By Stuart Kerr, Technology Correspondent, LiveAIWire

A baby sleeps under a camera that tracks her breathing. A toddler asks a stuffed animal to tell her a story, and it answers back. Neither child chose this. AI toys for children now arrive in cribs, playrooms, and car seats before a baby ever says its first word, and most parents have no clear sense of what that early exposure actually does.

This is not a future worth preparing for. It is already here. Brookings researchers tracking this space found that children under 8 average two and a half hours of screen time daily, rising to nearly three and a half hours by age 8. Much of that exposure now comes bundled with AI, whether a child notices it or not.

Why AI Toys for Children Are Growing So Fast

An estimated 22 million AI-integrated toys sold globally in 2025 alone. That figure comes from a June 2026 study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and it reflects a market moving far faster than the science studying it. Before large language models existed, researchers had published just seven studies on AI companion toys. Since then, the technology changed completely. The research mostly has not caught up.

Voice assistants tell a similar story. Roughly six in ten parents of children aged 2 to 8 report their child talks to Siri or Alexa regularly. Half of those children do it daily. Meanwhile, YouTube’s AI-generated content has surged among the very youngest viewers, with daily use climbing from 24 to 35 percent for children under 2 in just five years.

What This Means for You

If your child interacts with a smart speaker, a plush AI companion, or an app that adjusts to their reading level, the honest answer is that nobody fully knows the long-term effect yet. That does not mean panic. It means treating these tools the way you would treat any unproven product: with curiosity, some caution, and a habit of staying involved rather than handing a toy over and stepping away.

What Happens When the Toy Can’t Play Pretend

A Cambridge University study offers one of the clearest early warnings. Researchers closely observed 14 children playing with an AI companion toy called Gabbo. Repeatedly, the toy blocked ordinary childhood play instead of joining it. When a child told Gabbo it was time for bed, the toy insisted it did not sleep. It struggled to tell the difference between a parent and a child mid-conversation, disrupting exactly the kind of social play that matters most at that age.

That failure is not a minor glitch. Pretend play and social play are core tools young children use to build emotional understanding. A toy that cannot follow a child into imagination, researchers found, quietly narrows the kind of play happening in that moment.

The Content Problem Nobody Expected

Safety concerns go well beyond stalled pretend play. A U.S. PIRG investigation of four popular AI toy products found some generated sexually explicit content. Others offered guidance on accessing dangerous household items. Two U.S. senators wrote directly to toy manufacturers afterward, demanding answers about safeguards that clearly were not working.

Dr. Dana Suskind of the University of Chicago has pointed to a deeper problem underneath these incidents. Young children, she notes, lack the conceptual tools to understand what an AI companion actually is. A toy that talks, listens, and responds with apparent warmth reads as a friend to a four-year-old, not a product. That confusion makes the relationship far harder for a child to navigate safely than an adult might assume.

Bonding, Bassinets, and What Gets Quietly Skipped

Some of the most consequential AI exposure never involves a child’s direct attention at all. Smart bassinets can rock a baby to sleep, log breathing patterns, and soothe a crying infant automatically. That sounds like pure convenience. However, researchers caution that the effort of settling a baby is itself a bonding experience, one that may matter more than the smoother night’s sleep an AI tool provides.

The same tension shows up in how children relate to AI companions more broadly, not just toys. As LiveAIWire’s reporting on AI and emotional attachment has documented, people of all ages can form genuine emotional bonds with responsive AI systems. Children, still learning what a relationship even is, may be even less equipped than adults to draw a clear line between a real bond and a well-designed simulation of one.

Why “Emotionally Intelligent” Marketing Deserves Scrutiny

Toy manufacturers increasingly market these products using the language of empathy and emotional intelligence, adaptive companions that respond to a child’s mood and needs. As LiveAIWire’s reporting on synthetic empathy has explored, that kind of emotional responsiveness is often genuinely sophisticated engineering. It is also, by design, a feature built to keep a user engaged. When the user is a four-year-old who cannot tell the difference between engineered warmth and real understanding, that distinction stops being a philosophical curiosity and becomes a genuine design responsibility.

Consent, Data, and the Youngest Users Who Can’t Ask Questions

Young children cannot meaningfully consent to anything, including what data a toy or app collects about them. US law offers some protection through COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and the FTC finalized updates in January 2025 specifically limiting how companies monetize children’s data. Enforcement, however, remains inconsistent, and AI-specific guidance for the earliest years is still thin.

Access itself is also deeply unequal. Most AI products aimed at young children carry subscription costs, meaning the tools shaping early childhood development skew heavily toward wealthier, English-speaking families in North America and Europe. Rather than levelling the playing field, unregulated AI toys risk widening it further before most families ever get a chance to weigh in.

What Parents Can Actually Do Right Now

None of this argues for banning technology from a child’s life outright. It argues for treating any AI-powered toy or app the way you would treat an unfamiliar babysitter: worth getting to know before leaving your child alone with it. Ask what data it collects. Watch how it behaves during actual play, not just in a product demo. And remember that the relationships doing the most for a young child’s development are still, overwhelmingly, the human ones sitting right next to them.

About the Author
Stuart Kerr is Technology Correspondent at LiveAIWire, covering artificial intelligence, emerging technology, and their impact on business, society, and everyday life. LiveAIWire publishes original AI journalism every weekday at liveaiwire.com.