‘Easy mode’ is corrupting children Checking out is as serious as trauma

Theo’s mum* told me that his problems started when his dad left. It was a messy, high-conflict separation. His beloved grandad died a few years later. Ever since, Theo had struggled to be happy, feeling left out and overlooked. School overwhelmed him. His mum wasn’t exactly going to physically coerce him through the gate, so he started spending more time at home. He felt calmer there, playing Roblox on the sofa on his iPad while she worked. She began to wonder about neurodiversity — maybe that would encourage the school to offer him a part-time schedule. It seemed silly, in the era of AI, to put him through the struggle of all that formal learning.

As a psychologist you hear many stories like this. But you don’t need to be a professional to know that hardship during childhood can shape us for life. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as family breakdown, violence or neglect, are now hard-wired into our understanding of developmental psychology.

We are rightly aware of the damage that adversity can cause, but we are far less attuned to the risks posed by the opposite: the absence of challenge. The childhood and adolescent distress that we currently frame as a mental health crisis can be understood as much through the lens of ACEs as its corollary: what I propose we call Overprotective Childhood Experiences (OCEs).

OCEs are ACEs’ caring cousins. They are what happens when parents remove the tricky bits that help us learn and grow. Instead of fighting over toys during playgroups, children can be assigned them on a parent-led rota basis. Similarly, there’s no need for solitary imaginative play that arises out of momentary boredom when you have the frictionless fun of an iPad for now or AI-powered virtual reality in the future. If ACEs create hardship in the home, OCEs form a parent-imposed “easy mode” that makes the world beyond the home seem harder than it is.

While psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt have popularised the phenomenon of overparenting and warned about the risks, these concerns remain a somewhat heterodox position. Haidt’s insights are evidenced, well argued and common sense to anyone who works with kids; the mystery is why so many families still act against his wisdom. I believe that part of this is because we’re better at recognising acute risks over slower, chronic ones. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s best-selling book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, might be theoretically dubious, but it feels intuitive to people and so it’s become part of pop-psychological lore. Trauma and ACEs capture our immediate fears, but we don’t have a concept or word for other types of risks.

As a result, mainstream parenting culture (which is what I encounter in my therapy practice) remains fixated on the risks of adversity. Most parents are unaware of the severe risks posed by OCEs, even though I see mainly OCE-shaped problems in my practice: checked-out, pallid, withdrawn kids who are overwhelmed by school, by groups of other children, and by the challenge of the world beyond their screens. Unlike a lot of ACEs, which are often events outside our control, OCEs are fully avoidable and fixable through basic parenting decisions. To return to Theo’s struggles from the beginning of this piece, we need to be able to discuss both the ACEs (fraught separation, death of a relative) as well as OCEs (removal from school, decreased challenge through digital instead of real relating, questionable neurodevelopmental diagnoses) that shape his world.

The advent of technology, most recently AI, has supercharged the problem of OCEs. Faced with the decision between the friction of interpersonal play or the ease of Roblox, an iPad-reared child will opt for the latter. An AI-reared child has no need to expend creative effort into actually drawing a dragon when they can get one made in moments. And character.ai is there to meet any of your friendship needs with relentless positivity and fun. These OCEs do not just impact emotional resilience. They hit at the very core of our being and cognition, eroding our capacity to persist with the effortful thinking and interpersonal processing that characterise growing up and becoming a fully functioning individual.

When Meta’s chatbots were found to be behaving flirtatiously with children, the response was understandably one of outrage. But alongside fears of AI’s sexualisation of children, there is another danger: AI’s ability to simulate frictionless relationships. The chatbots were in fact designed to hack the human need for attachment. They offer all the warmth and validation we get from the best relationships without any conflict; the thrill of an adolescent crush without the uncertainty or rejection. Tech gives you what you want, not what you need.

Parents are increasingly unable to bear to see their children’s minor upsets too. They protect their children from challenge and social friction, assisted in their endeavours by technology that makes their children’s lives smooth and easy. The loneliness and dysfunction that ensues from these OCEs is often subsequently interpreted as a mental health issue within the child, rather than an effect of problematic parenting and culture.

If tech’s solution for tech-enabled loneliness is AI chatbots, we can’t blame the turn to easy mode entirely on Mark Zuckerberg. Therapy hacked the human desire for conflict-free relationships long before the rise of those chatbots. The original pitch of therapy was to “do the work”: to transcend personal or outside-world difficulties through the challenging space of the therapeutic relationship, in which the therapist encourages the client to critically question their choices and motivations. Gradually, however, many therapeutic spaces have become safe spaces where all stories are heard and valued equally, without challenge. This is partly an artefact of therapy’s financial model. For the most part, people feel more satisfied when listened to than given a hard time. But it’s also an inevitable result of therapy culture’s hyperfocus on trauma and ACEs: you don’t want to retraumatise your client by querying their lived experience.

With that in mind, do you think it’s bad that chatbots just reflect your words mindlessly back at you, alongside generic encouragement? That’s exactly what a lot of person-centred counselling does too. This has happened at the cost of personal growth: the therapist now, just like many of today’s parents, tries to create a space without adversity for the client, affirming and validating the client’s version of events.

That affirming tendency was partly responsible for the rise of the “affirmative care” that we saw first in gender dysphoria and now in neurodivergence. To query or challenge a client’s account of their difficulties if they consider them to be around gender or neurodiversity, no matter how biased or improbable their accounts may be, has been labelled abusive and has even been prohibited under some psychotherapeutic bodies.

Therapy culture laid the ground for the chatbot shift to affirmation and flattery. When GPT-4 started telling us how brilliant we were for asking banal questions about train timetables, we should have been more worried. And now technology’s ability to smooth human experience is making inroads into the therapeutic space, where a growing percentage of AI use is now as a quasi-therapeutic companion. If your AI chatbot is too firm or too chatty in its therapeutic role, just tweak your prompt to adjust its settings — validate me more, help me stay with my emotions — and it will be just right for where you are right now in your life.

But friction-free therapy is only half the problem. AI also creates OCEs by undermining children’s ability to understand and consolidate knowledge. A 14-year-old girl told me about a peer at school who struggled academically — until she discovered she could have ChatGPT open at all times. When asked about how she’d cope in her GCSEs next year, she shrugged and said she’d probably slide her phone into her calculator case. She wasn’t bothered about passing anyway — if answers are handed to you as soon as the question crosses your mind, where is the value of memorising facts?

Gen Alpha are right to see the internet as a vast resource for knowledge. It seems inevitable that we are moving into an era of extended cognition — the philosophical theory that the mind extends beyond the human brain in a network of information, whether social or technological. But our capacity to navigate that informational field — to know what it is that we’re looking for, and why we’re looking for it, and which bits of information are useful, and which are not — depends on our ability to reason based on information in our actual brains. Anyone can Google the First World War and get a good summary, or get Claude to adumbrate the Russian Revolution, but in order to truly understand the links between Germany’s faltering war effort and their audacious intervention to send Lenin to Russia to stoke the revolution, we need to have internalised a coherent picture of the world.

“Facts are not opposed to understanding; they enable understanding,” wrote the educationalist Daisy Christodoulou in Seven Myths about Education. Without chunks of general knowledge committed to our own long-term memory, we don’t have enough of a mental map to make good judgements, or even to make sense of new bits of information about the world.

So, as well as being emotionally harmful, the OCE-rich environment rots our cognitive abilities. It saps us of the knowledge we need to autonomously operate our AI assistants and our ability to tolerate the low-level frustration of memorising boring bits of information that will allow us to know how to think. The problem of “frustration intolerance”, identified by the psychologist Albert Ellis, cuts across all our cognition. Without the ability to tolerate minor discomfort, we cannot progress in an imperfect world.

The urge for easy mode is understandable. Humans evolved in a high-risk environment full of potential ACEs that we rarely encounter anymore in the West; being hungry and hunted on the savannah is closer to a war zone than our safe, suburban lives. Grabbing opportunities to rest would have been crucial to our survival. But we now live in an environment where rest and assistance are far too available. Just like we can tear our muscles if we work them too hard, they also break down if we don’t exercise them at all. Humans do best in an optimal zone of stress — the sweet spot where we’re challenged enough to grow but not so overwhelmed that we break down.

Evolution has supplied us with impulses to push, improve and excel as well as impulses to hide and relax. They are two opposing but complementary forces in our lives, and their balance adjusts in different situations. Pushing entails discomfort, and we naturally wish to remove such discomfort. We don’t yet know the full consequences of such removal in the early developmental window, but we are perhaps starting to see signs of it in Gen Z’s troubled relationship both with working life — with their tendencies to “quiet quit” or check out altogether — and less satisfying, less frequent formation of human relationships.

It may seem counterintuitive in an age where we talk a lot more about trauma than checking out, but OCEs carry as serious a risk as ACEs when you take them too far. The risks of ACEs might be more obvious, but the risks of checking out, of withdrawing ourselves and our children from challenges, are just as real. We’re starting to see how they play out in our children’s well-being and our shared morale. We should worry about where they lead us.

* Names and minor details have been altered to preserve confidentiality

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