Attitudes and concerns about children’s use of technology have really tracked with advancements in technology and well described by the EU Kids Online research project of two decades ago, when they talked about the three Cs: ‘Content’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Conduct’ – and then later added ‘Contract’.

‘Content’ was the first public concern, before the Internet was interactive. It was all around the content that kids could be exposed to, especially adult content or pornography. There were two national task forces about that in the early 2000s. Next, ‘Contact’ [surfaced as a concern] when social media was beginning to emerge and people were very concerned about internet predation, pedophilia and sexual solicitation online. Then the third C was ‘Conduct’ when, for the first time in history, children were perceived as both perpetrators and targets of cyberbullying. The fourth C, ‘Contract’, was added probably in the next decade – that was about advertising, data misuse, fraud, ID theft – those aspects of what children face online. 

The concerns really tracked with the evolution of technology. Smartphones became a great concern much more recently, and then the metaverse and generative AI.

The metaverse is all about immersive virtual environments and it poses a lot of ‘new old’ problems – it sort of makes the digital space ‘physical’ in a lot of ways. You have technology that puts you in an environment that is actually virtual but feels very real, and people can violate your personal space. Tech companies are at pains to help adults get a sense of personal boundaries in virtual environments. For example, how do you moderate real-time conversation and movement? Do you put content moderators into the space as avatars to monitor and moderate what happens in that space? Just think about the cost of that. 

Generative AI is, for now, really much more about consuming and co-producing content, so the user and the machine or large language model produce content together, whether it is text, video, audio or still imagery. There are a whole lot of questions around the ethics of that, the power of LLMs, how much they know, how much they hallucinate, the mistakes they can make, and the incredible pressure that puts on media literacy education and digital literacy education. 

We have known for a long time that the online risk that affects the most young people is social-emotional – online harassment and bullying. It is very individual and focused on school life, which represents most of children’s waking hours. 

So the context for what happens online for children is actually school life for the most part, not the Internet. I think we as adults have made the mistake of thinking that just taking socially cruel or harassing content down will fix a problem when actually what we see online is the tip of the iceberg for children. It usually involves people they know at school, peers, some people in their social circles, and that needs to be the focus of attention for what we see online. We can actually thank the internet or social media, in some ways, for exposing some of the problems that we might not otherwise be aware of.

The focus of their concerns, where the Internet is concerned, is relational. It is really about their relationships in offline life. Those interactions are expressed online, but their questions and concerns are about how to be a good friend; whether or not that peer texting you constantly on your phone is a form of sexual harassment; how to treat people at school when they’re being mean to you or when they’re being mean to somebody else.

I think it is different from family to family. I love what a media professor whom I’ve been following for years, who’s also a parent, said long ago: that “we need to have their backs not look over their shoulders”. We need to communicate to our children that we are there for them. That will create space for tricker questions if they seem sad, or they are not eating well, or they are not sleeping. We need to monitor their social-emotional symptoms more than we monitor their Internet activity. But not too much. There’s a balance to strike. If we are constantly asking them questions, they could very well shut down. If we lock down their use of technology or have really draconian rules, they have workarounds. 

So it is a constant calibration that is all about keeping the communication lines open and, as Dr. Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist, put it recently, being a steady presence in their lives. It is just helping them know that we are there for them and that we have their backs. But we cannot remove all their agency because that is not good for their mental health. Their sense of control over their media, control over their relationships and their ability to take action to help others is really important for their mental health. 

I've learned so much from so many researchers. I think about the gardener. There's this analogy of the gardener and the carpenter made by Prof. Alison Gopnik. The carpenter builds a chair to specifications. He has complete control over the outcome. Whereas the gardener tends the garden, provides food and water, and as best they can, creates the conditions for the plants to grow in healthy ways. That's what we parents are. We're more gardeners than carpenters.

Absolutely. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has three categories of rights for children: participation, provision and protection. They cannot exercise their rights of participation without agency. What is emerging more and more in the research around kids, technology and mental health is that agency is good for their mental health. We cannot take away their capacity to act and effect change. If we don’t allow them their agency, we are basically teaching or conditioning them to be and feel helpless. Professor Ian Rivers in Scotland wrote that the single most significant predictor of suicide risk among bystanders is bullying situations was found to be powerlessness. So it is really important that we do not create the conditions for them to feel powerless. 

A millennial reporter, Kate Lindsay, has a Substack newsletter, where she recently talked about how the Internet has gone back to its pre-social days in some ways. It is mostly about watching videos, reels, TikToks and YouTube shorts. It is also about small group chat, including direct messages: SMS, texting, and small groups in WhatsApp, Discord, Instagram and Snapchat. It is becoming less performative, which I think is good for people’s mental health. They are getting tired of [performative media]. They want to breathe. Gen Zers are saying that Instagram has gotten all ‘judgey’, ‘filtered’ and ‘corporate’. It is [now] like a high school cafeteria but with a whole lot of ghost watchers. No one is supporting you anymore – no likes, no comments, just lurking. Remember when all of us adults were really worried about likes and comments? They have less impact now.