OpenAI is adding parental controls to ChatGPT. It will allow parents to manage how teens use the AI chatbot. The feature will start rolling out from next month and is said to address the growing concerns about teen safety and well-being as more and more young people integrate AI into their daily lives.
With this feature, parents will be able to link their account with their teen’s (minimum age 13) via an email invitation. Once connected, parents can control how ChatGPT responds with age-appropriate rules, manage features like memory and chat history, and even receive alerts if the system detects signs of acute distress in their teen’s usage. These safeguards will be enabled by default. However, parents will have the flexibility to adjust them.
OpenAI says these features build on its ongoing efforts to make ChatGPT more responsive in sensitive situations, especially around mental health. The company has been working with an Expert Council on Well-Being and AI, made up of specialists in youth development, mental health, and human-computer interaction, as well as a Global Physician Network of more than 250 doctors worldwide. Their guidance has shaped how ChatGPT is trained to handle scenarios involving emotional or psychological distress.
Furthermore, some of these changes will also tap into OpenAI’s newer “reasoning models,” like GPT-5-thinking, which are trained to deliberate longer before responding and are better at following safety guidelines. OpenAI says it will begin routing conversations that appear to involve acute distress to these reasoning models, regardless of which version a user originally selected.
Apart from that, the company is also working to make ChatGPT more usable. For example, recently, a new feature named “Branch from here” was spotted in the web app, which will allow you to fork a response into a new conversation thread. The company is also working on a feature called “Thinking effort”, which will give you control over how much reasoning power the AI applies while generating responses.
