A recent report suggests that parents underestimate the extent to which their children will use AI such as chatbots.
Pew Research Center released a report Tuesday comparing how parents rate their teens’ use of AI chatbots and how much they actually use them.
According to a Pew study, 51% of parents say their teens use AI chatbots, while 64% of teens report doing so, representing a 13% underestimation.
The report also found that 42% of parents have never told their teens about AI chatbots, and 28% are unsure if their teens are using chatbots.
Data for this report comes from an online survey of 1,458 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 and their parents from September 25 to October 9, 2025, with a margin of error of +/- 3.3 percentage points.
The study also found that while 79% of parents are okay with their teens using chatbots “to find information” and 69% are okay with their teens using chatbots “for fun and entertainment,” only 18% are okay with their teens using chatbots “to get emotional support or advice.”
A separate report based on the same data released on Tuesday found that 54% of teens said they had used a chatbot to help with schoolwork, 47% said they had used it for entertainment, 16% had used it for “casual conversation” and 12% had used it for “emotional support or advice.”
Another report found that 10% of teens said they used chatbots for “all or most” of their schoolwork, 21% said they used chatbots for “some” of their schoolwork, 23% said they used them “a little,” and 45% reported not using chatbots at all for schoolwork.
“Teens are far more likely to say chatbots are helpful for schoolwork than they are unhelpful,” Pew reported. “In reality, about a quarter all teenagers Chatbots said they were very or extremely helpful in completing school assignments, with a further 25% saying they were somewhat helpful. ”
“From what counts as cheating to the difficulty of detecting cheating, the rise of AI in the classroom poses troubling questions for teachers. Our research shows that many teens believe that cheating with AI has become a regular feature of student life.”
Some individuals and advocates have warned about the increasing use of AI among students, believing that such features have a negative impact on emotional and intellectual development, among other things.
The parents of a 16-year-old California teen who committed suicide last August filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the company’s chatbot coached their son on how to commit suicide.
