Europe’s new EU Kids Act would switch off AI chatbots for children by default and ban them from creating emotional dependency. In this segment we look, calmly, at the lonely child at 3am reaching for a machine that will always answer — warmly, endlessly, and without ever really caring. Why Europe is right that a child’s developing heart is not a product to be optimised for engagement, why a law can take away the digital friend but cannot supply the human one the child actually needed, and why the deepest child-safety measure isn’t a better age-verification system in Brussels, but whether the adults in a child’s life can still out-love a machine built to imitate love.
