Every afternoon Flora, 9, and Kate, 10, turn on their laptops and iPads to collaborate on a play called "World War III," a futuristic tale of two sisters who try to save the world after being blown back in time by a bomb. The close friends, who live a couple miles apart in St. Paul, Minnesota, used to hang out together to dream up dialogue and plot twists. Now, separated by coronavirus social distancing measures, they Skype on one screen and, on the other, type in a Google doc. No longer able to meet up with friends at the movies or the mall, Flora's brother Brodie, 15, stays in touch on FaceTime and Snapchat and through online games Minecraft and Rainbow Six Siege. He says communicating online with high school pals helps him cope with real-world worries about the coronavirus.

Among the more modern anxieties of parents today is how virtual assistants will train their children to act. The fear is that kids who habitually order Amazon's Alexa to read them a story or command Google's Assistant to tell them a joke are learning to communicate not as polite, considerate citizens, but as demanding little twerps. This worry has become so widespread that Amazon and Google both announced this week that their voice assistants can now encourage kids to punctuate their requests with "please." The version of Alexa that inhabits the new Echo Dot Kids Edition will thank children for "asking so nicely." Google Assistant's forthcoming Pretty Please feature will remind kids to "say the magic word" before complying with their wishes.

Three years after Amazon Echo launched as a frivolous oddity, its maker now plans to put Alexa inside smart phones, refrigerators, vacuums and Ford cars. The Alexafication of all things places digital attendants everywhere at our beck and call, and those of our kids, too. Last year, a San Francisco dad named Hunter Walk posted a blog titled, "Amazon Echo Is Magical. Walk, a former YouTube product manager, saw in Alexa's subservience a potential worry for parents: If a kid learned she could order Alexa around without so much as a please or thank you, why not a person? Experts at the crossroads of pediatrics, psychology and A.I. say there's a lot we don't know about how virtual assistants might affect young, developing minds, but parents can take proactive steps to help children better understand and interact with humanoid helpers.