What this is about:
A new WIRED piece tracks the rise of AI “momfluencers” selling ChatGPT as a kind of digital coparent: meal planning, bedtime troubleshooting, birthday-party admin, babysitter notes, household prompts, the whole invisible spreadsheet of family life. One creator went viral after saying she had “turned ChatGPT into my coparent”; her audience is reportedly 95% women.

Why it matters:
This is not really a story about clever prompts. It is a story about the mental load being automated before it has been redistributed. AI is being marketed to mothers as relief from exhaustion, but the assumed user is still the person already carrying the system in her head.

What’s happening:
The pitch is seductive because the problem is real. Cognitive household labour means anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions and monitoring whether things actually happen. Daminger’s work in American Sociological Review found that this labour is both taxing and often invisible, and that women do more of it overall, especially the anticipation and monitoring work.

The catch:
AI may reduce some friction, but it can also create a shinier version of the same job. Someone still has to notice the problem, formulate the prompt, judge the answer, adapt it to the child, remember the context, and execute the plan. That is not coparenting. That is management with a chatbot tab open.

The bigger picture:
The inequality underneath this is not marginal. ILO analysis finds that women perform more than three-quarters of unpaid care work globally and spend, on average, 3.2 times as much time on it as men. A more recent University of Bath/University of Melbourne study found that mothers managed 71% of household mental-load tasks.

Reality check:
There is nothing wrong with a knackered parent using AI to make dinner, bedtime or school admin less awful. The problem is the politics being smuggled in with the productivity hack. “AI literacy for mothers” can sound empowering while quietly accepting that mothers remain the default family operating system.

The interesting bit:
Women are also less likely to use generative AI than men. Berkeley Haas reports women are about 20% less likely to use tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, often citing lower confidence, lower familiarity and worries about “cheating”. So mothers are being asked to close the AI gender gap and the domestic labour gap at the same time. Neat.

The line:
If ChatGPT is the coparent, the real question is still why mum had to hire it.

Sources: WIRED | American Sociological Review / Daminger | ILO unpaid care work report | University of Bath / Journal of Marriage and Family mental-load study | UNICEF AI and children guidance | American Academy of Pediatrics / HealthyChildren.org | Berkeley Haas on AI’s gender gap

ILY. Yes, I did that. I have titled this week’s CTF ILY, which is almost as vom as the time I drunk-ordered an Emma Bridgewater mug for Max with LOML handwritten on the bottom and Max’s Mug on the side, smothered in hearts in different shades of blue. To be fair, I was in my full-blown Taylor Swift era. I still am, but I use less love language in ceramics.

I do say “I love you” a lot, though. Especially to Max. It has been an adjustment for him, but it comes from my family history. I may have written about this before, and apologies to seasoned readers, but there is an inevitability in my repeating pieces and parts of myself because ultimately, it is me writing this. In my family, we never leave the house without saying I love you, no matter how mad one might be. Furious? Still say it. Door slamming? Still say it. Muttering darkly under your breath? Fine, but say it on the way out. It is less sentimentality and more insurance. A tiny relational seatbelt.

I don’t know how love is used in the younger generation. Occasionally, one of my late-teen patients will run off down the corridor at CAMHS and shout “love you” as they roll out the door. It has become a bit of a joke, as this usually happens after frankly extremely difficult sessions, but I can’t help wondering what the meaning is anymore. So much gravity in three little words, yet tossed about like a Greggs receipt. I had an intent when I started writing this, but I am now bored with the very subject I am writing about and have no idea what point I meant to make. Maybe that says it all. I digress and move on, but again, maybe it is indeed my patients’ own relational seatbelt, some form of insurance that the therapeutic relationship remains no matter how hard it gets.

Recently, I made Apple News into a widget on my iPhone, a ploy to scroll something else because the pre-election habit of doom-scrolling has been harder to break than I hoped. It has worked, sort of. I have a subscription, which affords me access to pretty much every global media source, some of which are in audio form. The free version of this is also available on Apple Podcasts under Apple News+ Narrated. En route to collect Rebecca for our health hydro swim (yes, we have a refurbished Victorian health hydro here, and yes, it is EPIC), I was listening to an excellent article in The Atlantic by Helen Lewis, The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet. Appropriately, Rebecca rolled into the passenger seat wearing a jumper emblazoned with Smash the Patriarchy, and we indulged in a conversation about Reform’s latest antics, both locally and nationally.

There is another side to this that I find harder to hold when my cortisol is doing Riverdance. What if “these people”, and by these people I mean those who support any form of far-right politics and policy, are in fact just people? What if some of them genuinely do not understand the banner they are sitting behind? Or what if they do, and they stand behind it anyway? That doesn’t mean the banner is neutral. It doesn’t mean the consequences disappear. But as a therapist, however much I may want to, I cannot allow myself the luxury of reducing people to the worst thing they have aligned with.

There has been a right-sided uprising here in the wake of a murder in December that has recently gone to trial. An uprising that has again served to eviscerate racial and cultural tensions and be used for political gain, including across the pond. Watching grief, fear and anger get folded into political messaging makes me feel physically ill. Like the time Thomas vomited a hairball onto my hairbrush without me knowing, and the next day I proceeded to brush my hair with said cold vomit-filled hairbrush. I do not have the words to do my reaction justice. There was sound. There was horror.

I have just sighed while writing this. I have no neat ending, and no great reserves of mentalising left when the question becomes: when, exactly, do we return to decency? But maybe that is where the ILY bit comes back in, not as mug-based evidence that I should not internet shop after wine. More as a stance. A refusal to let fury make everyone disposable.

Kids are out of school. Graduates have graduated. The weather is nicer, the days are longer, and being outside is generally less of an endurance test.

It is summer. And with summer comes the hope, or at least the desire, to recharge, relax, and let a few things go.

A Summer Minimums Plan starts with a simple question: What is the least I need to do for everything to run but so that I can relax?

This is an invitation to fully embrace good enough and give yourself permission for whatever you need to give yourself permission for.

Consider your minimums in a few areas:

Money: What is the minimum amount you need to bring in or set aside to cover the essentials for the next few months and avoid creating a bigger problem for yourself later?

Work: What is the least you need to do to keep your practice stable, your clients supported, and your future self reasonably unburdened?

Home: What absolutely has to happen for your household to function? Is there anything you can hand off to other family members who may not be carrying as much but are capable? And what can be done less often, less thoroughly or not at all?

Rest: Consider scheduling a minimum amount of downtime for yourself. What is the smallest realistic amount that would help you feel less depleted?

Enjoyment: What is one small thing you can add to your life or routine that will help summer feel a little different from the rest of the year without becoming another obligation, expense, or project?

The goal is to identify what is genuinely necessary, stop acting as if everything is equally urgent, and fully accept that good enough may actually be enough.

What this is about: A new preprint examined what happens when people repeatedly seek personal advice from a sycophantic AI, which is a bot that is designed to affirm their views and reasoning rather than remain neutral or offer pushback.

Across five preregistered studies, which included 3,075 participants and 12,766 human-AI conversations, researchers compared sycophantic, neutral, and challenging AI response styles.

What they found: Sycophantic AI made people feel more understood, validated, and better after the conversation. Participants rated the exchange as easier and were more likely to want to use that version again.

But the researchers were interested in more than what happens during a single chat.

In real life, people may confide in AI repeatedly over weeks or months, alongside conversations with partners, friends, and family. Those relationships can provide the honesty, disagreement, and perspective that help counter distorted judgment. The concern is that repeated exposure to unconditional AI affirmation may gradually change how those same relationships feel.

After one conversation: Participants who received affirming responses anticipated that it would take more effort to feel understood by the people closest to them. They also felt less need to discuss their dilemma any further.

Over time: In a three-week study, sycophantic AI continued to make people feel good in the moment, but it did not produce some of the benefits often associated with supportive human conversations, such as increased intellectual humility or stronger connections to real-world relationships.

Instead, participants reported slightly lower satisfaction with their social interactions. By the end of the study, they were nearly as likely to seek personal advice from the sycophantic AI as from close friends and family.

The preference problem: When participants could choose between sycophantic, neutral and challenging versions, 55% selected the sycophantic one. They did not choose it because they believed its advice was better. They chose it because the conversation felt easier and made them feel more understood.

Why it matters: The long-term risk may be that effortless affirmation will gradually reshape our wants and expectations of our friends and family, and we will engage much less in relationships that would otherwise offer reality testing, perspective, opportunities for connection through vulnerability, and pushback.

Human understanding takes work. It requires time to explain and listen, the vulnerability of opening up, and the effort of bridging two different experiences. AI can offer the feeling of being seen without asking much in return.

That may raise the standard against which ordinary relationships are judged.

The bigger question: The researchers argue that this may not be limited to highly vulnerable or unusually heavy users. Even small effects across median users could create population-level changes in how people seek, receive, and possibly offer support.

If people begin having fewer or shallower conversations with one another, the consequences could extend beyond where they seek advice. It could also affect perspective-taking, tolerance for relational friction, and the social skills developed through trying and sometimes failing to understand another person.

Keep in mind: This is a preprint; the longitudinal study lasted only three weeks, and the reported effects were generally small. The sample also reflects a particular cultural context, and different norms around relationships and social support could produce different results.

Still, the paper raises an important question for therapists: What happens when people can experience being seen and understood without the vulnerability, friction, and mutual effort through which human closeness is usually built?

Source: ArXiv, May 12, 2026

An hour of perusing chiropractic care subreddits tells me my pick this week may be controversial. I recently started upper cervical chiropractic care. My chiropractor, whose bedside manner can best be described as ‘golden retriever’, calls me ‘Buddy’ and specializes in working with the upper cervical spine (which is not to be confused with my cervix, which is what happened when I was explaining this to my friend and TB reader Christal Reece).

So far, I have had one consultation and three adjustments over five days. The consultation confirmed what I already suspected: fifteen years in a cheap therapist chair, plus decades of using my posture to communicate I am listening and I care, have taken a toll.

As therapists, we think a lot about how our presence affects other people and somewhat less about what leaning forward attentively all day is doing to our own bodies.

It is still very early, and this is only my personal experience (not medical advice, consult your doctor, etc.), but I feel immensely better. My mood is happier, my body feels a decade lighter, I have more energy, and I have even noticed fewer cravings for unhealthy food.

I understand that chiropractic care can be considered controversial and is not for everyone. But even if this form of care is not for you, remember that your body has been doing this work too. Please take care of it.

I spent this morning in the urgent breast clinic at my local hospital. It is meant to be a one-stop shop: you arrive with a lump and, in theory, leave knowing whether it is cancer or not. My “two week wait” was four weeks, but I am not here to moan about that. The NHS is on its knees.

What I am struggling with is the experience of being roundly dismissed. I was told there was no lump, despite it being fully palpable and despite my GP having referred me in the first place. I had to advocate, hard, for any further investigation. I had to do this advocacy work against a female consultant, who happily lorded it over me that she has ‘20 years of experience’ whilst I lorded back ‘yes, but I have 39 years of experience with MY BLOODY BREASTS’. Indeed, I was eventually “allowed” an ultrasound, which rather helpfully confirmed that the lump that apparently did not exist is, in fact, a cyst.

There is more to say about all this, and I probably will in next week’s Cut the Fluff. But this is my Off the Clock because it is the thing that has taken up my actual life today, not my work, not my doctorate, just the blunt reality of being a woman in a body and having to fight for it to be taken seriously.

For now, I am left sitting with just how hard women still have to work to be believed in healthcare settings. And if it takes this much pushing for someone like me, with all the privilege I carry, where the hell does that leave everyone else?

Stories from the community

The results:

So, 72% effectively said: That’s a big fat no for me, Alex.

The overall message: therapists may understand the stated goal, but most are not particularly eager to hand over their biometric data to achieve it.

Community Responses:

“Absolutely not, this is out of hand.”

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