companion might seem like a good alternative to other, addictive forms of digital diversion such as YouTube or video games. But Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and paediatrics at the University of Chicago, believes parents should be wary of this technology. Her book is a passionate and reasoned defence of the need for parenting to be done by people rather than AI. She argues that “infinitely agreeable AI companions are the socioemotional equivalent of giving your child ice cream and cookies for every meal.” She describes how early interactions prepare kids for a lifetime of socialisation. “Precise neural nourishment” is required to “build a child’s brain”. (Food is a recurring analogy in the book.) This is a “sophisticated mix of language, emotional attunement and social signalling”, encompassing everything from eye contact, facial cues and laughter to mismatched expectations and delayed responses. Together these interactions help children form attachments and learn necessary social skills. For when children interact with adults and peers, they experience “micro- frictions” (squabbles over a toy, for instance, or denials from parents). The imperfect exchanges are not bugs in the system, she argues, but “extremely productive”. The experiences forge an individual’s resilience and patience. True friendships are not “built on endless harmony, but on conflict and resolution”. AI toys, by contrast, offer endless harmony. They are sycophantic, agreeing with everything their playmate says. Ms Suskind worries about what people will be like if their formative years have been spent learning from, and mirroring, artificial minds. A child who grows up with a pal that offers rapid, reliable and always-sunny replies may not be equipped for the future. They will not build the necessary “neural architecture” around emotional regulation and it will affect their future relationships. Then there is the question of who programmes these toys. AI toys in China regurgitate Communist Party dogma. In the West, Mattel, the toymaker behind Barbie and Hot Wheels, announced a partnership with OpenAI last year. Yet many are concerned about safety. OpenAI is facing several lawsuits over alleged harmful advice dispensed by its ChatGPT service.
Ms Suskind is not anti-AI in childhood. But she is against parents using AI as a substitute. It is a bad idea to get an AI companion to read a bedtime story, she writes, as it deprives your child of the multisensory experience and the “productive struggle” that comes with negotiating a routine. But it is a good idea to ask ai to recommend a book your child might like, or perhaps craft a story for them that you can read aloud. She also wants parents to think more broadly about parenting in an age of AI. She wonders whether children really need to toil for years to master factual recall, pattern recognition and analytical efficiency when these are the skills that AI excels at. If the skills needed by humans in the future are empathy, social resilience, creativity and connection, then imperfect children raised by good-enough parents will be essential. The book does not explore what might happen as AI improves. It is already easy to see how AI companions might enter overcrowded classrooms, something that could be positive if implemented well. And it is reasonable to assume that, over time, AI toys could learn from and replicate the messier aspects of human interactions in a way that primes children for success with other humans. Eventually, ai companions may become better parents than actual parents. In extreme instances of abuse or neglect, will some make the case for children being removed from their parents and entrusted to robot caregivers? “Human Raised” is a book about today, though. More than anything, Ms Suskind urges her readers to enjoy the noise of childhood. As the mother in a blended family of eight children, she asserts that adults should relish the chaos and clamour, the interruptions and noisy bickering. These are “the sound[s] of our species caring for itself”. Parents lose themselves, and their humanity, one digitally soothed tantrum and one silent car ride at a time. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/06/the-problem-with-ai-companion-toys- for-children
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Betye Saar believed thrown-out objects should have a second life The assemblage artist who challenged black stereotypes died on July 22nd, aged 99 Aug 6th 2026 Objects spoke to Betye Saar. As she browsed through yard sales and flea markets, something would catch her eye and ask to be used. A broken necklace, say, or a rusty dagger. An off-cut of wood, a remnant of coloured cloth, even a circuit board. A chipped ceramic of a cat, or a bundle of postcards. “Mother wit” would lead her to them. These things were not simply dead and discarded. They held the spirit of their previous owner, and had power. They would say, “You can make art with this.” So she did. She had always been that way. Growing up in Watts, then separate from Los Angeles, she liked to hunt in the yard to find coloured beads, paper scraps or
toys left behind. If she kept them tidily, her mother would not throw them away, so she preserved them as treasures. The Watts Towers were then going up in town, great spires of fantastical concrete and piping stuck all over with broken ceramics and glass. To her they were magic castles out of fairy tales. From so-called junk one man, Simon Rodia, had made something beautiful. So could she. Some objects, though, came to speak to her louder than others. Rusty bird cages, lengths of chain, pieces of rope, worn-out alarm clocks. Model sailing boats of the old three-master kind and palmistry hands held up, as if in despair. All these shouted slavery, and a weight of history she could sense through her skin. Her "Dark Voyage" was a brick-like box that opened to show, on one side, a plan for the packing of men on a slave ship and, on the other, an African wood carving of an upright, sleeping man. His dreams, bright-coloured electrical wires, still played around his head. Slavery's persistence in the black psyche became her most important theme. This included, most famously, her recreation of black mammies. In the 1960s they were easy to find on second-hand stalls, fat and widely smiling in aprons and kerchiefs, ready to clean white people’s houses and look after their children. They turned up as jars, figurines, tins, dolls and the jolly face on pancake-mix packets. As a black woman herself (though part-Irish and Choctaw), she decided in 1968, that year of rage, to transform one of them. Seizing on a metal memo-pad-holder of “Aunt Jemima” with a broom, she put a rifle in her other hand and, under her broom-arm, a hand-grenade. Her smiling face, with its huge scarlet lips, was made terrifying. Her slippered feet stood among cotton-bolls. A postcard displayed on her apron showed her dandling a crying white child, but it was now half-obliterated by a black- power fist. The title said it all: “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima”. This small work touched a national nerve, and helped to make Betye Saar feel that at last she was an artist. Until then she had crafted “stuff” mostly for her family, as presents, or for the artist-circles she had joined on the design course at UCLA. (Back then, in the 1940s, black applicants were steered away from pure art, but she could at least help people choose curtains.) On her own initiative she became a print-maker, a painter and an enameller, all invaluable to make backgrounds for her constructions. She knew she was good at these things. But she didn’t consider herself a
professional until “Jemima” made her name in the Black Arts Movement and, in 1974, the National Endowment for the Arts gave her a fellowship and a grant. The gun-toting mammy also gave her a theme for life. In the 1990s she began to collect old washboards, each to be scathingly repurposed. Some, interspersed with padlocks, became her “Tower of Destiny”. In “Sunnyland (On the Dark Side)”, a Sunnyland washboard was decorated with a whirligig of a black laundress and a faint photograph of a lynching. In “A Lost Innocence”, a pretty vintage christening robe was sewn over at the hem with neat labels reading “Pickaninny”, “Tar baby”, and the like. She remembered how, looking at the cloak of an African chief decorated with hair from his subjects, she had felt what was almost an electric shock. She wanted that robe to do the same. Even embroidered handkerchiefs, such as those she inherited from her beloved Aunt Hattie in a huge trunk from which, of course, she kept everything, could be charged with the sadness of hemmed- in lives. She had felt this herself. As a self-declared member of the black bourgeoisie, she wasn’t poor, and her light skin gave her a certain advantage. Nonetheless, she was the subject of “Black Girl’s Window”, one of her earliest pieces. In it, a coal-black girl stared out from the bottom half of an old window frame. Above her, smaller panes contained the moon, stars, a skeleton and a lion, Leo, her astrological sign. Her hands, pressing against the glass, were also covered with astrological symbols. All this seemed to ask what future even she, a can-do Leo, had. Tarot, palmistry, the random fall of playing cards, all intrigued her. So did magic, an interest reinforced by trips to Haiti and Africa. Not that she wanted to practise it herself, but she hoped her art might, evoking a mystical force. Her “Altars”, built like shrines to some random rescued figurine, were decked with candles and protecting eyes, as if for a ritual. She developed a lasting love of “haint blue”, almost navy-dark, which was supposed to keep ghosts at bay. In her 90s she produced two large suspended works based on old canoes: “Gliding into Midnight” and “Drifting Toward Twilight”. Both were surrounded by haint-blue sea and sky. The first, a slave-canoe, carried pleading black ceramic hands; the second carried bird cages containing bones and branches, a calming homage to Nature. The boats spoke of
transition, from place to place and also from lower to higher states of being. She liked to think of that as she worked, fuelled by Dr Pepper and pieces of watermelon, swapping out one object for another, preferably in silence. Yet ambient sounds were all around. Some came from her neighbours in Laurel Canyon, where she had lived for decades. Many more, rising sometimes to a clamour, came from the battered treasures in her studio, each begging her for new life. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/obituary/2026/08/06/betye-saar-believed-thrown-out- objects-should-have-a-second-life