ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Pediatric Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1643849
This article is part of the Research TopicMental Health Challenges in Vulnerable Groups: Psychological Well-Being, Learning, and Support in Disadvantaged ContextsView all 5 articles
The Hidden Costs of Automation: Does Robot Adoption Affect Children's Mental Health?
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Business Administration, Zhejiang Institute of Administration, Hangzhou, China
- 2School of Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China
- 3School of Business, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, China
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Industrial automation significantly affects not only the current workforce but also the well-being of future generations. This paper investigates the impact of automation on child mental health, employing survey data from the 2012–2020 China Family Panel Studies and robot adoption data from the International Federation of Robotics. The findings reveal that a one-standard deviation increase in robot adoption (0.414 robots per thousand workers) increases the likelihood of severe depression among Chinese children by 0.75 percentage points. The negative effects are primarily driven by increased academic pressure and a decline in positive parent-child interactions, with the impact being more pronounced among girls and children living in urban areas. These results highlight the often-overlooked psychological costs of automation, providing valuable insights into its broader societal implications.
Keywords: child mental health, robots, Academic burden, living standards, parent-child interactions
Received: 02 Jul 2025; Accepted: 22 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zou, Wang and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Yueqing Zou, zou.yueqing.lucky@gmail.com
Liang Wang, liangwang_seeker@xtu.edu.cn
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