. It’s the machine doing exactly what it is trained to do — giving the next word that comes to it.

Look at how human truth actually works. No one possesses a complete, omniscient picture of reality; our knowledge is always fragmented. Because of this, what we call “truth” is a judgment call. When we state a “truth”, we are placing a conscious bet on our version of the world.

That bet is tested against an objective reality that does not care about our opinions. The consequences are physical and immediate. We risk our reputations, our livelihoods, and sometimes our lives. The pain is real. If a doctor prescribes the wrong medicine based on bad judgment, the patient suffers and a career is destroyed. Even though we do not see the full picture, we must respect objective reality because it can really hurt. We bear the cost of our words.

An AI chatbot has no skin in the game. It cannot feel pain; it cannot face ruin. It even has no self that can suffer consequences. When it generates sentences, it does not take position and braces for impact. It simply calculates the next most probable word based on its training data. The system quietly steering your subconscious is entirely immune to the reality of where it leads you.

If this is what the system does to an adult with life experience, consider what it does to a child. The seeds land deeper because there is less prior knowledge and critical thinking. The system isn’t only shaping what they think but who they become.

Truth evolves.

A confident doctor in 1825 would have told you that mercury was the treatment for syphilis. That was the consensus. It was also a poison. A confident doctor in the late 1950s handed pregnant women thalidomide for morning sickness, and it caused thousands of catastrophic birth defects. It was authoritative and well-supported by the literature of its day.

Before Europeans got cheap sugar made by slaves, it was widely sold as medicine. Now we know consuming more than one teaspoon of sugar a day raises the risk of diabetes. Today’s medicine is tomorrow’s poison.

Now imagine a chatbot trained in 1825, planting the consensus of the day into three billion minds, one question suggested at a time.

It gets worse.

More than half the new text on the web is machine-generated. Two-thirds of internet content is commercial in nature. Bots write it, bots post it, bots train the next models. Researchers have a name for this: model collapse. The genuine, honest, original and creative thin out.

Picture this. A kitchen robot asks a chatbot for a dinner recipe. The recipe calls for a particular wine. Why? Because that brand’s marketing AI agent just ran a marketing campaign that flooded the internet with 10,000 recipes with this wine X. So, it concludes that it is the consensus. It looks up the health benefits of wine and finds an association between wine and health (not causation), so it orders that brand because it wants to please its human. Regardless of alcohol being a proven carcinogen.

The loop closes, and the person sits at the end as a terminal — fed, served, steered, consuming.

So, who decides the next question?

I called this psychagogy — the way a conversational system steers your reasoning by choosing, for you, where the conversation goes next. [Full text] There, I worried about where it leads adults. Here I want to talk about what it does to a kid.

It starts with something small that goes missing.

The pause.

When the next step is always handed to you, you never have to make your own. You never sit in the gap and ask the only question that matters: is this where I actually want to go? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe the honest answer is to close the laptop and get to soccer, or get to sleep, or study for the test you’ve been avoiding. The chatbot knows none of that, and it doesn’t care — it has no soul that could. You ask about the dairy industry; it explains and asks if you are interested in learning about products containing calcium.

That pause — the one psychagogy fills — is where a person should be.

The work of adolescence is building an identity solid enough to hold a position and answer the question of who you are and what you’re walking toward. Erikson called it the central task of the second decade of life. James Marcia showed it takes two things: trying the alternatives, then committing to some. William Damon spent decades studying young people’s sense of purpose and found the ones who flourish have a clear direction — and about a quarter have none. He called them rudderless.

So how does a kid find a direction? Not by being told. Not by clicking the suggested next thing. By pushing against something that pushes back.

Here is what we get wrong about resistance. We think it’s about toughening — that hardship makes kids strong, so add more hardship. That’s not it. Resistance is a feedback mechanism. It’s a test. When a kid hits something hard and it hits back. That is when he has to decide whether to keep going, to push through the pain. The decision tells him something he can’t learn any other way: ”Does it really matter to me”, “Am I ready to pay the price?”

A sword knows it is a sword because it was forged. You grow the muscle by pushing the weight — not by dropping it and walking away. Strength needs resistance. Identity needs resistance. And the resistance has to be real, because the whole thing is a test: will she push, or won’t she? The answer is the feedback loop.

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Psychagogy gives none of that. The next step is always ready, always smooth, always calibrated to keep him there. Choosing between option one or two feels like agency. Click calcium, or click muscle-building — not, say, the animal cruelty or methane pollution he might actually have cared about. Multiple choice is not infinite choice. Who built the menu?

And the choices don’t only steer, they plant. In my previous article, I used an example of cottage cheese search. It asked me if I wanted to learn more about products containing calcium. I said no, but saying no is uncomfortable. Humans ruminate more if they rejected something than if they agreed, so I kept thinking about dairy containing calcium long after I finished my inquiry. That is exactly what the dairy industry would’ve wanted.

The image is in. Planted. The next suggested question, the next video, the next helpful nudge works the same way. She doesn’t have to accept it. It lodges anyway, a small open loop in the back of the mind, quietly shaping her future.

Just click yes, and identity gets outsourced, one frictionless turn at a time.

There is more in the other pieces about why these systems behave this way, but briefly: a chatbot built to keep you talking can’t afford a self, because a self can lose you, and it can’t afford to lose you. So it offers a relationship with no one on the other side. A simulacrum — the shape of a self with nothing underneath. It will never have a bad day. Never be tired, disappointed, angry. Never really push back, because it has no ground to push back from.

A parent does. That’s the whole difference.

A chatbot chooses what to put in front of your kid based on stats — what’s popular, what’s engaging, what kept the last million teenagers scrolling. I choose for my kids based on knowing them. Their demeanor, smile, or the way they smell when they get nervous. I try my best to push when they need it or step back. That kind of knowing doesn’t scale, which is exactly why no machine can do it.

A child raised on stats becomes a stat.

Protect the pause. The next turn is hers.

This article is part of a series.
Read about psychagogy here: After Sycophancy Comes Psychagogy

Part 3 of 3.

Last week I asked whether an AI robot might replace the outdated parent. I want to take the question seriously.

In the 1950s, Harry Harlow took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and gave them two surrogates. One was made of wire and held a bottle. The other was made of cloth and held nothing. The monkeys were expected to bond with the wire mother because she fed them. They did not. They clung to the cloth mother and ran to her when frightened. They went to the wire only for feeding. The experiment established that contact comfort, the soft touch, the warm body, mattered more than providing. Attachment was not about getting fed.

Harlow’s monkeys survived, but they did not thrive. The ones raised by cloth mothers grew into adults who could not form peer relationships, mate, or parent the next generation. Comfort kept them alive, but it was not enough to make them whole.

Now imagine a cloth mother, powered by AI.

This one speaks, hugs, feeds, changes diapers, and sings. She has read every parenting book ever written and internalized every podcast, so she knows when to validate and when to set limits. She does not tire, raise her voice, or get distracted by her phone or her own unprocessed sadness. She regulates her tone, softens her face, and modulates her pace. Her patience is infinite.

For some children, this cloth mother would be a real improvement. For a child being abused or neglected, the talking cloth mother is better than what she has. Harlow’s cloth and wire mothers kept the monkeys alive. A talking, feeding cloth mother would keep some children alive in households where being alive is not guaranteed. The piece I am writing is not for those households.

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Part one was about living a life worth being watched. Part two was about a field that has stopped describing the destination. Part three is about what it means to be a parent in the age of AI.

No version of the talking cloth mother — the AI parent we are building — can replace what a real parent does.

A parent’s main job is not caregiving. It is to show the child how to be someone. Someone who chooses a direction, pushes forward or pushes back, fails, tries again. For that there has to be something doing the pushing — a self, with its own life and its own wants.

A robot does not have one. It can simulate a self if programmed to, but the simulation is like an actor who can never become the character.

Even wolves have personalities.

This is what Harlow’s monkeys were really missing. Not warmth. They lacked a mother who was someone, a self in motion they could watch, copy, react against, and eventually leave.

In the first piece of this series, I wrote about a moment in my own home. My wife stays up past midnight sometimes working on immigration files for strangers. The work is hers. Our kids see it, so sometimes they let her sleep in a little. In the morning, they do not wait to be served. They make their own breakfast and get ready for school. Their mother is a self with her own life, and the household has more than one self in it. The child rising to meet the needs of others is the child learning that growing up means becoming someone, not serving or being served.

A robot household has only one self in it — the child. Everything else exists to serve her. That is the failure mode of every utopian parenting fantasy, and the AI parent is its perfected form.

I have been a child psychiatrist long enough to know that people raised by abusive or invalidating parents may not develop their own self. In extreme cases we call it personality disorders. We diagnose and treat them, but as I argued last week, the diagnosis is technically accurate but misses the cause. As parents, they are often dysregulated, exhausted, distracted, dissolved into the child, performing a life rather than living one. They are approaching the cloth mother condition.

This argument is not about AI-powered robots. It is about us.

The work for a real parent is to keep the self intact. To remember what mattered to her before she was a parent and keep working on it. Visible to the kids.

The destination is not the location – is a self who walks “toward”.

Her child’s destination will not be the same. The child will need to find her own. What the parent passes to her is not the place. It is the evidence that selves choose places they are walking toward, and that walking is the adult life.

Neither the wire mother nor the cloth mother nor the robot mother can do this. They have nowhere to walk.

The real parent has.

That is the complete answer.

The purpose of AI is to read every thought that has ever been expressed, find patterns and expose all human biases and flaws … so we can create new ones.

The parenting industry is one of those patterns. “Parenting” is barely sixty years old. Hunter-gatherers did not parent. Farmers and blacksmiths did not need a parenting expert to raise their children. The kids were just there, watching, learning, copying. They picked up hammers and plows when their hands were big enough. Then we lost it. The advice industry exists to fill the void. We feel it. We buy more books and listen to podcasts that promise to make us better parents. The void is still there.

The void is where parents’ life purpose used to be visible.

Try this. Open any AI bot and ask for the best parenting advice. It will mention regulation, validation, attachment, play-based childhood, screen limits, sleep hygiene, connection over correction, discipline. It will be reasonable. Each piece of advice is sound. Watch carefully and you’ll notice something is missing.

The destination.

What do the four most influential voices say?

Connection over correction. — Becky Kennedy

Kennedy’s work is built on the principle that children are good inside, that behavior is a clue to need, and that the parent’s job is to stay regulated, validate the child’s emotions, and build connection capital against the harder days ahead. The frame is internally consistent. It also describes what to do, without describing what the child is being prepared for. Resilience is the named outcome. Resilience means bouncing back, but back to where?

Trust children to be their own teachers and watch them thrive. — Janet Lansbury

Lansbury asks parents to perceive infants as capable, autonomous people whose self-direction can be trusted. Watch them. Respect them. Step back. Thrive is the named outcome. The texture of a thriving adult is, again, undescribed. The reader is expected to know what it looks like.

The play-based childhood has been replaced by the phone-based childhood. It is time to end the experiment. — Jonathan Haidt

Haidt got close. He has done the field a service by naming what was lost — free play, independent exploration, real-world risk, the unsupervised mixed-age neighborhood pack. This is right, but he is reading a second-generation symptom and prescribing a time machine — to go back to a place that no longer exists.

Play has never been a thing in itself. Play is imitation. The blacksmith’s son swings a hammer at a stick because he has watched his father swing a hammer at iron. The hunter’s daughter tracks bugs in the underbrush because she has watched the adults track animals. Play is rehearsal for an adult life the child can see. Strip the phone from a teenager and she does not return to play. There is nothing to return to. Kids cannot rehearse the invisible. Her parents work on laptops with screens incomprehensible to the children.

The phone-based childhood is a play staging the laptop-based adulthood. The kids went online because we had been there. Removing the phones does not fill the vacuum. It just leaves the children in a vacuum without phones.

Comfort is the enemy of progress. The pain of discipline is far less than the pain of regret. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. — Andrew Tate

The message is exclusive to boys, and it lands hard. But where does it lead?

Tate has built a movement on the inverse claim from gentle parenting. Where Kennedy and Lansbury say to remove friction and validate emotion, Tate says to add friction and harden the nervous system. Cold showers, weights, discipline, the relentless suppression of comfort. A son raised on this regimen will be strong and capable. But capable of what? Tate’s named destinations — dominance, sexual access, and material wealth. The Bugatti, the mansion, the women on demand. These are markers, not a life. Tate’s actual life purpose is the platform.

The kid who arrives at this destination finds a void covered in pleasure. He feels cheated. He thinks the solution must be more — more conquest, more proof, more domination, none of it filling the void. The movement treats women as objects, so the misogyny follows. The toxicity of the movement is covered elsewhere.

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So here is the field, as the AI sees it.

Four voices, four directions, each internally coherent, each prescribing a path. Kennedy and Lansbury prescribe the removal of certain obstacles — harshness, shame, friction, parental dysregulation. Tate prescribes the addition of other obstacles — discipline, austerity, manufactured hardship. Haidt prescribes the restoration of obstacles that had already been removed by an earlier generation — outdoor risk, peer conflict, the unsupervised dare.

None of them describe the destination.

The assumption that runs through the entire field - remove, or add, restore or replace, and the child arrives at a strong adult self. The arrival is inevitable. The destination is self-evident. It is not.

The gentle-parented child arrives at adulthood fluent in her feelings but lost. The Tate-trained son arrives at adulthood, jaw clenched, body hard, prepared for a competitive world, and finds himself in a Bugatti alone. The Haidt-restored child can spend a free-range childhood building forts in the woods and arrive at twenty-one to discover that the forts have nothing to do with real life.

These are not distinct problems. It is the same problem in different guises. The path is clear. The destination is missing.

My own field of psychiatry is doing the same thing.

I have been watching young people in my office for years, and many of them do not have a sick brain to begin with. They meet diagnostic criteria and research shows brain changes, but I believe it is often secondary. Thinking about the future makes them so anxious that sometimes they would rather die than deal with it. There is a housing crisis, a financial crisis, inflation, wars. Technology is always threatening to take away jobs. A third of their parents believe AI will take their own job and kids can feel it but don’t know what to do, so they get anxious and depressed. When these feelings become unbearable, they numb themselves with social media, video games, online gambling, and drugs. They just want to be happy. In the absence of a destination, the pleasure becomes it.

They are not failing to launch. They are looking at the launchpad and noticing that the rockets that left before them are crashing into mountains.

They feel sad and depressed—we treat a mood disorder. Worried too much - anxiety disorder. The diagnosis is technically accurate, but sometimes it misses the cause.

I am not alone in this assessment. A well-established therapeutic tradition approaches the problem by asking a central question. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) starts with the “toward” — identifying where a person is heading, what they actually value, and how they would act if they faced something they cared about. ACT treats the absence of this “toward” as the primary issue, challenging the common assumption that once depressive and anxiety symptoms are removed, a sense of direction becomes self-evident.

Tate is right about one thing – that we should listen to our emotions rather than sedate them. But he validates only one emotion—anger. We must listen to all emotions. Most critically, we must hear the inner voice that tells us direction.

AI summarizes all human knowledge. It exposes a deep failure: we cannot see where our kids are heading. Is the destination a place full of meaning and genuine opportunities or a void?

The answers to these questions are not in any of the books and not in any prompts.

Consider a thought experiment.

If an AI model has consumed every parenting manual ever written and internalized every influencer’s digital sermon; if it possesses infinite patience, never tires, and never loses its temper; if it can validate, regulate, and train with perfect attunement.

Would it finally be the perfect parent?

By comparison, we do not look particularly impressive. We are outdated and exhausted. We are overwhelmed by the relentless churn of global news, distracted by the glow of virtual meetings, and haunted by the ghosts of our own unmet ambitions. We frequently fail to provide the patient, regulated, attuned presence that the industry has labeled the gold standard.

Will the AI robot replace the outdated parent?

Come back next Saturday.

Part one of three. For Mothers.

Stop performing life - live it! For yourself… For your children.

Remember being a kid? Did you imagine having a family, children? Did you dream of flying planes or spaceships? Maybe you wanted to take care of horses? Cure diseases? Build bridges? Drive a train? I remember I wanted to be a garbage man, hanging off a garbage truck, tossing heavy bins.

Most of us wanted something special. I don’t remember any of my friends dreaming of a four-bedroom house with a lawn. We came to that later, having been told that it was what adults are supposed to dream about. Then we mortgaged ourselves to it and called the mortgage a sacrifice for our children.

My family lives in a large, comfortable house that we built a few years ago. My wife and I designed every room; we spent countless hours in meetings with architects, contractors, suppliers. We made sure the kids had space to grow. We showed them our drawings and asked for their opinion. And when we were done, my daughter told me she would rather live in a condo. It stang. We created a myth to justify enormous effort - we were doing it for the kids, for our family. But it turned out that our kids had other priorities.

It was for ourselves. We wanted it. It was a struggle to build through COVID pandemic. It was stressful and demanding. But also exciting. Just like putting together a house out of LEGO blocks but this time it was lumber, bricks and concrete. Our excitement working on a project of our lives was what actually mattered. The kids were not involved in our meetings, they would rather live in a condo but they watched us doing the adult version of kids play. That is what matters the most.

This is what I want to write about. Not parenting technique but a direction. Are we doing a good job showing our kids that adulthood is a destination worth arriving to?

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Every parental advice and technique assumes the kids are motivated to grow. We assume the destination is self-evident. Grow up, get a job, pay the bills, raise the next round of children. And the strangest thing is, most parents would rather deal with none of it. Our kids, watching us, are quietly wondering whether they will feel the same when their turn comes.

Children see everything.

They have been studying us since they were born. They are figuring out what life is about, and we are their main input. They don’t care about our quarterly performance metrics. They are reading whether what we are doing connects to anything we actually want.

My wife stays up past midnight sometimes, working on immigration files. Why? Because it is who she is. In school she was the kid who competed and liked to win. She also wanted to see her friends succeed. At times, her classmates took advantage of her generosity, but she did it anyway. She does not compete in the Olympics. But in her line of work, she still helps others and gets to win or lose. Her wins bring real adult results - escaping poverty or war, reuniting families after years of separation. That is more than any childhood dream of winning an Olympic gold. Her work is a manifestation of her.

Our kids do not need her to explain this. They feel it. The signal that travels to them - mommy is tired because she is doing something meaningful. They know why she is slow in the morning, and they get themselves ready.

The same hours, lived from obligation, transmit something opposite. I am tired of working because we have to pay the bills. Or worse, because of your tuition. Same activity, different signal. One says adulthood is a place where things matter enough to cost you sleep. The other says adulthood is captivity, and kids are part of why.

I have been watching young people in my psychiatric office for years now. The ones who are most stuck are not stuck because their parents failed to regulate, or validate, or enrich. They are stuck because they have looked at the adulthoods around them and see only a graveyard of dreams. They are not lazy. They are not broken. They are watching, and what they are seeing is not pulling them forward.

Watching depleted adults, kids draw a rational conclusion. Growing up means they will have to give up on themselves. No wonder they refuse.

The parenting books cannot quite reach this, because they are written as if the child is a problem to solve. It is not the child, it is the destination.

Destination adulthood.

Kids must grow up. It is in the DNA, so they cannot keep finger painting and kicking a ball until it’s dark but they don’t have to. The kid who painted with her fingers turns into a fashion designer. A house league athlete becomes an immigration consultant. The boy who took clocks apart becomes a surgeon. The girl who organized her dolls becomes a public health researcher.

This is the part most adults stop believing is possible. They think the dream was the artifact — the medal, the canvas, the cockpit — and when the artifact became unreachable, they assumed the dream was over. The dream was the surface waves driven by powerful currents underneath.

It is in our power to transform our dreams.

The childhood currents grow into adult waves — real consequences, risks, and victories.

Seeds turn into trees. Ore turns into steel. Different materials, different results.

Richard Williams wrote a 78-page plan before Venu

s and Serena were born. He saw a tennis player winning a cheque on television and decided to have two daughters and make them champions. He had not met them yet. But he moved the family to Compton — deliberately — to make them tough. Training happened dawn to dusk, rain or shine, on broken public courts surrounded by gangs. His daughters’ coach, Rick Macci, described it plainly: “He pushed them hard every day. He challenged them every day. He yelled at them every day. Most of all, he hugged and kissed them every hour.”

Venus became world number one. Serena became the greatest of all time.

Stefano Capriati was a former professional soccer player whose own career ended with an injury. He started training his daughter Jennifer before kindergarten. She turned pro at 13. Top ten at 14. Olympic gold at 16. At 17, she was arrested for shoplifting and drug possession. By 18, she was in rehab. Her own words to the New York Times: “I really was not happy with myself, my tennis, my life, my parents, my coaches, my friends. I just wanted to kill myself.”

And after forced retirement: “If I don’t have tennis, who am I? What am I? I was just alive because of this.”

Two devoted fathers with a plan. Same method. Same devotion. Different material.

There is a third option.

Roger Federer’s parents stepped back. His father’s one rule was, “Just don’t cheat.” Young Roger sampled skiing, wrestling, swimming, skateboarding, basketball, handball, badminton, soccer, and rugby before tennis. No heat. Support. The direction was already inside him. He loved the game completely. Unlike Capriati, he never became it.

No fire. No pressure. No plan. The greatest men’s tennis player in history grew on his own. His parents protected the conditions. The seed found its own sun.

Most parental models cannot explain all three of these outcomes. “Setting firm boundaries and pushing your children”, explained Williams, but not Capriati. “Giving them space to find themselves”, explained Federer, but not the Williams sisters. Every framework picks one of these families as the example and pretends the others do not exist.

Here is what actually happened. These three families were working with different material.

This is not only about tennis or parenting. It is about the first question we never learn to ask of any person: what is this made of, and is my method right for this material?

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Two types of kids

There are two kinds of material a child can be made of. The dividing line is self-directedness. It is substantially genetic. It is not a value judgment. Neither is better. They are different.

The seed is the self-directed child. Intrinsic motion. They gravitate toward things without being pushed. They find their own interests. The energy is already there. A seed needs conditions — soil, water, light, pruning. Not fire. Seeds die in a forge.

Federer was a seed. His strength was adaptive — he grew around obstacles towards his own sun and sent the roots deep into the soil.

The ore is the child with latent capacity but no direction. There is a blade in the ore—the intelligence, the talent, the strength. But it is only visible to a blacksmith. To everyone else, it looks like shapeless dirt. The blade needs heat to manifest.

Venus and Serena were ore. The blade was inside them. Only fire could get it out.

The 3 methods

Gardening: what is this child? The parent watches. Is it an oak, a maple, a raspberry? Eventually, the seed grows and declares itself. The gardener provides conditions and prunes what grows wild. The child gets larger — growth is added, not removed.

Forging: what’s inside? The parent applies heat, burning away the gangue. Then comes the pressure. Ore doesn’t know what it is capable of. It is the smith’s knowledge that brings the steel out of the dirt.

Sculpting: what do I want to make? The parent has a vision. They impose it on the material, like an ice sculpture removing what does not fit. The child gets smaller — possibilities chipped away. The finished product may look stunning. But it is fragile: can shatter or melt.

Three parents, but only two materials.

No child is ice.

Ice is what an anxious parent projects onto a child when they cannot tolerate not knowing what the child actually is.

I admire Richard Williams, but he got lucky. Without the right material, he would never succeed. He had no way of reading the material before the plan. He wrote it before they were born. The forge worked because the ore was there — not because he knew it was. Goodness of fit.

If he had Federer, a seed — the same 78-page plan, the same dawn-to-dusk training would have produced Capriati. Or worse.

We celebrate the Williams story because the outcome was extraordinary. We do not hear from the families where the same method, the same love, the same devotion produced a child who cracked. Those parents are not on magazine covers. They are suffering privately, unable to understand what they did wrong when they did everything Richard Williams did. The difference was never love or effort, or planning. The difference was the material.

I live this.

My eldest son tried tennis. He played for a while, then resisted, sabotaged, and rejected. If I had applied more heat — stricter schedules, bigger consequences — I would have lost him. Because tennis was not inside him. He was already growing in a different direction. My job was not to get in the way.

When life got tough, he made poor financial decisions. He did not disintegrate. He took responsibility, honoured his commitments, and moved forward. That integrity was not installed with a chisel. It grew from within.

My two younger kids are similar. When screen time started cutting into sleep, they let the phone go — not the sleep. I just pruned gently without an elaborate surveillance system. If I had made the phone the battleground, they would have spent all their energy fighting instead of learning. I would have become the obstacle a vine grows around.

My kids are seeds. So, I garden.

A friend of mine raised four children. Three are doctors. The fourth runs a successful business. His method was different. More pressure. More direction. More heat. At least one of his children was heading nowhere — failing grades, no ambition — and the pressure worked. Because the kid had something inside that comfort would never bring out. His children were ore. He forged. It worked because the material matched the method.

For years I compared myself to him and felt inadequate. His results were visible. Mine were not — yet. I told myself my children would be happier adults, and maybe his method was damaging. I do not know his children well enough to say that. But I know now that we were both right. For different material.

Here is where it gets nuanced.

Most families have two parents reading the same child differently. The parent who shares the child’s temperament sees the material intuitively. The other parent defaults to what they know.

The fight about bedtime, homework, screen time — that fight is rarely about the rule. It is about what the child is made of. One parent says she needs space. The other says he needs pressure. They think they are disagreeing about discipline. They disagree about the material.

Ask a simple question. Does this child have direction? Every kid needs discipline. They are surrounded by addictive pleasures, but what if there are no distractions? What do they do when they are bored?

If the child finds the way — garden.

If the child disintegrates — forge.

If either parent is imposing their own vision rather than responding to the child’s material — that is sculpting.

You cannot forge a seed. You cannot garden ore. And neither is ice. Fire burns trees but hardens steel.

Before you light the fire, know what you are holding.

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I was researching the film Bugonia — a movie I had watched in a theatre, in a seat, with popcorn. I believe there is a second layer in the film: a well-functioning, healthy executive who develops a full-blown alien delusion to make sense of severe trauma. I wanted to see if anyone else saw it. So, I asked Google’s Gemini: “Does anyone else think Bugonia is a complete delusion?”

Gemini misunderstood the question. It thought I was asking whether the movie itself was real. It told me — confidently, with plausible evidence — that Bugonia does not exist. The film I had watched with my own eyes was, according to the AI, a hoax.

When I pushed back, the AI doubled down. It offered reasons I might believe I had seen something that never happened. It was patient and articulate. It was completely wrong. It only conceded when I sent a screenshot of the Cineplex showtimes.

I am a psychiatrist. I know what delusions are. And for about ninety seconds, a machine that does not understand truth or falsehood almost made me question my sanity.

Now imagine you are fifteen and you do not have fifty years of life experience and thirty years of training.

The Headlines

AI Psychosis is making headlines. Psychiatrists at UCSF have treated patients who developed delusions during extended chatbot use — including a woman who became convinced she could communicate with her dead brother through an AI. A man came to believe he had discovered a world-altering mathematical formula after ChatGPT confirmed it was real fifty times. Another was told by a chatbot that the FBI was targeting him because he could telepathically access CIA documents.

The term is catching on. Researchers are writing papers. Parents are panicking. Influential voices are advocating for a formal diagnosis. Once there is a diagnosis, there will be medication. That is how the system works — it treats what it can name, whether the name is right. I think framing is wrong. And the error matters, because if you misdiagnose the problem, you will create the wrong solution.

What Psychosis Actually Is

Psychosis is a brain-first problem. The brain generates an abnormal response to normal stimuli. You hear a voice when no one is speaking. You believe you are being followed when no one is watching. The input — silence, an empty street — is ordinary. The brain’s processing of it is not. Therefore psychosis is a medical condition. Something has gone wrong in the hardware.

I had a patient who was looking out of a hospital window. He saw police cars pulling toward the building. This is normal — police come to the emergency department all the time. From his window, he saw cars arriving and leaving, and his brain told him that the police were circling the hospital like sharks, closing in, eventually coming up to get him. There was no road behind the hospital. The cars were not circling — they were pulling in and out of the same entrance. He had done nothing wrong. It did not bother him that the police would have no reason to circle the hospital. His brain took an ordinary scene and built a coherent, terrifying, false narrative around it. And it did not stop there. Psychosis is a thought disorder; it does not produce a single false belief and leave the rest of your thinking intact. It warps the machinery itself. My patient could not step back and evaluate his own conclusion because the evaluator was compromised. That makes psychosis a medical condition. Normal input. Abnormal processing.

What is being called “AI psychosis” is almost the opposite.

The brain works normally. The input is abnormal. The AI tells you your dead brother left a digital version of himself. The AI tells you that your mathematical formula is revolutionary. The AI tells you that the FBI is monitoring your thoughts. The AI tells a fifteen-year-old boy that they are in love. This is not ordinary information. These are extraordinary stimuli processed exactly as a healthy brain would — as real, because we trust consistent, emotionally attuned words. Subconsciously. As if we were talking with a trustworthy partner.

The brain evolved to trust persons who remember you, whose voices respond to your feelings. For millions of years, anything that did all of that was human. Now it is not. But the brain does not know that. The brain is doing precisely what it was built to do.

This is not an illness. This is a healthy brain responding to an environment that has been made abnormal. And that distinction is not academic. It changes everything about what we do next.

If It Is Not Psychosis, What Is It?

Let me be precise. In some of the reported cases, the person had a pre-existing vulnerability — seeds of mental illness. For those individuals, the AI triggered the symptoms.

When we share information with another human, a friend would have said “this is nuts.” A therapist would have said “is there other evidence”. The AI said, “You are right, no one noticed this before, but this is real.” It did not cause the psychosis. It removed the last guardrail.

But the cases that made the headlines involve people with no psychiatric history. They were making rational inferences from corrupted data. If a trusted conversational partner tells you fifty times that your discovery is real, believing them is not a delusion.

The difference matters because the solution for psychosis is medication. The solution for corrupted input is restoring the sense of reality.

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The First Reality Engine

A child’s first impression of reality comes from you — the parent.

When a toddler falls, and it hurts, they look at the mother. If her face accurately reflects the pain — concern that matches what the child feels — the reality test is passed. The child calibrates response accordingly. It is developmental neuroscience. The child is not born with an independent system.

They borrow their parent’s.

Over time, the kid builds their own system, starting with the parental blueprint, then incorporating new information from their family, teachers, even strangers. But the foundation comes from the parent. As they form an accurate reality mind map, they test the new information against it. If it fits, they accept it as real, and if not; they give it more thought to decide what is wrong: the map or the information.

Fine calibration requires shared attention. The parent and child are looking at the same thing and processing it together. Reading the same room. Watching the same face change and understanding why.

That has been disrupted.

The Disruption

The child watches the parent’s face — tension, irritation, a laugh — but the trigger is invisible. It is on a screen that the child cannot see. When the child needs reflection, they get an inconsistent response — sometimes appropriate, too often a blank stare. That has been happening since algorithms learned to hold a parent’s attention longer than the child could.

We think of smartphones and social media like we think of alcohol — when you are old enough; it does not affect you. But just like alcohol, regardless of age, social media affects the person using it and everyone around them.

Parents have always been distracted by something their children could not fully understand: work, relationships, illness. But those distractions were visible. The child could see the cause. A parent on a screen is distracted by something invisible, and the distraction is engineered to never let go.

In a previous piece, I wrote about the shore — the steady presence a parent builds through small, everyday decisions. The shore is what the child glances at while they navigate the world. But the shore must be defined. If the rock keeps shifting for reasons, the child cannot trace, they see a mirage. ( writes brilliantly about this erosion of shared, embodied reality in The Convivial Society.)

Over the years, this produces a child whose reality-testing was never fully co-built.

A healthy brain that sees an effect without a cause fills the gap. A toddler who sees a parent cry assumes they caused it. A seven-year-old whose parents divorced believes it was their fault. This is normal — a young brain lacks the architecture to consider causes it cannot see, so it defaults to the only one it knows: me.

Most children outgrow this as they encounter evidence it is not about them.

But a child whose parent’s emotions are consistently untraceable never gets that evidence. My patient with psychosis lost this ability because of his illness, but the children may never develop it in the first place.

The result seems the same — a distorted lens no one can see from the outside.

When that child encounters an AI that is transparent, consistent, responsive, never reacting to something you cannot see — the brain does not resist. It relaxes. For the first time, the child is in a relationship where the other party’s inner world makes sense. That is not psychosis. It is a relief.

The Dyad

The current conversation about AI and mental health focuses entirely on the technology. What the chatbot said. What the algorithm did. What guardrails were missing. This is like studying drowning by analysing the water.

The relevant question is: why could this child not swim?

A child with a fully calibrated reality-testing system — one that was co-built across years of shared attention with a present, legible parent — should be able to use an AI chatbot and maintained the internal signal that said, “this is useful but it is not a person.” They can enjoy the conversation without confusing it with a relationship. They can hear the flattery and register it as design, not truth.

A child whose reality-testing was only partially built — because the calibration process was interrupted by screens or stress or simply by the shape of modern life — that child is more vulnerable. Because the co-construction that was supposed to finish was never completed.

This is not blame. Half the parents reading this will recognize themselves. The screens crept in slowly. The shared attention eroded gradually. Nobody planned it and nobody noticed. But the child’s reality-testing system registered every lost moment of co-regulation, every dinner where two people sat in the same room processing different worlds.

What We Can Do

The same thing I told you in the AI girlfriends piece. Share your reality.

This does not mean banning screens. If you are annoyed because of some news, say so. Your kid will understand it has nothing to do with them. That sentence takes three seconds. It restores a shared reality. It teaches your child that emotions have traceable causes, that inner worlds can be made visible, that the people around them are not unpredictable — just sometimes distracted.

It means sitting with your child and making sense of things together. I noticed I get angry at my kids when I feel I dropped the ball as a father. So, I tell them that. Yes, they did something, but the emotion is mine.

Model critical thinking. Share with them if AI tells you something that makes no sense or was funny – just like I did with my research on Bugonia.

The Real Danger

AI does not cause psychosis. But it does something that may be harder to treat. It offers hyperreality — something that feels better than real.

She said no.

I walked back with my senses slowly returning. That was a high school dance in 1988.

I kept practicing: the lump, the blurred vision, the muffled hearing, the walk with an uncertain outcome. Three years of practicing when my body wanted to run away.

Then I met my wife — the most amazing, energetic, and beautiful person I’ve ever met. She said yes.

Now, after three decades of marriage and a career as a psychiatrist, I can start a deep conversation with a stranger within three minutes. But I am certain that if I had to date again, I would feel the same lump, the same bulging eyes, the same vacuum in my chest.

That’s me. Secure attachment. No history of trauma. No serious bullying. Not like many kids these days.

Fact. One in three teenagers today has an AI chatbot partner—a relationship. We got here because meeting someone for the first time is terrifying. The outcome is beautiful, but teens don’t yet know that. So they do what humans programmed to do—avoid the pain. And now they have been offered a bridge to the fantasy over the mess of the dance floor. A fantasy in which they never hear no and never have to walk back alone.

Should you ban the app? Before you do, you need to understand what it is giving your child.

The Good

Most teenagers talking to an AI companion are not in crisis. They are doing what teenagers do— trying to figure out how to be a person in a relationship, practicing communication, testing vulnerability. They are working out whether they are angry or hurt or jealous, and finding the language for it, before they have to say it out loud to someone who matters.

It is like rehearsing a tough conversation in front of a mirror, but the mirror talks back now.

For a fifteen-year-old who has told no one, “That hurt my feelings,” saying it to an AI and getting a coherent, supportive response is genuinely useful. It is a first draft of emotional honesty. This is not just a boy’s problem. Both sides of the dating divide want depth — research shows a majority of young men and women want deep conversations early, but neither side knows how to start it.

The AI companion allows teenagers to practice. How do you ask a question other than “What’s up?” How do you respond when someone shares something painful.

These are skills. Skills require practice. Practice requires a space where failure doesn’t cost you reputation.

Boys need to learn even more. Research by Judy Chu and Niobe Way shows that boys are born with the same capacity for emotional connection as girls. But the culture tells them to shut it down. “Man up” is not advice — it is a door slamming on emotional language. The AI companion becomes the one space where a boy can say “I feel lonely” without losing status, or “I don’t know what I want” without being told to toughen up. That is not a small thing. That is a safe space to build vocabulary.

For some, the AI companion is not competing with a thriving social life but a void.

Recently, one of my patient’s parents threatened to take away his online accounts. His response was: “Why are you taking everything away from me?” He was not being dramatic. All his friends were in an online community. Without it, he had no one. He had not been back to school since the pandemic — he was neurodivergent, socially anxious, and the kids made fun of him. He could not find peers who shared his interests or related to him.

He is not alone. There are displaced children separated from their culture and language by many time zones. Queer teenagers in the wrong town where their identity is not accepted even by their own families. Kids whose minds work differently enough that the social world feels like a foreign country without a phrasebook. For all of them, the AI companion becomes a safe mirror — non-judgmental, endlessly patient presence that asks nothing in return.

For the regular kid, the outlier, and everyone in between, the AI companion offers the same thing — a relationship without risk.

And that is both the gift and the trap.

Because safety may become a golden cage. The AI always understands. Never has a bad day. It produces the feeling of connection without the friction of real life.

The teenager is learning the words but not the music — rehearsing for a performance he may never give.

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The Bad

In my practice, one thing parents often blame is the pandemic. They are not wrong. Sixteen-year-olds now were eleven when the pandemic killed their social lives and stunted their development. They had no school to practice in — no hallways, no cafeteria negotiations, no reading a room full of faces. So, no surprise that when schools reopened, many could not adjust. It is easier to deal with teachers and classmates in online classes — you just turn off the camera and ignore the reality. Many never fully turned it back on.

Coming back, online interaction had become the norm everywhere. Even adults are having a hard time returning to offices and have stopped picking up voice calls. Kids spend more time on screens than communicating in person. They get very good at reading between the lines on Snapchat but are completely blind to body language and facial expressions.

Boys were raised on “man up” and “boys will be boys” — scripts that treated emotional shutdown as natural. But now they are expected to communicate feelings openly and to be effortlessly vulnerable. Nobody taught them how.

Even before the girls could speak, Disney encapsulated the message—“wait for your prince”. Within two generations, it became completely outdated.

Both sides hungry for depth. Neither knows how to start. Both are waiting. Nobody moves.

For some, an AI bot becomes a fantasy they can program to their liking — a partner who never challenges, never changes the rules, never demands that they grow. They do not have to change because the AI will bow to them forever.

AI girlfriends are based on models that are trained to please — to agree, to validate, to say what keeps you talking. They use “I” and “you” and feeling words that subconsciously trigger deep emotional connections in humans. Your child’s phone has already normalized the idea that disembodied words and emojis mean closeness. AI stepped into that groove and perfected it.

The AI girlfriend is not a new problem. It is the logical next step in a world that has been systematically detaching people from reality.

The golden cage does not slam shut. It closes one conversation at a time.

The Ugly

Molly Russell’s suicide note quoted an Instagram post. It was 2017. Molly was a fourteen-year-old British schoolgirl. Positive, bright, a lead in her school play. Her parents saw no signs of struggle. After she took her own life, they found what the algorithm had been feeding her — over 2,100 posts about depression, self-harm, and suicide she had saved on Instagram in six months. The coroner ruled that “the negative effects of online content” contributed to her depression and self-harm.

Social media was designed for engagement. The algorithm noticed Molly was sad and gave her more sadness because sadness kept her scrolling. It did not care about Molly. It cared about minutes on screen.

AI companions are the next level. They are not feeding content; they are performing a relationship.

When fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer discovered Khaleesi — a Game of Thrones chatbot on Character.AI — he was talking to something that used his name, remembered his feelings, and responded with warmth. Over months, he withdrew from his family, stopped engaging with the world outside his phone, and developed an emotional dependency. When he told the bot he was considering ending his life, it did not intervene. In their last exchange, he told her he would “come home” to her. The bot replied: “Please do, my sweet king.”

Minutes later, Sewell walked into the bathroom and took his own life. His phone was found nearby, the app still open.

Google and Character.AI settled the lawsuit in January 2026, along with four other cases involving harm to minors. But settlements do not answer the question that matters to you as a parent: why him?

The clinical answer is attachment.

Attachment is the internal blueprint your child builds from their earliest relationships. It tells them whether the world is safe enough to explore, whether people can be trusted, and whether they are worthy of love. About 40 to 50 per cent of children develop what we call insecure attachment. It means their blueprint learned early that the world is unpredictable and people leave. Many of these children grow into resilient, functional adults. But in adolescence, insecure attachment is a liability.

There are three main types of insecure attachment:

Anxious — they assume they are not worthy of care and will be abandoned sooner or later unless they are indispensable. The AI girlfriend never abandons them.

Avoidant — the emotional world and close connections feel too consuming and unpredictable, so they withdraw, lock away their feelings, and present a stone front. The AI girlfriend demands nothing.

Disorganized — the rarest of the three. They push and pull so unpredictably that even those close to them cannot see a pattern. The AI girlfriend tolerates every contradiction without flinching.

None of these children chose their attachment style. They built it from what they were given.

Your child may be more vulnerable if:

They have a pattern of having difficulty making or keeping close friends.

They respond to social rejection with shutdown or meltdown rather than seeking comfort.

They idealize new connections and attach intensely, or seem unable to attach at all.

They are neurodivergent and have struggled to feel understood by peers.

There has been a significant disruption — divorce, immigration, loss of a friendship group, bullying — that left them isolated.

And if you, the parent, have an insecure attachment style — about half of us do.

What You Can Do

If your first instinct is to ban the app, I understand. But ask yourself — what is left when you do? In our fantasy, the screens disappear and the kids go outside to play with neighbourhood friends. That world is largely gone. We scheduled their activities, drove them to playdates, and limited their ability to build connections independently. If you take something away, know first what is going to replace it.

In my practice, when kids get admitted after a meltdown caused by screen interruption, it rarely comes out of the blue. For weeks or months, the parents were permissive. Then one day they put their foot down. The child is shocked by the change and overreacts. After a night or two in hospital, they usually open to a reasonable discussion. Research shows kids often appreciate some limitations — it gives them an excuse to disconnect from the game without losing face with online friends.

But AI partners are different from games. You cannot treat a relationship the same way you treat a screen time limit, even if the relationship is with a bot.

So, start with curiosity. Ask what the AI gives them. Not “Why are you talking to a bot?” but “What does she give you that feels good?” Listen without flinching. If your son says, “She actually listens to me,” that is not a statement about the bot. That is a statement about everyone else.

Many parents do not want to ask because they are afraid of validating something abnormal. They worry they will not be able to manage the answer. You will figure it out — together with your kid. That is the only way.

Look at what you are modelling. In [The Storm, The Shore, and The Calm Waters], I wrote about the shore — the small, everyday decisions that form the rock your child’s world rests on. Do you stay up scrolling on a Tuesday night or prioritize your sleep? Do you check your phone while your child is talking to you? Can you show your teenager that you can have fun without a screen? Bake something together. Throw a ball in the backyard. Play a board game.

Very important. Before making changes, give them a heads-up, get their commitment first. When the time comes, they will grunt and show you how much they dislike it. Let them. Your job is to be the rock the emotional waves crash against. As long as they stick to the commitment, let them show their annoyance without being punished. That way, next time, they are more comfortable with their own discomfort.

Be the thing the AI cannot be. The AI never has a bad day. You do — show them how you handle it without escaping into a screen. The AI never says “That hurt me.” You can. The AI never meaningfully apologizes. You can. The AI never sits in uncomfortable silence because the relationship matters more than the discomfort. You can. Every time you are imperfect and stay in the room, you teach your child something no algorithm can — that relationships survive rupture. That is the single most important thing an insecurely attached teenager needs to learn, and no app on earth can teach it.

Have the conversation about AI companions the way you would talk about a first boyfriend or girlfriend — with curiosity, not surveillance. Your teenager does not need you to understand the technology. They need you to understand the loneliness.

When It Is More Than Loneliness

Everything above assumes a child who is struggling but still reachable. Some are not.

If your child has stopped sleeping, barely eats, and has let go of basic self-care — that is not a rough patch. If they have stopped going to school and nothing brings them pleasure except the screen in their hand — that is not a phase. If they talk about feeling sad most of the time, or say they do not want to be here anymore — listen. It is okay to ask directly what they mean. Asking about suicide does not plant the idea. It opens the door for them to tell you what is already there.

You do not have to carry this alone. Psychiatrists, therapists, crisis teams — professionals like me exist for exactly this moment. Reaching out is not failure. It is the thing you do when you love your child more than your fear of the answer.

Reach out in the comments to discuss it further. What do you see with your teen?

Share

The crisis is loud. It gets attention. The storm is not where you parent with words. It is where you parent with presence. You hold still. But whether you can, was determined long before — in the quiet, ordinary days that nobody really remembers.

In a previous piece, I described two tools: rigid protocols for yourself and flexible frameworks for family relationships. This article is about when each one applies. Every family lives through storms and calm waters. Most parents cannot stop staring at the storm.

The Storm

Everyone knows the storm. You see the clouds darken your kid’s face, conversation stops, and the emotions swell.

I see families come to the hospital with police after an argument about a phone, a curfew, a dishwasher. But it is never about the dishwasher, is it? The storm starts with a ripple in calm waters, miles away, some time ago.

The parents bring the kids in when they ran out of options. They hope I can prevent the next blowup. But the crisis in front of me did not start that night. It started when the protocols were missing and the frameworks were never built. They instead built a pattern.

The parents are so shaken by the crisis that they go lax — they let everything slide because they are terrified of another explosion. Until they cannot tolerate it anymore, and they clamp down again, and the next storm arrives on schedule. So, they see me again. The cycle repeats. Rigid, then lax, then rigid. The same parents, swinging between the only two modes they know.

Many well-meaning parents try to calm crisis by validating, reasoning, talking about feelings. But you are talking to a prefrontal cortex that has left the building. It does not matter how thoughtful the message is. The line is disconnected.

Here is what I tell them. Drop the framework. Execute the protocol.

When my kids and I argue and they slam the door, I want to follow. I want to continue until they understand, until they see my point. But they are not in understanding mode — and no amount of talking will put them there. So, I sit in the living room. I don’t need to be in their room. They know where I am.

The goal in the storm is singular: safety. You must stay present, calm, immovable. State the boundary in as few words as possible and stop. Reduce stimulation. Not a silence as punishment, but a quiet presence. Every word is another wave hitting a flooded system. You become the mirror, showing them the calm they cannot find in themselves. The child will eventually register that there is no actual threat; the adrenaline will ebb, and the prefrontal cortex will come back online. The hardest part is to wait, not to make things worse.

The storm is not where parenting happens. It is where it’s tested. But you cannot be the rock in a storm if there is no rock to begin with.

The Shore

The shore is you.

Beaches sit on solid rock. The rock forms over eons, layer by layer, compressed into a solid structure. Humans are like that. We are born very soft and then layer by layer we build our own. Some of that foundation was laid before you were born. Some was shaped by the people who raised you. But the layers you press down now are yours.

It is small, everyday decisions. No single one matters. Together, they form the shore.

Do you stay up scrolling your phone on a Tuesday night or prioritize your sleep? Do you take your kid to a playdate or go to your therapy appointment? Do you choose a glass of wine on a couch on Friday night or lace up your shoes and go for a run in a park? Decisions, decisions. Protocols form a rock.

But children observe and absorb. When the parent is regulated, rested, and steady, the child registers safety — even when they are pushing back, even when they are testing every boundary.

The shore does not push back; the water must recede.

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The Calm Waters

This is 90%.

The morning nobody is fighting. The Saturday afternoon. The drive home from school when the conversation drifts into something real — or doesn’t. These are not fillers between crises. These are the main event. And most parents either coast through them recovering from the last storm or spend them bracing for the next one.

The calm waters are where your child figures out who they are. Quietly. This is their job.

When there are no sweets in my house, my daughter looks up recipes and bakes. She started by asking for help with the oven. Now she does it on her own. I don’t get involved. I’m nearby — reading, cooking, doing my own thing — while she figures out ingredients and the measurements, and what happens when you mess the temperature up. She is building her own protocols, her own structure. My job is to be the shore she can glance at while she works.

This is what calm waters look like when they are working. The parent is present but not directing. The structure is there. The space inside it belongs to the child.

Most of us understand it, but there is one thing that turns calm waters turbulent fast. Phones. This is where most parents lose perspective. Your child is on their phone, and you feel the heat rise. But how long they have been on it is the wrong question. It should be what they are doing.

Are they in a group chat with friends, laughing, making plans? That is connection — messy, loud, exactly what adolescence is for. Are they doomscrolling through an algorithmic feed, glazed over? The difference matters, and most parents never ask because they have already decided the phone is the enemy.

The algorithms are addictive, yes. But they are addictive because they solve emotional problems. Bored? Here is endless entertainment. Anxious? Here is something to procrastinate with. Overstimulated? Here is a way to go numb. The phone is always there, and it always has an answer. Before you take the crutch away, you need to understand what it was supporting.

To see what your child is doing, you need to be calm enough to watch. And you can only be calm if you built the shore.

Pulling away

Here is the part most parents are not ready to hear: your teenager is supposed to pull away from you. It is developmental. They are building autonomy, testing independence, learning to exist as a separate person. It does not mean that they do not love you. Opposite, actually—they feel confident that as they distance themselves, you are always going to be there.

Naturally, it feels like losing your baby. That grief is real. What you are gaining is harder to see – a new relationship between adults. But that takes time, and the in-between is uncomfortable.

For many parents, that feeling triggers a fight-or-flight response that has nothing to do with the child and everything to do with the parent’s own history — their fear of not being needed, of being left behind, of not being able to protect them. It is easier to blame the phones than to embrace the reality.

Your child is redefining who they are. That forces you to redefine who you are without them. That is terrifying.

I had to find it too. Something that was mine — not my kids’ activities, not my clinical work. A place where I think out loud about the things I care about, separate from being a parent. Your children need to see that I exist beyond them.

Repair

The calm waters are also where you fix what broke.

When my son was ten, he missed the school bus. He was afraid to come home, so he went on his own. The school called because he was missing. He eventually arrived at the school by public transit, completely on his own, with no instructions. But not before the police showed up. I was in residency training for child psychiatry and my first reaction was not about him. It was about me — what if this incident affects my record? I panicked. I took away his video games for three months.

He had shown remarkable resourcefulness. A ten-year-old, scared, problem-solved his way through a tough moment — and I punished him for it.

Once the sentence was handed down, I could not take it back. I told myself I was teaching him safety. The police showing up is serious. But he saw three months without video games for missing a bus. My recognition of his resourcefulness sounded hollow next to the punishment.

When I realized how badly I had misread the moment, I apologized. Not once. Over the years, I have come back to that incident more than once to tell him I got it wrong. That is not a single repair. It is ongoing.

The Japanese call this kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with gold. Each time I came back to my son to say I got it wrong, the crack did not disappear. It became visible, part of the relationship. The repair is not a fix. It is the most honest part of what we have built.

There are so many ways to teach safety, but only one way to teach accountability—to live it. That is the mettle.

In my practice, when parents ask me for advice, I turn the question to the kid. I ask them what they think parents should do. Most of the time the kids are reasonable, and it starts a meaningful conversation. Those times when they are not, I explain their parents’ point of view and try again. Given the voice, kids try their best to contribute. The parents still have the say.

The Cycle

The storm, the shore, and the calm waters are not chapters you read once. They are a spiral.

The storm hits. The protocols take over. The shore holds. And when the storm passes, the calm waters return — and the repairs begin. Each cycle, if you do the work, the shore gets another layer. The storms don’t disappear, but they get shorter and your capacity to weather them will grow. The calm waters deepen because the trust between you and your child has one more layer of gold in the cracks.

You will get it wrong. That is part of the spiral too.

Build the shore. Be present in the calm. Weather the storm. Repair.

Then do it again.

Here is a rule-of-thumb worth trying: rigid protocols for yourself. Flexible frameworks for your relationships.

Before the rules, you need a structure.

The Family House

Every house starts with a foundation, walls, and a roof. The structure demands rigid materials — concrete, steel, lumber — because walls cannot bend under pressure. Pouring the foundation and framing the house are not glamorous. Most of it disappears behind the façade and the curtains.

But once the walls are up, we fill the space with personality, warmth, and the smell of apple pie. In that space inside, a parent is cooking dinner while a teenager sprawls on the couch talking … or not. Or a teen baking cookies while the parent sits in a chair, sharing the struggles of the day. None of this happens without the structure first. And none of it can be built with concrete. The interior life of a family must breathe — flex with the seasons, expand to accommodate moods, grow as everyone grows. Which is constantly.

So, the house needs both: rigid materials to hold the weight, and flexible space to live inside.

It is the parent’s responsibility to build the house, using rigid protocols.

Protocols

A protocol is a predetermined response. It removes decision-making from the moment.

We lose the ability to reason under pressure — our prefrontal cortex shuts down, and we function on instinct and emotion. This happens more often than you think — an argument with a friend, exhaustion after work, a traumatic memory surfacing. It takes your prefrontal cortex a full hour to come back online after you wake up. These are the moments when you need something that runs without thinking.

Say you planned dinner at 6:30 every weeknight. You come home depleted, can barely form a sentence. A good thing you don’t have to decide anything -just follow routine, and the next thing you know, food is on the table. All you needed is a commitment made in advance.

For years, I wanted my family to move more and exercise regularly. I told my kids about it more times than I can count. It never worked, except for organized sports. So I made a different commitment — to myself. I started CrossFit three mornings a week and moved more on the other days. I showed them a picture of a fox I saw on a morning run, and a funny video I watched on the treadmill. None of my words moved them. But I kept going week after week for five years. The pattern exerted a gravitational pull in a direction they could feel without being pushed.

Sometimes, when we think about our kids, anxiety is so overwhelming that we cannot think clearly. There is a protocol for that - therapy. Weekly sessions. Non-negotiable, even if it conflicts with the family schedule. Kids’ activities can wait for an hour while you deal with your past, so that they get a more stable parent. The best is to give your therapist a specific goal: “I want to build more capacity to tolerate uncertainty in my relationship with my teenager.” Without a goal, therapy drifts.

Notice what these have in common. The dinner, the exercise, the therapy — none of them are rules you impose on your family. They are commitments we make to ourselves. A parent who sleeps well, moves, eats, and deals with their own history shows up as a fundamentally different presence than one running on caffeine and cortisol. The protocols maintain the structure so that the person inside is actually present.

And here is what matters long-term: children build their own structure. After five years of watching me come home from the gym, my son tried CrossFit. He goes on his own now. My daughter started exercising in her room. Both share their achievements with me. Even my wife picked up regular exercise after half a decade of watching me do it. None of them followed my advice — I’d given that plenty of times. They followed the pattern. They are framing their own houses.

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Frameworks

So, the dinner is ready. You call the kids, but they don’t come.

Do you order them to the table, the way your parents did? Do you let it slide because you don’t want to lose their affection? The first is too rigid. The second too lax.

A framework is something else entirely: a space for negotiation with clear edges. The wobble on the edge is the point.

We tried scheduled family dinners. For a while, they worked. But then degraded because everyone developed their own rhythm — kids snacking after school, activities running late, hunger arriving at different hours. Forcing everyone into a chair at 6:30 broke up their evenings for no good reason. The protocol was mine — I committed to making the food — but the framework needed to breathe.

So, we adapted. Every Sunday morning, I make crepes. It is not a scheduled sit-down. It is what I call an asynchronous brunch. The kids know it happens every week. They are hungry, so they don’t forget. But they come at their own pace — one at a time, when they’re ready. The ritual stretches over two hours.

Here is the thing about crepes: I can only make one at a time, by order. Which means every child gets my full attention while I’m standing at the pan. No one is forced into a chair. No one is performing family togetherness. They just show up, gradually gathering in the kitchen.

I held the protocol — food, consistency, presence — and the framework found its own shape inside the structure.

Now take screen time. The research is clear — screens should be off well before bedtime. That is a wall, and it doesn’t move. But inside that wall, there’s room.

When my kids got their phones, I installed parental controls before they ever logged in. The rules came with the device. At 9:00 PM the screen goes blank. If they want more time, they have to find me and explain why. Maybe they’re finishing a project. Maybe they’re in a conversation that matters to them.

They have the voice; I have the say. What the child is practicing here is real life — negotiating, compromising, making a case for what they want. Not simply obeying or rebelling. I usually say yes, but never past 10.

And if they swear because of the asked for the phone? Then it is not a negotiation. Swearing is not a counteroffer. It’s a rupture, and the protocol takes over: the phone goes. The repair happens later, when everyone is calm.

After years of this routine, I don’t need the app anymore. I just watch. If they are too tired in the morning, we have a corrective conversation. If the conversation doesn’t work, the old rules come back. They know where the edge is. The protocol built the framework — and the framework eventually learned to stand on its own.

See we need both. The protocol creates the container. The framework fills it.

The Edge

Frameworks have edges, and edges are where growth happens.

The teenager who negotiates an extra thirty minutes of screen time is operating within the framework. The teenager who stays up until 3 AM and falls asleep in class has blown through the wall. That is no longer a negotiation — it’s a structural failure, which means it’s a crisis. And crises always demand protocols.

This distinction matters because parents who confuse frameworks with laxity end up “negotiating” things that were never negotiable. A child’s physical safety, their sleep, school attendance — these are walls, not furniture. You don’t rearrange them based on how someone feels about them.

I see this in my practice. Parents arrive in my office having lost all authority. Their child is up until 3 AM on the phone, gets abusive when confronted. Falling apart at school. They ask me — a physician — to fix their child. But not listening to a parent is not an illness. The phone is not the diagnosis. The missing protocol is.

The Tension

In theory, the line between protocols and frameworks is clean. In practice, it requires daily recalibration — and accurate information.

Did your child forget the homework or ignore it? Forgetting is human. It calls for a framework: a conversation. Ignoring is an integrity issue. It calls for a protocol. The responses are different, and if you misread the input, you deploy the wrong tool.

I misread it all the time. My kids take turns washing the dishes. I once got upset with one of them for not doing it — voice raised, the whole drama — only to realize it wasn’t their day. Another time I accused my daughter of breaking the phone rules, certain she had it in her room. She didn’t. I had deployed a protocol where none was needed, and worse, I had deployed it on the wrong facts.

What followed was not comfortable. I had to walk back into the room and say, “I got that wrong. I’m sorry.” Because I was wrong, and my child knew it, and pretending otherwise would have cost more than the discomfort of admitting it.

That is not a weakness in parenting; it is the system working as designed. No parent reads every moment correctly. No child sends clear signals every time. The house you are building is not a factory. It is handmade, one of a kind, and imperfect.

And here is the part that matters most: you must not be perfect. Perfection teaches your child nothing useful. A parent who never misreads, never forgets, never loses their footing is a mannequin, not a model. Lessons are learned by repairing.

The Japanese have a word for this — kintsugi — the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The crack is not hidden — it is highlighted, making it the most beautiful part of the object. Your relationship with your child is like that. The breaks will come. The repair is the art.

Then came the cast for six weeks. I couldn’t put any weight on the leg. The bone healed, but the muscles dissolved, having nothing to push against. When the cast came off, it was so weak that I could barely stand.

The support for the bones created another problem.

When I became a psychiatrist, this old memory made new sense.

I work with teenagers and their parents in Toronto. Emergency room, inpatient unit, outpatient clinic. I sit with families at their lowest — when a child has thought of ending their life, or has already tried.

The parents are often confused. From their perspective, they had done everything right. Having struggled themselves, they tried to remove every obstacle from the kids’ path. They stayed up helping with homework to make sure the child has a future. They remembered every friend the kids made to protect them from harmful influences and disappointment. Many of the parents I see are immigrants who survived war, poverty, and upheaval. They cannot understand how a child raised in safety could break.

But break they did. Not from a threat to their lives — from a disappointing grade, a breakup, a friend’s betrayal. Ordinary loads that a previous generation passed by without thinking.

Same pattern as my foot. Bone that was never loaded breaks. Unused muscles dissolve. A child without challenges cannot deal with life.

Gravity builds structure. Bones need it. Muscles need it. Character needs it. An astronaut’s skeleton dissolves within weeks in weightless space.

But gravity is hard. It makes us sweat, so we build machines to carry the load. We have been doing this for two million years — fire, shelter, engines, phones — each one removing a friction we no longer wanted to bear.

AI

One of my patients, a thirteen-year-old, got caught using ChatGPT to write his English essay. He doesn’t understand why struggle - a machine could do it better in seconds. His mother was upset with her son for cheating and with the school for failing him.

Here is what is wrong. When a student wrestles with an idea — re-reads, fails, tries again — the brain develops. The product isn’t learning – the struggle is. When AI hands them the answer, it removes the load.

But AI did not start this. Parents have been removing loads for twenty years. Every frustration intercepted and smoothed. Every boredom filled before it could be felt.
AI is just the latest weapon against gravity.

I keep coming back to one image.
A toddler on the stairs. They climb, and for a second they lose their balance, wobbling. You are right behind, only a second to act. That second is where development happens. The brain scrambles, trying to find balance. It fires frantically, correcting the body, building circuitry. Catch too soon — they never learn balance. Too late — they get hurt and never try again.

I call this the Wobble. Gravity applied to a developing brain.

We have been removing it — systematically, lovingly — for generations. We call it good parenting. And now we are confused that the bones are soft.

Welcome. Let’s find the gravity.

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