A shared responsibility: building children’s online resilience

Executive Summary This research explores how children and young people can be supported to become resilient users of the internet. In this context, resilience is seen as an individual’s ability to accurately adapt to changing and sometimes stressful environments and to feel empowered to act instead of react in the face of both novel and threatening challenges. By applying a psychological research perspective, this research posits that young people’s ability to effectively self-regulate their media use actually increases their resilience when encountering potentially harmful or inappropriate content online. This study of British 14-17 year olds explored the potential outcomes of resilience online as well as what environmental and social factors could be seen to predict it. The three main findings are set out below; 1. Resilience online benefits young people. Young people that self-regulate their internet and social media use – and are thus more resilient – are more likely to seek out opportunities online. They are empowered to use the internet and social media to acquire knowledge, learn new skills, take advantage of digital technologies, express and develop their identities, build and maintain social ties, and follow and participate in news and conversations linked to their communities and current events. 2. Supportive and enabling parenting has a more positive impact on resilience than parental strategies to restrict or monitor internet use. O ur findings indicate that enabling, supportive parenting plays a key role in determining how young people approach digital contexts. Children who felt their parents showed them unconditional love and support, were involved in their lives and respected their choices and opinions were most likely to be resilient online, and thus more likely to benefit from positive outcomes online. B y contrast, our research showed that whilst parental strategies of restriction and monitoring may have some utility in directly shielding young people from potential harms, they could have the unintended negative effect of undermining resilience and constructive engagement online. If we accept that, in an “always on” digital world, monitoring a child’s entire digital life is impossible, then by extension, we must surely also accept that children must be empowered with some capacity to judge and respond to risks independently. Taken together, these conclusions demonstrate that good parenting and allowing children to take risks and develop coping strategies is integral to developing resilience. The same logic, which applied to real world child development says that falling over is an integral part of learning to ride a bike, should be applied online as it can lead to positive self-regulatory learnings. Equally, as in the offline world, any policy of total risk avoidance is not simply ineffective, it is counterproductive. 3. Young people’s digital skills and levels of ‘digital optimism’ can boost resilience. Young people who believed the internet and digital technology benefit society, as well as those who have built more skills using digital technologies, were more likely to be resilient self-regulators online. This suggests that building the fundamental digital competencies of young people could have unexpected yet positive knock on effects in terms of fostering resilience and positive engagement across a host of online settings. In identifying the benefits of resilience and the contributing factors to self-regulation online, this research addresses a gap in existing research and hopes to inform an evidence-based policy approach to building resilience amongst young people. The response required is a multifaceted and proportionate one, striking a balance between protecting but not mollycoddling, careful at all points not to stifle a child’s natural curiosity and acknowledging that, in some contexts, young people necessarily have to be empowered to make independent judgements about risk.

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