In the Growing Up Digital report published today, a 12-year-old girl moves seamlessly from talking about free beauty products to discussing ‘dick pics’. I was shocked when I first read this - I hadn’t realised that ‘dick pic’ had become normalised language for 12-year-olds.
All of us with children have had a lot of growing up to do with the internet. But we haven’t had to do it as fast or as intensively as our children have. With even three- to four-year-olds now spending over eight hours a week online, and 12- to 15-year-olds more than 20 hours a week, we must ensure we are better preparing young people to navigate the opportunities – and pitfalls – of the internet.
We have to move beyond lessons about safety to a much broader emphasis on agency and resilience online. We need a digital citizenship curriculum for 4- to 14-year-olds, led as far as possible by older children. Children, particularly teenagers, do not listen to adults about the internet – we panic, we look confused, we take away their phones – but they do want advice from older peers.
This curriculum would teach children about their rights and responsibilities online. They would learn how to critique the content they view: for instance, how to assess representations of body image and how other people portray their lives online, how to spot fake news, and how to disengage and control their internet use. They would learn about bullying and respect, about how they present themselves and what they might unwittingly be revealing.
Social media companies have a responsibility to help children, too. We showed a group of teenagers what they had really signed up to with their social media accounts, and they were shocked at the loss of control over their personal data to which they had unwittingly agreed. The standard terms and conditions for social media sites used by children are not just incomprehensible, but unnecessarily long, and are therefore largely ignored by kids. “They write it like this so you can’t understand it”, as one 13-year-old commented ruefully after being shown what the Ts and Cs really meant. The law firm Schillings has drawn up a simplified, two-page version which is understandable to teenagers, found in my report.
We also learned that teenagers face big problems in getting content removed, whether posted by themselves or by somebody else about them. That is why I am calling for the creation of a children’s digital ombudsman to mediate between social media companies and children, to help them enforce their rights.
It’s all about restoring the balance of power between these global companies and our children: giving children information, knowledge and critical skills, backed up by their own digital champion. I am confident Mumsnet parents will agree. We surveyed 900 of you and found the overwhelming majority worried about time spent online, over-sharing personal information and sleep deprivation, as well as the familiar worries about inappropriate material and stranger contact.
I hope you will find time to read my report and join me in fighting for a fairer online deal for our kids.
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Guest post: "We need to do more to equip our children for life online"
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MumsnetGuestPosts · 05/01/2017 12:00
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