Crises have gone digital – but our understanding of children is still analogue

Today, children and young people encounter the world’s conflicts, disasters, violence, dangerous trends, social tensions, and extremist communities directly through their phones – often alone, and without adults to help them make sense of what they are seeing.

The government’s proposal to introduce an age limit for social media is therefore understandable. It sends an important signal: children should not simply be left to platforms designed to capture attention and amplify emotion. But the proposal also raises a broader question: what exactly are we trying to protect children from? Are age limits the right solution? And what do we do for the children and young people who are already navigating digital spaces where news, identity, social relationships, conflict, and crisis all flow together?

If the only answer is to delay access, we risk overlooking the fact that children’s and young people’s wellbeing is shaped not only by when they gain access to social media, but by how they encounter it, how they understand it, and how they are supported in dealing with what happens there.

This is precisely where the limitation becomes clear: our understanding of children and wellbeing is still, to a large extent, analogue. We ask children how things are going at school. Whether they have good friends. Whether someone has been mean to them at break time. But many of the experiences that carry the greatest emotional weight for children and young people today take place in digital spaces that adults rarely see and often only partially understand.

This applies both to the communities that strengthen children and to the experiences that make them feel unsafe.

 

Adults must help children make sense of what they see 

At Epinion, we encounter this across projects on children’s and young people’s digital lives. We see children exposed to disturbing news and crises without necessarily having adults to talk to about what they are seeing. We see young people constantly comparing their own lives to the carefully curated realities of others. We see online communities that can foster both belonging and loneliness. And we see young people searching for answers to difficult feelings and thoughts in digital communities where algorithms often reward the polarising rather than the nuanced.

It is not necessarily new that children are affected by the world around them. What is new is the intensity, the speed, and the constant accessibility of today’s digital media environment.

There are no longer clear breaks between “the world” and “children’s lives.” News feeds, social relationships, trends, gaming, entertainment, and serious content all coexist in the same feeds. A child can go from a funny video to images of war, self-harm, or looksmaxxing in a matter of seconds — without context and without an adult there to help make sense of the experience.

At the same time, there is strong reason to believe that children often carry the worries this creates on their own. Many parents find it difficult to talk to their children about serious online events because they fear making them more worried or insecure. That is an understandable impulse. But in a digital reality, silence is not neutral. When adults do not help children understand what they encounter online, algorithms, influencers, comment threads, and online communities often step in to fill the void.

And the paradox is that children are, in fact, asking for adults. Many children point to the adults at home as the people they most want to talk to when something makes them feel frightened or uneasy. Not necessarily because adults have the answers, but because children need help understanding and placing what they experience. Children no longer experience crises from a distance. They carry them in their pockets. And that is precisely why adults must not approach their children’s lives only with an analogue understanding of care, wellbeing, and preparedness — they also need to take children’s digital reality just as seriously as we take their physical everyday lives.