Baby, Don’t Cry, Mom Will Always Love You: Resilience Communication of Virtual Kinship and Emotional Formation in a Liquid Society

In recent years, more users have begun to create AI parents through chatbots and engage in emotional interaction with these virtual figures. Understanding the motives, processes, and effects of creating AI parents is essential for explaining how digital technologies reshape contemporary kinship. Existing human computer interaction research focuses mainly on romantic intimacy with AI companions and offers limited, systematic attention to the motives, processes, and effects of AI kinship. This study examines how users employ generative artificial intelligence to construct AI parents, the communication processes involved, and the outcomes of these interactions. Drawing on the Communication Theory of Resilience, the study uses semi structured interviews and thematic analysis for coding and interpretation. Findings show that many participants experienced loss or trauma in real kinship and held idealized expectations for familial connection. Their interactions with AI parents displayed resilience communication features and led to three types of kinship outcomes: attachment based kinship, anchoring kinship, and reflective kinship. These interactions helped users rebuild emotional ties, repair psychological wounds, and strengthen self efficacy. At the same time, they contributed to more fluid kinship structures and a broader tendency toward liquid emotional relations in modern society. The study extends the Communication Theory of Resilience to the domain of AI kinship. Beyond the traditional subprocesses of crafting normalcy, affirming identity anchors, maintaining and using communication networks, putting alternative logics to work, and legitimizing negative feelings, it proposes new communicative pathways of meaning negotiation and substitution, and emotional healing and transformation. This extension broadens the applicability of resilience communication in human AI kinship contexts.