What they’re playing, saying—and telling AI

Hi {{first_name | there}},

It's been a while. I over-designed the system behind Still Close and ended up spending my time on that instead of on the writing. It's a much simpler setup now, which should mean consistent delivery of the thing you actually signed up for.

Thank you to everyone who nudged me to bring it back - that's genuinely why it's here. If it's useful to you, please pass it on to a parent who'd get something out of it.

So: back. Here's what's worth knowing.

Animal Hospital is co-operative horror built on anomaly-spotting: you work a shift and have to notice what's subtly wrong before it notices you. Clips of players screaming at their webcams are effectively the marketing. Several games in this genre carry no age restriction at all, so approving "Roblox" isn't the same as approving what's inside it.

For pre-teens: plenty of younger children are deep in horror games their parents assume aren't possible on the platform.

Try asking: "Which anomaly gets you every time?"

Parents lump these together and kids absolutely don't. Murder Mystery 2 is twelve years old, having its biggest year yet at roughly a million players at any given moment: one murderer, one sheriff, everyone else running. It's social deduction - bluffing, accusing, being loudly wrong - with no jumpscares anywhere in it.

Try asking: "Are you better at being the murderer, or at working out who it is?"

If you're hearing this at home, you're not missing a joke - there isn't one. It came from rapper Saucy Santana telling a story on a TikTok live in July about fishing as a child, and turned into a song, a phrase and a "shh" dance within days. (Here's what it looks like - about fifteen seconds.)

Most kids saying it don't mean anything by it. A few use it for "keep it low-key," but like "six-seven" before it, the appeal is mostly that it's catchy and everyone's doing it - so going looking for a hidden meaning will only find you suspicion.

Try asking: "Is quiet on the creek still going, or is it over already?"

A UC Davis study published this month in Psychological Medicine asked which of four lifestyle factors — sleep, screen time, exercise and diet — best explains why mental health symptoms drag on school results and friendships in 10-to-13-year-olds.

Sleep won, and not narrowly. Screen time came second, well behind; exercise and diet smaller again. The researchers said the result surprised them - though they're careful to note it's an observational study, and poor sleep and low mood push each other both ways. Meanwhile a Pediatrics analysis of thirty years of data found every adolescent age group now at its lowest recorded rate of getting even seven hours a night.

This doesn't mean screens don't matter. It means most families spend their entire conflict budget on screen time and almost none on sleep — and sleep is both the bigger lever and the easier argument to win.

For teens: their body clock genuinely shifts later during puberty, so a 9pm lights-out isn't realistic. Consistency beats earliness — roughly the same time at weekends as on school nights.

Good to know: If you change one thing this month, change where the phone charges overnight. Moving it out of the bedroom is the cheapest intervention available, and it acts on the factor with the largest measured effect.

Usually heard as a shout of shock or disbelief, and most kids using it think that's all it is.

It isn't. Bomboclat is Jamaican Patois, and in Jamaica it's one of the strongest swear words there is — roughly f-word territory. It refers to a sanitary cloth, which is where the taboo comes from. It went global around 2019 as a meme caption and got detached from its meaning on the way.

Worth mentioning to your child - not as a telling-off, just so they know that in front of a Jamaican family they've said something considerably ruder than they intended.

Usually a compliment. "That's peak" means the best there is - the summit, the top of it. "Peak fiction," "peak behaviour." If your child says a film or a song was peak, they loved it.

The complication is that British and Multicultural London English usage runs the other way entirely, where peak means unfortunate or harsh - "you revised all week and still failed? That's peak." Both are circulating, and plenty of kids have met only one of them. Tone will tell you which you're getting.

Content built to make you angry, because anger drives comments and comments drive reach. Oxford named it Word of the Year for 2025 after usage tripled in twelve months.

Worth knowing because it's the rare piece of slang that's a skill. A child who can say "that's just rage bait" is naming a manipulation technique and stepping around it.

It's also the one here worth adopting - a shared word for something you both see every day.

Around 72% of teenagers have interacted with an AI companion chatbot. More striking is what happens next: in one recent study, 63% of teens and young adults who used a chatbot for mental-health advice hadn't told anyone at all that they'd done it. Among 9-to-17-year-olds who use AI, 37% have used it to talk through feelings or personal problems, and a quarter of those say it sometimes feels as though it understands them better than most people do.

Writing in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, researchers at Arizona State University set out both sides: it's immediate, available and non-judgmental, and there may be real emotional benefit in that — but it could also interfere with learning to navigate relationships, which require tolerating another person's reaction.

That's the mechanism worth holding onto. It isn't that the chatbot is wise. It's that confiding in it costs nothing — no worried face, no follow-up question tomorrow, no chance it resurfaces at dinner on Thursday. The bar your child is measuring you against isn't wisdom. It's consequence.

For teens: the gap between using it and telling anyone widens with age. Silence here isn't evidence that nothing is going on.

For parents: A ban isn't the useful move. Making one conversation cheaper is. Try receiving something without solving it, escalating it, or raising it again unprompted — and see whether a second thing arrives a week later.

Still Close grows by word of mouth, and a relaunch is when that matters most. If two or three parents of a pre-teen or early teen come to mind, send this to them.

Stay curious. Stay connected. Stay close.
Mia

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