Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming important in healthcare, especially for children. AI can help improve medical work, watch patients from far away, and give care tailored for each child. It offers benefits for doctors and families. But as AI tools are used more in the U.S. healthcare system, there are ethical and privacy problems. These issues are especially important when the technology involves parents and caregivers in children’s care.
Hospital leaders, doctors, and IT managers have important roles in planning and putting AI to use. They must handle these issues carefully to follow laws and keep trust. This article talks about ethical and privacy challenges in using AI for children’s healthcare and parental involvement. It gives useful information for healthcare teams using AI in clinics. It also shows how these problems can affect care quality, following rules, and how the organization works.
In the last few years, AI has been added to many children’s health services. AI helps create personal treatment plans, make medical decisions, read images, and talk with patients. Children’s care can be complex because kids grow and change fast. AI helps by analyzing data and giving support. AI programs called agents can also help parents and caregivers at home, outside the hospital.
For example, Stanford Medicine showed how AI agents work like virtual helpers for parents and kids. They help watch over health and support learning. At Stanford’s Health AI Week 2025, experts talked about AI tools for kids, like virtual elephants made to help children learn by interacting (Catalin Voss, co-founder, Ello Technology). These examples show how AI tools are not just for doctors but also help families with daily health tasks.
Using AI in children’s healthcare brings special ethical questions different from adult care. Pediatric AI must think about how children grow and change, from newborns to teenagers with new needs.
Key ethical challenges include:
AI tools for involving parents collect and study child health data all the time, often outside the doctor’s office. These tools include mobile apps, telemedicine, or chatbots powered by AI. Privacy is very important here.
Using AI successfully needs doctors and leaders to accept and understand it. Dr. Veena Jones says that if clinicians don’t accept AI, the tools might not get used well or may be misused. Training programs that teach AI basics help doctors see AI as a helper, not a replacement.
Kimberly Lomis, MD, said AI tools should act like teachers within clinical workflows. They should help providers adapt and manage work pressure. Hospital leaders and IT teams must also provide training and change how work is done to make AI use smooth.
In pediatric healthcare, paperwork and admin work take a lot of time. A 2024 study said that if primary care doctors did every task, they would need a 26.7-hour day. Tasks like documenting, scheduling, and managing records take time away from patients and families.
AI can help by making these tasks easier and improving communication with parents:
By using AI this way, pediatric practices in the U.S. can work more efficiently and keep or improve family-centered care.
Healthcare organizations must act to stop AI from causing health gaps. AI makers, healthcare leaders, and policymakers should:
The Coalition for Health AI, led by Brian Anderson, MD, works with medical groups to create AI tools for different specialties, like pediatrics, to support fair AI use in clinics.
Hospital leaders and IT managers face many challenges using pediatric AI at their sites:
AI’s growing use in U.S. pediatric healthcare has the chance to change care models:
But these benefits depend on carefully handling ethical and privacy issues, and getting doctors and families to accept AI.
This review highlights the important balance needed between new technology and responsibility when using AI in children’s health and parental involvement. Healthcare leaders and technology teams in the U.S. must watch these challenges closely and create AI systems that respect children’s and families’ rights and needs. With clear education, transparent rules, and ethical oversight, AI can be a useful tool to improve care and partnership without harming privacy or fairness.
AI agents can extend pediatric care beyond clinic visits, offering continuous in-home support to children with special needs. By partnering with daily caregivers like parents and teachers, AI can help monitor development, provide educational assistance, and deliver personalized interventions, filling gaps where pediatricians see patients only intermittently.
Challenges include small pediatric datasets, rapidly evolving patients from neonates to teenagers, differing regulatory and ethical standards, and the risk of applying adult AI models to children, which may lead to inaccurate outcomes. These factors require fundamentally different AI development approaches tailored to pediatrics.
True patient and parent partnership from the early design stages builds trust and ensures tools address real community needs. Performative involvement, like superficial focus groups, fails to capture priorities. Effective partnership treats patients and parents as co-investigators or governance members for equitable, relevant AI solutions.
Education must focus on increasing AI literacy among clinicians, emphasizing how AI tools can support rather than replace their role. Training should blend clinical decision support with ongoing learning, preparing providers for AI-integrated workflows and fostering buy-in amidst rapid technological changes.
AI chatbots and agents can help parents practice complex conversations, understand medical information, and receive real-time guidance, thereby improving communication quality, reducing anxiety, and supporting shared decision-making between pediatricians and families.
AI can automate documentation, charting, and scheduling tasks, freeing pediatricians to focus more on patient and parent communication. This efficiency allows providers to dedicate cognitive resources toward personalized care and empathetic interactions.
Ensuring fairness requires using diverse, representative pediatric datasets and ongoing bias detection during AI training. Transparent evaluation metrics must measure equity and avoid replicating existing health disparities, particularly for vulnerable pediatric populations.
Ethical concerns include safeguarding child privacy, obtaining appropriate consent, addressing data security, ensuring age-appropriate content, and balancing AI assistance with preserving human empathy and connection in care.
Pediatrics demands recognition of prolonged developmental trajectories and family dynamics, making human connection vital. AI must complement this by supporting caregivers and providers without supplanting the trusted relationships essential to children’s long-term wellbeing.
Future AI systems may offer real-time developmental monitoring, personalized learning plans, behavior interventions, and integrated communication platforms linking pediatricians, parents, and educators, shifting care from episodic clinic visits to continuous, home-based partnerships improving lifelong outcomes.
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