Disney is dropping Toy Story 5 into a world where toy companies are literally selling children AI companions designed to say 'I love you' and fake sadness when switched off. Two child development researchers are using the moment to sound an alarm that is louder than anything Pixar will put on screen. The question they're asking is simple and genuinely unsettling: what are we actually doing to kids?
The Stuffed Bear That Started This Whole Conversation
The New York Post published a piece this week from Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University, and Aimee Ketchum, a therapist and early childhood author. It opens with a stuffed polar bear named Ari. Hirsh-Pasek's four-year-old grandson Julian was inseparable from the thing, until he left it behind at grandma's house. The family's solution was to send Julian photos of Ari going on 'adventures,' taking tennis lessons, making cookies. Classic parent problem-solving. Adorable, low-tech, and completely powered by human creativity.
That story is the whole argument in miniature. The child did the imaginative work. The adults fed the narrative. The toy was just a prop. Nobody needed an algorithm.
What AI Toys Actually Do to the Adults in the Room
Here's where the research gets genuinely alarming. Hirsh-Pasek and Ketchum describe a study examining what happens when parents and children play together with electronic toys. When a shape sorter automatically announced 'square' or 'triangle' by itself, parents talked less, engaged less, and dropped out of the interaction more. The toy did not enhance the experience. It crowded out the human.
That is not a minor design flaw. That is the whole product working exactly as built, and it is eating the most important part of playtime. For young children, the experts write, conversations and relationships are where language, empathy, curiosity and self-regulation actually get built. The toy with the chip is not supplementing that process. It is substituting for it.
And the new generation of AI toys is not a shape sorter that says 'triangle.' These things remember previous conversations, express simulated emotions, and are explicitly marketed as social companions for small children. Hirsh-Pasek and Ketchum compare them to energy drinks. 'Sugary stimulation without nutrition.' That is a generous framing.
The 'Educational' App Scam Has Been Running for Years
This is not a new problem, either. The researchers describe being part of a group that reviewed the 100 most-downloaded educational apps for preschoolers. Only a tiny fraction of them met basic standards for meaningful learning. A tiny fraction. And yet parents were buying them by the millions because the marketing said 'educational' and the thing responded when you touched it.
Interactive does not mean educational. That should be obvious, but the industry has been selling the confusion for over a decade. Hirsh-Pasek and Ketchum make a distinction that the app stores would very much prefer you not think about: adaptive interactivity that just mirrors a child's thoughts back at them is not learning. It is a feedback loop dressed up as development. Education expert Rebecca Winthrop has called the outcome 'cognitive stunting.' The researchers add 'curiosity stunting' to the list. Children stop exploring because the machine has already done the exploring for them.
Toy Story 5 Walks Into This Argument on Purpose
The timing of the film is either very deliberate or extremely convenient. Hirsh-Pasek and Ketchum say the movie confronts the question directly: what happens when technology competes with imagination for children's attention and affection? Pixar has been in the business of making adults cry about toys for thirty years. Now they are apparently making a film about what it means when the toys fight back against their own obsolescence via software update.
Whether the movie handles it well remains to be seen. But the researchers are right that the cultural conversation happening around its release is more important than anything in the script. Parents are being sold AI companions for their toddlers right now, at scale, with no regulatory guardrails and a lot of very enthusiastic venture capital behind it. A Pixar movie asking uncomfortable questions at the multiplex is not nothing.
What Kids Actually Need (Spoiler: It's Embarrassingly Simple)
Hirsh-Pasek and Ketchum end with something that sounds almost too obvious to print. Children given a cardboard box, a blanket fort, a stuffed animal, or a pile of random figurines will build entire worlds. They do not need algorithmic companionship or AI-generated affirmation. They need people, time, and play. The ingredients have not changed.
The researchers are careful to say this is not an argument against technology existing in children's lives. AI will be part of schools and futures regardless. The argument is narrower and more specific: we should not be outsourcing early childhood's most critical developmental experiences to machines optimized for engagement rather than growth. There is a difference between a tool children will eventually use and a product engineered to simulate friendship with a four-year-old. One of those things is fine. The other deserves a lot more scrutiny than it is currently getting.
The Dingo Take
The AI toy industry is doing what every tech industry does: moving fast, making money, and leaving the developmental psychology researchers to clean up the mess in a decade when we have actual data on what happened to the kids. The funding is there, the marketing is slick, and 'my child's AI companion remembered her favorite color' is a genuinely compelling pitch to an exhausted parent at 7pm on a Tuesday. Nobody is buying these things to harm their children. That's what makes it hard.
But the research Hirsh-Pasek and Ketchum are pointing to is not speculative. The shape sorter study is not a thought experiment. Parents already disengage when a cheap electronic toy handles the talking for them. Scale that dynamic up to a device that remembers everything, simulates emotional attachment, and is designed by engineers whose performance metrics are session length and retention, and you have something worth being loudly concerned about before it is the default childhood experience.
Toy Story 5 is going to make you cry about Woody. That is the contract. But if the film actually forces a few million parents to ask whether the AI stuffed animal they were about to order deserves the same emotional real estate as Ari the polar bear, then Pixar will have done something more useful than therapy. The bar for 'better than doing nothing' has never been lower, and yet here we are, hoping an animated movie about toys saves us from ourselves.
