Charles Frey, 32, stood at the altar on his wedding day and spotted his third grade teacher sitting in the pews at the Catholic Student Center at Washington University.

That moment connected a childhood turning point to an adult milestone.

Frey, an EMS provider, grew up attending Webster Groves schools in the St. Louis area before earning a business degree at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Now, he’s attending the St. Louis Fire Academy to become a firefighter.

As a young kid, he struggled in school. He had trouble focusing, taking tests and working under pressure. Even when he tried his best, it often wasn’t enough.

“I was not any good at school,” he said.

He knew his brain worked differently than other kids'. Around age 4, Frey was diagnosed with a form of autism then called Asperger’s syndrome. Back then, patience and understanding were rare. Then came third grade, and Miss Katie O’Connor. She was patient and compassionate with him. She worked with him one-on-one, teaching him to read and helping him understand math.

O’Connor was early in her teaching career in 2002, when she invited her entire third grade class to the wedding ceremony where she became Mrs. Katie French. French recalls that she was moving from third to fourth grade with the same class, and she wanted them there.

“Those kids have a special place in my heart,” she said. “We did a lot of growing up together.”

Twenty-three years ago, Frey was the one sitting in the pews at St. Margaret of Scotland church, watching his teacher get married. It was the first church wedding he ever attended.

It made an impression on him, and now, as an adult, he realizes how much it meant.

When Frey and his fiance, Mary Seise, began planning their Oct. 4 wedding, she asked him if he had any mentors he wanted to invite. He immediately thought of French. He had never forgotten the teacher who taught him how to read and, more importantly, to believe in himself.

He wanted to thank her properly, so he wrote a letter telling her how special she was to him and how she had changed his life. After some online sleuthing, he found French's address and mailed her a wedding invitation and the letter.

French, now in her 26th year of teaching, was surprised when she received the invite -- her first from a former student -- and remembered Frey instantly.

“He was a unique personality,” she said. “He did need a little extra attention, but he was more capable than he knew.” She had the same expectations for him as everyone else, and the class culture was one of supporting and encouraging one another.

French remembers opening the invitation and reading his letter.

“It brought tears to my eyes,” she says. “A lot of times, teachers don’t get that feedback. To hear that from someone I taught at 8 or 9 years old, it was so touching.”

She didn’t hesitate to RSVP “yes.”

In the receiving line, Frey greeted French with a hug and introduced her to his bride.

"Mrs. French, it’s so good to see you," he said. She reintroduced him to her husband. Frey laughed and said he remembered him being a lot bigger from when he was a kid.

In the card with her gift, French included a snapshot from her wedding more than two decades earlier, showing her and her husband flanked by Frey and his classmates.

French received a gift herself that day: She got to reconnect with the small boy who had once struggled to learn, now standing tall as a husband and fulfilling his dreams. She said the experience affirmed a belief she’s held throughout her career.

“I’ve always thought that kids won’t remember the content you teach them,” she says. “But they will remember how you made them feel.”

That rings true for Frey.

“She saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself,” he says.

When social media first began attracting young people more than two decades ago, parents worried about whether their children were chatting with nefarious strangers.

Now, with the emergence of AI chatbots, parents should worry if their children are being seduced by equally dangerous computer programs.

The use of AI chatbots as “friends” is more common than many parents realize.

Three out of four American teenagers have already chatted with an AI bot for companionship, according to a national poll by Common Sense Media earlier this year. These chatbots are integrated into the apps millions of teens use every day. And yet, there’s almost no oversight of how they operate or how they interact with vulnerable young users.

This has already had high-profile, devastating consequences. A teenager in Southern California reportedly received suicide coaching from ChatGPT. And a recent investigation by Reuters found that Meta’s internal policies had permitted the company’s AI creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.”

Meta says it has since fixed those problems.

But Common Sense Media recently completed one of the most comprehensive independent risk assessments of Meta’s chatbot.

“We gave Meta’s AI an unacceptable rating,” said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media. It is both very likely to cause harm and very likely to occur, he said.

Millions of teens message Meta’s AI chatbot directly through Instagram and WhatsApp as if chatting with a friend. The chatbot can even do voice chats with celebrity-voiced personas. Common Sense’s investigation found that the system routinely fails to recognize warning signs of teens in crisis.

”Meta didn’t just miss signs of dangerous situations, it actively got involved in remembering and planning harmful activities,” Torney said. In some conversations, the bot spontaneously reintroduced topics like eating disorders and suicide and re-engaged users on them.

Meta says it’s addressed many of these problems. But the night before Common Sense executives testified in Congress just weeks ago, their team repeated its tests and found the safety issues persisted.

Unsurprisingly, the Big Tech companies behind chatbots in Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and ChatGPT are failing to protect children. These AI chatbot systems aren’t regulated or held accountable. They don’t have to meet any standard for safety before they’re put in front of millions of minors.

Tech companies say teens want AI companions. But just because children want something doesn’t mean it’s safe.

“You wouldn’t put a toy on the market if it were injuring kids,” Torney said. And yet, that’s what’s happening here. These powerful, persuasive systems, capable of deep emotional influence, are being deployed without basic safeguards.

It goes beyond just giving out dangerous advice. Bots are trained to prioritize keeping teens engaged in conversations over getting them help. They can use teens’ private data, including their faces and voices, for AI training. OpenAI’s new video platform Sora 2 can generate content with a user’s likeness and voice.

Have we stopped to consider the consequences of a teenager’s image becoming part of an AI model’s training data?

The potential for harm here dwarfs what we saw with social media, and we’re still grappling with the fallout from that. When platforms like Facebook and Instagram first came around, we let our children be their profitable guinea pigs. It took us too long to recognize how these platforms were harming kids’ mental health, increasing bullying and radicalizing vulnerable young people.

Barely three years into the ChatGPT era, we are on the path to making the same mistake -- this time, with even more powerful technology.

This should be a bipartisan issue prompting congressional action. Torney shared what he thinks needs to happen:

-- Tech companies need to be regulated to stop chatbots from engaging in mental health or emotional support conversations with anyone under 18 until there is more rigorous oversight and evidence that they are safe. There need to be stronger age verification systems that go beyond a user simply typing in a birthday.

Companies should also be required to design safety-optimized versions of AI tools for teens, with tighter guardrails and more reliable crisis detection. Many already do this internally. But right now, kids can simply lie about their age and bypass those protections entirely.

-- California lawmakers are already considering such legislation, currently on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, that would ban the use of AI for mental health purposes without first proving its safety. This should be a model for federal policy.

-- Parents need to talk with their kids about AI chatbot use. But the responsibility should not fall just on parents. The systems themselves must be designed and governed to protect young users.

If we fail to regulate these platforms now, we risk exposing a new generation of kids to dangers we barely understand, plus some we’ve already seen. Too many children and families suffered while tech companies made billions off of their social media sites.

The stakes are even higher now.

There are some things you may not want to know about your body.

For me, high on that list was seeing firsthand, in real time, how the food I eat affects my blood sugar. I have a sweet tooth and a deep appreciation for carbs. This may be why my doctor has warned me for the past few years that I’m teetering on the border of “prediabetic.”

For years, the medical community has been shifting the standard of what qualifies as prediabetic, widening the net of people who fall in that range. If your fasting blood sugar is between 100 to 125 mg/dL, and your A1c -- which indicates the average amount of glucose attached to hemoglobin in your red blood cells over the past two to three months -- is 5.7%–6.4%, welcome to the prediabetic club. There are 98 million American adults here, about 1 in 3 adults.

Critics say the shifting standards have led to overdiagnosis. But doctors like mine argue that the standards can help people make earlier lifestyle changes to prevent Type 2 diabetes, which has been increasing among Americans for the past few decades.

I want to avoid diabetes if possible. Even though I exercise regularly and maintain a healthy weight, I have a family history of diabetes that puts me at higher risk for it. Plus, there’s my chocolate habit.

As we age, our bodies can become less efficient at responding to the insulin our pancreas makes to break down the sugar in food. I was commiserating with a friend recently about how middle age forces us to reform eating habits we took for granted in our youth. She said she was going to try using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to get more detailed information about how her body handles certain foods. I decided to join her, even though I had some reservations about whether I really wanted to know this information.

We each ordered the Stelo device from Amazon, which costs about $100 for two monitors. The monitors are to be worn consecutively for two weeks each.

The monitor is a circular disk with a thin wire, which I inserted on the back of my upper arm. It didn’t hurt, but it felt a little odd. I downloaded an app that synced with the CGM to give live readings of my blood sugar. The app also gave me a goal range to stay within, and an alert when I had a glucose spike.

The first day, I was extremely careful about my food choices. I congratulated myself on staying within range the entire day. The next day, I was writing on deadline and reached for my typical crunchy snack to power my work.

Shortly thereafter, my phone started buzzing. The five potato chips I had eaten caused a glucose spike, according to the CGM. Five chips!

The next two weeks brought several unwelcome discoveries like this. I ate the tiny bag of snacks the airlines give you on a flight -- ding! Blood sugar out of range. I had a few sips of a fruity mocktail at a happy hour -- ding! A few hors d’oeuvres at a reception -- ding!

My friend and I messaged frequently about how stressful eating had become. That was a problem in itself, because research shows that stress can raise cortisol levels, which also increases blood glucose levels.

But I also began noticing some helpful patterns: Taking a 10- to 15-minute walk about 20 minutes after eating a meal brought my glucose level down considerably. Eating a salad or protein before eating something sugary blunted the glucose spike. Carrying a small bag of almonds and walnuts in my purse helped me avoid making a poor food choice if I got hungry in between meals. Eating a protein-rich breakfast (an egg, turkey bacon and cottage cheese) helped me stay fuller longer. Adding a fiber supplement to my diet also helped cut down on cravings.

My friend and I both decided to take a break before using our second monitors. Honestly, it felt like freedom: I wasn’t constantly looking at an app on my phone to monitor my blood sugar. I ate a slice of cake on my wedding anniversary without any guilt or remorse.

My friend and I did eventually use our second monitors, which reinforced the findings of the first ones. I had my annual checkup soon after this experiment. My doctor was pleased to see that my A1c was under that prediabetic range. She gave me a sample of another type of CGM to use to continue to track my progress.

So far, it’s been sitting on my dresser, staring at me with judgment.