Note: The discussion was held under the Chatham House Rule. All quotes have been edited for clarity, brevity and anonymity.
“We immunize children against Polio, right? If we immunize an entire population irrespective of privilege and access. What stops us from also bringing that level of agency to children?” asked a female parent during the roundtable discussion on Age Verification and Restricting Social Media for Children on May 15 in Bengaluru.
Build Child’s resilience against internet & platform harms: “We need to look at immunizing children and building resilience in the child against the harms, because the harms are not going away,” said a female parent speaker.
She made this point after saying that, as a parent, she would be uncomfortable sharing a child’s facial data for age verification with the Big tech, regardless of her allegiances. She cited DigiYatra as an example of trading privacy for convenience.
When the female speaker pointed out that the privilege of child agency is hard-earned, Nikhil Pahwa, MediaNama’s editor and moderator of the discussion, countered: What about those who don’t have that privilege?
“That doesn’t mean they will never have it. So you need to build that agency for them so that, at some point in time, they can access it,” said the speaker.
Countering this another speaker who works with schools as a teacher said:
Underpreviliged children with minimal agency can’t be exposed to everything online: “Sorry, I don’t agree with that point. We cannot say that unprivileged kids should simply be exposed to everything. It’s similar to saying, ‘I can bully you so that you become immunized against bullying.’ It doesn’t work like that.”
She pointed out that the way the children’s brain develops is “very nuanced and sensitive” and emphasized the impact such misguided, agency-led exposure to internet content, including social media and games, can have on children’s development and mental health.
UK considered child’s agency while drafting age appropriate design code: During the discussion Nikhil Pahwa recalled Sonia Livingstone, Professor of social psychology at The London School of Economics and Political Science, who was involved in drafting the UK’s age-appropriate design code and said “they created the regulation with the child’s agency in mind first.”
During the roundtable discussion, several speakers suggested various interventions that could help reduce online harm to children. Some focused on what parents can, or should, do, while others focused on the role schools can play in reducing online harms and building a child’s agency.
Why parent-first digital literacy to strengthen children’s agency could be effective? “Regulatory effectiveness has to take a multi-modal approach of even fixing accountability and responsibility,” said a speaker. He asked the following questions that could indicate where the right interventions should happen:
He then concluded: “The first responsibility is on the parent.”
Peers are not reliable, parental intervention till a certain age is necessary: “There’s a book called Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gabor Maté. If you have the time, please read it. You will understand why, after schools, parents should be the first people children turn to. Yes, as someone mentioned, children may go to their peers when they have doubts or face trouble online. But peers are not always reliable. They may not be mature enough to judge whether someone or something is safe, and they may not be able to give good advice. So, up to a certain age, parental intervention is necessary,” said a mental health expert.
What parents can do:
Parental monitoring through co-viewing till atleast 12 years: “It is really, really difficult for parents to monitor, though we recommend co-viewing up till at least the age of 12 years. We recommend that parents sit with their children when they are online. But unfortunately, it doesn’t happen. We don’t allow children to go out at night, do we? We don’t. But here, we give them a free app or a mobile to use. And the internet can be the most dangerous place to go without monitoring,” advised the speaker.
Teach children how to distinguish what is safe and unsafe: “If you do an age-based check, how the hell does it help when every parent is entering an OTP from their phone? It’s the parent’s ID that’s going into the age-based check because that is the default way children are allowed to access the world already. And the responsibility should be to teach them which OTPs are dangerous to enter, which nobody’s doing,” warned the speaker.
Talk to children about how platforms and gamification work: “Roblox is a good example where schools and I have talked to my own kid about, you know, using these tokens and other things about how gamification works. Once I told my kid, it worked really well because the kid went and talked to other kids,” said a technologist.
Gamification refers to the process of adding games or game-like elements to encourage and engage users.
Empower children to question what they read online: “Children also experience doubt about what they read on the internet. What we should be doing is empowering them to explore that doubt, not simply telling them not to question things because everything is supposedly safe for them.”
Don’t give smartphones as gifts to children: “The worst thing parents can do is give a mobile phone as a gift. The moment they give it as a gift, they lose control over it, because you can’t control gifts, right?” said a speaker.
What schools and teachers can do:
Education through schools is important alongside platform-level design changes: “I don’t think there is any other way. One can always argue for defaults and safeguards, but ultimately, this has to start somewhere within the system where children are first introduced to these technologies. And I think schools are the best place to start,” said a speaker.
Contrary to this view, another speaker from AltEd, a Bengaluru-based hands-on, practitioner-led workshop conductor, said this process is not merely about information dissemination. She said it requires a different kind of understanding and added, “It’s been a challenge across the country.” Therefore, she suggested focusing more on what platforms can do responsibly.
Conduct digital literacy workshops regularly for both children and their parents: “The role of schools is to conduct workshops regularly. That is the key thing. We can educate both parents and students. We have to tell them about the advantages as well as the disadvantages. Because, as she said, this is not going to go away. So what can we do? We have to prepare children for it,” said the school teacher.
“It’s not just about giving them agency, but about building that agency. You cannot do that without life skills, skills that many of us take for granted because we had the privilege of receiving them. Those include decision-making, critical thinking, and the basic skills needed to avoid being radicalized,” said a researcher while affirming that scientifically informed life skills interventions can be done in schools. He said he had worked with the Ministry of Women and Child Development for Mission Vatsalya, an initiative to support children in difficult circumstances through family-based, non-institutional care.
He further pointed to the binding guidelines issued by the Supreme Court in the Sukhdev Saha judgment, requiring all schools to provide mental health support to help prevent self-harm and suicide. The speaker said states are already developing school mental health policies and that integrating such measures into those policies would not be difficult. Full judgement here: [PDF]
Central govt’s Atal Tinkering Labs: The school teacher pointed to Atal Tinkering Labs as an example of how the education system can infuse digital literacy among children to strengthen their agency and decision-making. The scheme aims to teach children skills such as design thinking, computational thinking, adaptive learning, and physical computing.
“So if that can be done, why can’t this be done? Because this forms the base,” she said. “When the government can allocate huge funds and bring education reforms in areas such as technical education and robotics, why can’t we do the same for this? It is possible, sir. It can be done,” she continued.
She further raised the issue of privilege and argued that if she were a businesswoman, privileged people would naturally be her consumers because “they form a huge part of society,” indicating that reforms have to start somewhere.
Another technologist agreed and said, “Seeing how this technology is implemented, I think the agency should be with the schools.”
Children should receive sex education from schools, not through porn: Another speaker argued that while restricting harmful content online is difficult, schools and child-care institutions can still mitigate harm by strengthening life skills, including sex and sexuality education, especially for vulnerable children whose only exposure to sex and sexuality may come through pornography.
“You can’t restrict access to content because there are going to be many situations like this. But what you can do is strengthen life skills and sexuality education in schools and child-care institutions, as someone mentioned earlier, in ways that may not fully solve the problem but can still mitigate the harm. That provides children with an alternative perspective on sex and sexuality, instead of the worst possible source of information, which is pornography. That is one form of intervention.”
Less digital, more pen and paper: “There are some schools that say having a tablet is mandatory. Children have to work on their systems and there is no paper and pen. Perhaps a policy can be developed around that,” said a female speaker.
The speaker argued that there is no need for children to be a part of parent-teacher digital communication and emphasized to keep children away from smart devices and smartphones.
Countering this position, Pahwa said: “There are situations where we can’t avoid that. You need devices and internet access. What would we have done during COVID, for instance? Or what do we do during Delhi’s pollution? I would rather say schools remain shut and classes go virtual because I don’t want to expose my child to that pollution.”
Note: This discussion was organised with support from Meta and Snap. Community partners for the event included Pacta, Design Beku, and The Pranava Institute.
Read MediaNama’s whole coverage of this discussion here.
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