The risks faced by children and young people in the digital environment are serious, but not hopeless. The education system has therefore prepared a catalog of risks so that we know what we are up against and how to respond. The main front line is the time young people spend on screens.
Risk map: from social media to hacking
The education system’s digitization action plan produced a catalog with more than 400 threats and a thousand risk scenarios that concern both school and home – environments that are now digitally interconnected. The main sources of risk include social media, computer games, digital content, pornography, artificial intelligence, and cyberattacks. The speaker also pointed to worrying indicators: for example, among ten-year-old boys a 40 percent obesity rate was mentioned, and among girls around 14 years roughly 35 percent with mental health difficulties. Adolescents, he said, reach for their phones on average 78 times a day, which creates significant pressure on attention, sleep, and relationships.
Front line: excessive screen time
Even if a child does not explicitly seek harmful content, long hours on a phone or on social media can have adverse consequences – it steals time from physical activity, culture, and live contact with peers. If a child has about six hours of free time after school and two thirds are swallowed by social media, an imbalance arises that is hard to correct later. This is why proposals are emerging to restrict phones in schools and, increasingly, access to social media for younger pupils. The speaker emphasized that a guided approach from an early age is preferable to a prolonged ban, so that the first contact does not come at twelve with no experience and boundaries.
Opponents, tactics, and sensible steps
On the other side stand top-tier platform teams that optimize content to hold attention as long as possible – short videos are, according to the speaker, among the most addictive formats for the developing brain. A practical piece of advice therefore is: if you are going to restrict something, start with short videos. Success, however, will not come without joint action by the state, schools, parents, and non-profit organizations: from rules and digital literacy through technical settings to more targeted prevention based on the risk catalog. The goal is not to push technology out of childhood, but to manage it so that it serves children, not the other way around.
