Beyond TikTok : How AI is Becoming Gen Z’s Best Friend.

by Sabrina E.Bouker | Mar 2, 2026

And What We Can Do About it.

In their excellent book “Hold on to your kids” famous child development experts Dr. Gabor Maté, and his co-author psychologist Dr. Golden Neufeld, suggested that society is pushing the youngest generation to be more peer oriented than parents oriented.

According to them, looking for moral guidance, emotional support, and unconditional love, has shifted, among teenagers, from their parents to their peers.

Obviously, they won’t find any of the latter, which explains the rise in difficulties between parents or educators and teenagers, and most importantly the negative consequences on their own development and personality.

Having friends is important, but both experts argued that parents should matter more than peers.

Our problem today is a monster that doesn’t sleep or stop! and is champion in figuring out the next move to produce the dopamine boost so yearned for by a young brain not fully mature!

I’m not saying this to scare you, I’m a huge believer in AI, more particularly in good, ethical AI that will enhance our humanity, but my goal is to raise awareness about it.

Thankfully, the ideas proposed in the book “hold on to your kids” are still relevant today; Parents, educators, adults should take back the lead, be the role model for the next generation, building strong relationships based on unconditional love and moral values.

But also, it is imperative that we create the appropriate nurturing environment, at home, at schools or with their peers, that would incite the next generation to be the producers, the critical thinkers, not merely consumers or victims of these technologies.

This is how we will ensure the development of healthy intelligent humans.

A Word on AI

This week, I’m completely obsessed with this maths teacher, Grant Sanderson, the best you will find on the internet. In the following video, he brilliantly simplified how ChatGPT works. It is still a bit technical but really worth checking out even for absolute novice. “But what is GPT”

But what is a GPT? Visual intro to transformers | Chapter 5, Deep Learning (youtube.com)

My Current Reading

Still on this one 🙂
Currently reading “From the Child King to The Tyrannical Child.” The book is in French; from Dr Didier Pleux, clinician psychologist, expert in child development, Edition Odile Jacob,2002.

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