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Enable children’s learning, free play, sociability and belonging, and their fullest development.
While the digital environment provides children with opportunities for learning and social, cultural, recreational and playful activities, child development requires resources and designs that offer creative outlets to encourage imagination, educational opportunities of all kinds, resources that recognise and celebrate cultural and linguistic diversity, and an enabling environment for children to thrive in, belong to and pursue the opportunities they choose.
This is one of 11 child rights principles applicable to the digital environment. Together they encompass the full range of child rights covered by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
Summary of the key evidence from ySKILLS
Summary of the key evidence from ySKILLS
Children with higher information navigation and processing skills reported better school performance. The individual increase of communication and interaction skills had a positive effect on school performance. The higher a child’s academic achievement, the better their digital skills.
Skills are interdependent: retrieving and assessing the quality and veracity of information are considered as important skills to acquire, but require both digital and other (critical, interpretative) skills.
There is a need to go beyond operational skills into more social digital skills and the role of digital skills as ‘life skills.’
“In Mali I did not have a mobile phone. I left Mali and went to Gabon, where I got a cell phone and it helped me a lot to be able to communicate in French, I watched videos to learn French and English, on YouTube and Google Translate.” (Mali teenager, UK)
The level of skill achievement relies, in fact, on the children themselves, whether they engage with all this digital stuff in their private lives and whether they are interested in it.” (education expert, Finland)
ySKILLS is an EC-funded research network aiming to identify the actors and factors that undermine or promote the wellbeing of children aged 12–17 in a digital age. More about ySKILLS
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