However, evidence shows it’s highly unlikely bans will positively impact the youth mental health crisis in this country. Indeed, bans may make our children even more vulnerable online.
Children and young people go online primarily to socialise with their peers. Online spaces are one of the few avenues our overscheduled children have to interact freely with each other, which is crucial for their wellbeing.
Not just safe, but optimal
Safety by design is not the whole solution. Building on the efforts to develop industry codes, industry and government should come together to develop a wider range of standards that deliver not just safe, but optimal digital environments for children.
How? High-quality, child-centred evidence can help major platforms develop industry-wide standards that define what kinds of content are appropriate for children of different ages.
We also need targeted education for children that builds their digital capabilities and prepares them to deal with and grow through their engagement online.
For example, rather than education that focuses on extreme harm, children are calling for online safety education in schools and elsewhere that supports them in managing the low-level, everyday risks of harm they encounter online: disagreements with friends, inappropriate content or feeling excluded.
Heed the evidence
Some authoritative, evidence-based guidance already exists. It tells us how to ensure children can mitigate potential harms and maximise the benefits of the digital environment.
Where the evidence doesn’t yet exist, we need to invest in child-centred research. It’s the best method for gaining nuanced accounts of children’s digital practices and can guide a coherent and strategic long-term approach to policy and practice.
Drawing on lessons from the COVID pandemic, we also need to better align evidence with decision-making processes. This means speeding up high-quality, robust research processes or finding ways for research to better anticipate and generate evidence around emerging challenges. This way, governments can weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of particular policy actions.
Technology is not beyond our control. Rather, we need to decide, together, what role we want technology to play in childhood.
We need to move beyond a protectionist focus and work with children themselves to build the very best digital environments we can imagine. Nothing short of the future is at stake in doing so.
Amanda Third, Co-Director, Young and Resilient Research Centre/Professorial Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.