Generative AI (genAI) is increasingly being integrated into children’s everyday lives, not only through screens but also through so-called “screen-free” AI toys. These toys can simulate emotions, personalize responses, and recall prior interactions, creating the illusion of an ongoing social connection. Such capabilities raise important questions about how children understand boundaries, agency, and relationships when interacting with AI toys. To investigate this, we conducted two participatory design sessions with eight children ages 6 - 11 where they engaged with three different AI toys, shifting between play, experimentation, and reflection. Our findings reveal that children approached AI toys with genuine curiosity, profiling them as social beings. However, frequent interaction breakdowns and mismatches between apparent intelligence and toy-like form disrupted expectations around play and led to adversarial play. We conclude with implications and design provocations to navigate children’s encounters with AI toys in more transparent, developmentally appropriate, and responsible ways.

Emotion regulation (ER) is essential to youth well-being, and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is an established approach for building ER skills. Clinicians often use creative mediums such as visuals and narratives to support ER through CBT, yet access and personalization remain limited. Generative AI (GenAI) shows promise for addressing these limitations, but its benefits and risks in youth ER remain underexplored, underscoring the need for expert perspectives. We interviewed 20 ER specialists–psychotherapists, art therapists, and psychiatrists–using a GenAI technological probe that generated CBT-based visuals and narratives. Clinicians highlighted GenAI’s potential as a “bridge” to help youth concretely identify and express emotions, practice personalized coping skills, and mediate ER conversations between home and clinics. They also cautioned that the vividness and unpredictability of GenAI outputs may trigger trauma or reinforce maladaptive thinking. We propose psychologically grounded design implications for GenAI to foster safe, engaging youth ER as a foundation for lifelong well-being.

The advent of Generative AI (GenAI) has raised discussions about its effects on individuals. However, little is known about its impact on children’s creative collaboration, despite its importance for social and cognitive development. We examined GenAI’s role in children’s creative collaboration through five co-design sessions with 28 children (ages 5-11) using diverse GenAI tools (text, image, video, voice); 17 parents participated in focus group interviews. Our findings show that GenAI can foster positive social dynamics by enabling “Human vs. AI” teaming and children’s co-creation with shared ownership. However, GenAI disrupted collaborations when roles between children were unclear, AI ignored group dialogue, and AI dominated children’s agency. Children and parents envisioned socially attuned AI that could play an “older sibling” role–scaffolding while allowing playful disagreement–while raising concerns about children’s overreliance on GenAI. This work advances understanding of GenAI in collaboration and proposes design implications for designing AI systems that support child-centered collaboration.

As generative artificial intelligence (genAI) increasingly mediates how children learn, communicate, and engage with digital content, understanding children's hopes and fears about this emerging technology is crucial.In a pilot study with 37 fifth-graders, we explored how children (ages 9-10) envision genAI and the roles they believe it should play in their daily life.Our findings reveal three key ways children envision genAI: as a companion providing guidance, a collaborator working alongside them, and a task automator that offloads responsibilities.However, alongside these hopeful views, children expressed fears about overreliance, particularly in academic settings, linking it to fears of diminished learning, disciplinary consequences, and long-term failure.This study highlights the need for child-centric AI design that balances these tensions, empowering children with the skills to critically engage with and navigate their evolving relationships with digital technologies.

App Planner is an interactive support tool for K-12 students, designed to assist in creating mobile applications. By utilizing generative AI, App Planner helps students articulate the problem and solution through guided conversations via a chat-based interface. It assists them in brainstorming and formulating new ideas for applications, provides feedback on those ideas, and stimulates creative thinking. Here we report usability tests from our preliminary study with high-school students who appreciated App Planner for aiding the app design process and providing new viewpoints on human aspects especially the potential negative impact of their creation.