Enable children’s learning, free play, sociability and belonging, and their fullest development

Today’s digital environment has wowed children with opportunities for learning and social, cultural, recreational and playful activities. 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.

The principle of development draws together three sets of children’s rights:¹⁶⁹

• Education: making education (formal, non-formal, informal) accessible and affordable to children of all ages and circumstances to enable learning and, more ambitiously, children’s fullest development.
• Culture: enabling children to enjoy their own cultures and others’, and allowing children to ‘profess or practice’ their religion and speak their languages.
• Play, leisure and artistic activities: the right to play, recreational activities and rest.

While adults have the power to provide these opportunities, too often these are insufficient, inappropriate or restricted from children’s points of view.¹⁷⁰ Society is often ambivalent about the role of digital technologies in children’s development, being unclear which digital activities bring benefits or harms. Innovators have a crucial role to play here, along with civil society and child rights advocates, in building a digital world in which children can fully develop.

“I’ve been using [Yousician] for a year, and I try to teach myself the electric guitar… it has developed me so much… it can go at your own pace, and I can do what I want. If I want to learn shredding which is something you can play really fast on guitar, I can start learning that straight away.”

Child aged 13-14, Essex

Ideally innovators would:

prioritise creative resources and imaginative, open-ended play over pre-determined pathways built on popularity metrics or driven by advertising or other commercial pressures. ¹⁷¹

Digital technologies also facilitate remote learning and connection – this was vital during the COVID-19 lockdown and other emergencies that disrupt in-person education. When it comes to formal education, evidence of pedagogical benefits – especially in the face of the data protection risks children are exposed to when using EdTech – is less than compelling, and better designs are needed.¹⁷² However, digital technologies should not be promoted as substitutes for face-to-face learning: children want and need social interaction within school environments, which is also hugely important for their social and educational development.

Design cases

To ensure that children enjoy the full benefits of the digital environment, innovators need to contribute to education – including media and digital literacies about the nature of the digital environment itself. This can be facilitated through child-friendly terms of service and transparency on how innovators treat children, including how they handle children’s data or provide help or redress.¹⁷³ By providing effective support and systems for reporting and managing content, contact, conduct and contract risks, innovators can help children develop key ‘digital competencies.’¹⁷⁴

“Can you make more apps based on Toca World? Because it is so creative… lots of children … can do something creative instead of watching something.”

Child aged 7-8, greater London

However, innovating for children’s development is not and should not exclusively be about enabling children to navigate online risks and harms. It is equally about ‘creating space for play, including a choice [for children] to chill’.¹⁷⁵ Play can benefit from open-ended design, which prioritises ‘features that offer easy-to-use pathways, flexibility and variety as these support children’s agency and encourage their imaginative, simulating and open-ended play’.¹⁷⁶

Indeed, to support children’s development, innovators should:

allow for experimentation, recognis[ing] that exploration, invention and a degree of risk taking is important in children’s play and that the burden should not fall on [children] to always be cautious or anxious, or to follow rules set by others.¹⁷⁷

Innovators should also celebrate racial, cultural and linguistic diversity in their digital offering, for example by making available ‘skins’ that represent different ethnic origins and cultures in Minecraft,¹⁷⁸ and making content available in multiple languages and for those of different abilities. Innovators should think carefully about the impact of the features and operation of their products and services on children’s opportunities to play, learn and develop. They should prioritise design options that inspire children’s imagination and engage children in age-appropriate ways to promote learning, enjoyment, belonging and development.