Sonia Livingstone on moving child participation to the digital era

Professor Sonia Livingstone from the London School of Economics and Political Science has studied children’s online lives since the 1990s. In our interview, she shares her perspectives on how we can maximise the potential of online spaces for safe and meaningful child participation and civic engagement.

If there is one change that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated, it was its moving of people’s lives increasingly online. For children with access to digital devices and a steady connection, it has meant participating in school classes via videoconferencing, and watching YouTube videos to complement formal education.  Even before the global pandemic, children and young people were often the first ones to adopt digital technologies around the world. Although important gaps in access to internet persist, children are leading the way to a digital future: UNICEF estimates that one third of internet users are children under the age of 18.  

Yet, online spaces are rarely designed with children in mind, says Professor Sonia Livingstone, a pioneer in research on children and digital media. She started studying children’s online presence in the 1990s, when global interest in digital media first emerged, and has since lectured on, written about, and researched children’s engagement with online platforms extensively.  

The conversation around children’s online behaviour in the 1990s was, and continues to be, marked by a moral panic, Livingstone says. This contributed to her interest in hearing from children themselves about how they experience and interact with the online world. Through her research, Livingstone contributes to practical solutions to building digital environments that truly empower the youngest users.  

Balancing risks and opportunities of engagement 

Children’s increased online presence is happening against a backdrop of increasing restrictions in the physical world, Livingstone says. In 2018, a study by the British Government found that 10 per cent of child respondents had not been to a natural environment, such as a park, for a year.  The digital environment therefore becomes a portal for opportunities that children no longer have access to elsewhere. 

Children are also taking on an increasingly active role in the online environment, which has an impact on the risks and opportunities that they encounter, out of sight of parents and caregivers. Livingstone attributes this to the transition to personal devices that transformed children’s sense of ownership of the online space. It is now common in wealthy countries for children to have their own smartphones. A 2019 report estimated that, in the United States alone, more than half of the child population has their own smartphone by age 11.  

When discussing children in the online environment we are often drawn to the risks. Consequently, the discussion surrounding children’s online presence has been overwhelmingly protectionist, Livingstone says. “While protection is vital, we put children and young people’s freedoms and civil rights at risk if we become over-protective”, she says. This particularly concerns children’s right to meaningful participation, access to information, association, and their freedom of thought and expression.   

Children want to be responsible online users but lack child-friendly platforms and adult support to navigate the online world, Livingstone says. For them, the digital environment provides meaningful opportunities for identity-building, peer support, free play, and civic engagement. We often fail to give sufficient importance to these aspects when weighing in on the impacts of online environments.  

Livingstone finds that looking at the risks and opportunities of the online world through the lens of child rights is particularly helpful. Child rights provide “a holistic framework that recognises the importance of protection, but also the importance of civil freedoms and other rights”, she says. 

From local to global civic engagement 

Last year, the Committee on the Rights of the Child issued the General Comment No. 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. Livingstone was one of the specialists that supported the Committee in this work.  The General Comment emphasises that the digital environment offers children opportunities for their voices to be heard in matters that affect them. The use of digital technologies can help realise children’s participation at the local, national, and international levels. However, the potential of online spaces as platforms for children and young people’s civic engagement is often undermined by digital platforms being built around the idea of individual users. This makes them unconducive to collective action.  

Children rarely have a meaningful say in how these spaces are designed, as consultations with children are often left at the level of basic user design, Livingstone says.  Giving feedback on user experience is a long stretch from meaningful and transformative engagement with users. 

Livingstone also calls for caution when it comes to seeing online spaces as an opportunity to ‘globalise’ children’s participation without any meaningful connection to their daily lives.  For children’s digital civic engagement to be successful, it must be linked to a physical collective, such as a local youth group, that uses the online space to elevate their voice.  

This does not mean that local collectives cannot unite online, breaking down traditional barriers of time and space. On the contrary, the Fridays for Future climate movement, sparked by Greta Thunberg’s protest in front of her school in Stockholm, became a worldwide movement thanks to the savvy use of digital technology. In other words, Livingstone sees the greatest potential for online civic engagement when it is anchored in children’s lived realities. “Children live very local lives. What happens three streets away really matters”, she says. 

It means that, like adults, few children want to be truly global, digital citizens. Online communities need to contribute to children’s identity and sense of belonging to be meaningful, Livingstone says. “Think about the offer in terms of identity and belonging, as well as voice and expression.” 

Defining digital solutions for children, with children  

A wide range of stakeholders will be critical in defining future platforms for meaningful and safe civic engagement of children and young people, including policy makers, professionals working with children, academia, technology companies, and most importantly children themselves. 

 In the meantime, change has already begun to take shape. The Digital Futures Commission, which Livingstone leads, brings together actors from the public and private sectors to develop online environments that respect children’s rights. Learning from children’s free play offline, she is now working with digital designers to help make digital spaces Playful by Design. On the policy front, United Kingdom’s age-appropriate design code has encouraged the technology sector to become more attuned to the child rights implications of its work. 

Finally, children themselves are increasingly bending the norms of online engagement. Livingstone gives the example of young people’s online mental health communities that challenge the status quo of individualised online platforms and genuinely contribute to a change in the discourse around mental health.  

Yet, a lot remains to be done in terms of transforming online spaces into genuine platforms for civic engagement and child participation. 

“We need to set the bar higher in terms of what it means to listen, and what it means to be heard”, Livingstone says.  Changing this will require collaboration: bringing together the expertise of child rights specialists, the government, and the technology sector to define solutions together. 

Bio

Sonia Livingstone, OBE, is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Much of Sonia’s research is concerned with Children’s Rights in the Digital Age. She currently directs the Digital Futures Commission (with the 5Rights Foundation) and the Global Kids Online project (with UNICEF). Founder of the EC-funded 33 country EU Kids Online research network, she is a #SaferInternet4EU Ambassador for the European Commission, and has advised numerous governments and international organisations on children’s rights in the digital environment. Her publications include more than 20 books on the topic of child rights online, and the General Comment no. 25 on children’s rights in the digital environment.