LLMs and Childhood Safety: Identifying Risks and Proposing a Protection Framework for Safe Child-LLM Interaction

TL;DR

This paper reviews risks of LLMs in child contexts, analyzes evidence streams, and proposes a comprehensive safety framework with measurable evaluation targets for safer child-LLM interactions.

Contribution

It offers a systematic review of child-LLM interaction risks and introduces a detailed protection framework with specific safety and security measures.

Findings

Identified gaps between perceived and actual risks in child-LLM use.

Compared different evidence streams to operationalize 'harm' and their conflicts.

Proposed measurable safety evaluation targets for child-LLM deployment.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in child-facing contexts such as education, companionship, creative tools, but their deployment raises safety, privacy, developmental, and security risks. We conduct a systematic literature review of child-LLM interaction risks and organize findings into a structured map that separates (i) parent-reported concerns, (ii) empirically documented harms, and (iii) gaps between perceived and observed risk. Moving beyond descriptive listing, we compare how different evidence streams in surveys, incident reports, youth interaction logs, and governance guidance operationalize "harm," where they conflict, and what mitigations they imply. Based on this synthesis, we propose a protection framework that couples child-specific content safety and developmental sensitivity with security-grade controls for adversarial misuse, including prompt injection and multimodal jailbreak pathways. The framework specifies measurable evaluation targets (e.g., harmful-content avoidance, age-calibrated readability, bias parity checks, prompt-injection robustness, and monitoring transparency) to support developers, educators, and policymakers in assessing and improving child-safe LLM deployments.