On Thursday, I went to a roundtable event about children’s rights in digital spaces. I might be a hammer looking for a nail, but it feels like everyone is talking about kids online at the moment: in the UK, the film Molly vs the Machines aired on Thursday evening; a week ago, the UK government launched their consultation to gather opinions on children’s digital wellbeing; in Australia, where a social media ban has been in place for under 16s for three months, very early indicators are coming in.

Over the weekend, I talked with a few friends and parents about this topic, and also about how their kids are doing. One friend told me that she’s nervous about her 14-year-old going around their neighbourhood, because he keeps getting threatened by older kids who hang out on the streets he walks past every day. This is an awful feeling to have, especially in the neighbourhood you live in, and there are different ways of interpreting this, of course. One of the thoughts that came to my mind when hearing about their experiences was how in the last couple of years, the city of Berlin has closed a number of youth centres in that very same neighbourhood.

When we talk about children online, we tend to focus on the digital sphere. At the roundtable event I attended, we talked about regulation attempts of Big Tech, and potential levers for change that policy shifts could make. We talked about gaps in evidence about how social media affects children and young people. But we didn’t really talk about the bigger context in which children are living: wars, the climate crisis, and (honestly, quite understandable) anxiety about, well, a lot of things about the world that they’re inheriting.

Amidst all that, as my SUPERRR colleague Elisa has written “the lives of children today are heavily structured, controlled, and regulated by adults. Their range of movement has decreased dramatically in recent decades, and spaces where they can act independently and without supervision are becoming rare.”

I know more parents than I’d like who use things like AirTags, or ‘Find my Friend’ functions on their children’s smartphones to track their kids. Children start being surveilled from the moment they’re born, thanks to baby tracking apps tracking their wet or dirty nappies, the amount of bottles they drink, or their mood. Then it can often continue, with daycare and nurseries providing ‘real-time updates’ seen as a huge benefit (which, in economies where childcare is a paid-for service, makes a difference).

Children might not think of it quite as explicitly as this, but I wonder what it feels like to grow up knowing that your parents or caretakers are literally watching your every move – that when you get home that day, your parents will tell you about the cute photo nursery sent them while you were playing outside. Imagine the norm being that people in your household are able to see what you’re doing, and that they openly comment on it, even when they’re not physically there. Then put that into context that children who are experiencing or exposed to violence, are most likely to experience it in the home or within the family structure. It’s those kinds of edge cases (and sadly, they’re not so edge) that I fear we’re forgetting in the bigger debate here.

When I told my five-year-old that I was going to an event about children’s rights and technology, he told me: “You should really try speaking to some real children. You grew up a long time ago, without mobile phones even… it’s so different for me, you wouldn’t even know.”

I’m biased, but he’s right. In Germany, there’s a dearth of participatory research involving children (though I was very happy to learn on Thursday of Dr. Sandra Cortesi’s work involving youth at all stages of her research). In other places in the world, it’s a bit more normalised – in the UK, there’s longitudinal research over a number of years speaking to the same group of 8-17 year olds, for example, among many others. In the US, this report by my former Data & Society colleague Amanda Lenhart was released a couple of weeks ago, coining the term the Family Tech Cycle. Her research puts kids’ use of tech into context with the ways in which families as a whole negotiate technology, and involved a whole lot of participatory research and co-design sessions.

I’d love to see more research like that, which looks at children and youth experiences online within the broader context of their family, the intertwining of the digital and physical lives, the lack of spaces for kids to interact with their friends without being under adult surveillance. And of course, when we talk about “kids” online, we mostly mean kids from WEIRD countries. Here in Europe, we’re rarely (if ever) talking about the children who are mining the cobalt in batteries- at least not in the same context.

Here’s what I’m seeing: as people are getting more and more specialised into specific areas of digital society, those siloes are getting more and more separated from essential other areas. What might it look like if we took the time to join up those dots, look at the problem in all its rich complexity, and come up with solutions based on what children and young people say they want?

We’ll be working on this issue more at SUPERRR over the coming months; if you want to talk more about it, I’m all ears.

Links from around the web

• It’s Ramadan, and whether you’re celebrating or not, it’s a great time to up your donations, if you’re in a position to do so. Some fundraisers I’ve been appreciating: Nejma Collective’s fundraiser supporting Muslims in prison in the UK (did you know 18% of the England and Wales prison population is Muslim while Muslims make up only 6% of the general population?); and Lemon Tree Collective, a collective of mutual aid workers supporting Palestine.

• This article I wrote for Alliance Magazine about the need for more accountability in fiscal hosting is now free from the paywall.

• Not new, but I stumbled across it again recently - Xiaowei Wang and Ann Chen’s fantastic Field Guide to Semiconductors. I love a good accessible explanation to a complex topic!

• Adding to the long list of under-researched topics: period blood, which could be the source of cervical cancer screenings.