Hi, I'm Martin, I'm a Policy and Advocacy Officer at COFACE Families Europe
We're an umbrella NGO that has many member organisations across Europe. Our
main activity is lobbying: so we lobby with the European institutions to
make policies that protect children better online. So what is positive content?
Positive content simply has to
respond to certain criteria, but I think it mainly is what it develops
in the child. There is a lot of research on child development and the
different kinds of things they need to learn and develop: empathy
social-emotional learning, principles like democracy, participation, creation.
All of the contents that develop these kind of traits, that are
linked to research about a healthy child development are useful and are positive.
But obviously they're also influenced about the context in which they happened
so a child, left to themselves, with no parent to guide them may
not experience the same benefits as someone that has this kind of parental
supervision. The main challenges for
parents would be certain structural ones for instance the
vastness of the internet: there's just so much out there. Where do you start?
And then ironically, the opposite, namely the restrictive access to the internet via
certain filters like Google and Facebook, which sort of restrict your world view,
customise content, so you cannot access to the full picture. And there's
this contradiction between the two and you don't really know how to
insert yourself in that. And then there are wider structural problems like for
instance something that we advocate for in my organisation: giving parents
time: more time to spend with their kids. Obviously, if you're not there, then
that's a big challenge, right? I mean, work-life balance for instance, these are
policies we push forward making sure that parents are present and have the
time to deal with those two issues that I've just talked about. You know, make sense
of all that vast information and find the right things for their children.
As a new parent I feel very optimistic, but that's obviously a truncated
sentiment because I know so much about all of this - this is my job. But I can see
that there's a lot of things going on in creating content.
The open-source movement is huge. Take examples like Minecraft, which blew up
completely, but that was just the initiative of one passionate developer.
Look at all the things that emerge from it:
the creativity that it brings, the association, the
building skills: everything. There are other issues like Portal for instance.
Have you ever heard of portal? It's this kind of first-person shooter where you
have to solve a puzzle in a map and get to from one point to another: it's based
on first-person shooter which is something that most parents would say "oh,
that's something ugly, you know, people shooting at each other..."
But there's somebody who just decided to do something great with it and make players solve
puzzles and it really opens your mind. There are so many good
initiatives out there, like Wikipedia for instance. I mean it's insane how
much information you can find out there that is great. And coding
for kids like Scratch for instance which is a language that was openly developed for
helping children learn. So there's just a ton of things, I'm very excited and I
look forward to my child growing up and being able to you know, delve into all of
that. So in terms of the future, of what I would like to see or what what the
developments would be in terms of positive online content, I really hope
that there will be much more effort done on the democratic side. Learning
democratic principles, ideals of decision-making, autonomy, participation.
This is the kind of things that we're missing right now. Of course now you can still
share things online, fine. But there isn't really a tool which allows
children to interact with each other, collectively decide things and learn
the democratic ideals of debate, discussion and all of these things. Maybe the
"decentralise" movement will help as blockchain technology decentralised
the web, which allows for this kind of interactions and democracy: no
centralized control, people having to make decisions etc. And you have now
services like Mastodont, which is a sort of alternative to Twitter, where people
can build their own servers and communities and decide autonomously
how to interact with each other. And I think these are the ideals that
are really necessary: building this democratic culture and also, conversely,
building a digital citizenship for the future, where you have more power over
the services you use and have this kind of participatory instinct which is
absolutely key for our democratic societies. How can
parents contribute to shape this kind of environment to make it better for
children? I think the first advice is put your
money where your mouth is: support the services that you find really useful,
really great, participate, get involved if you really like for instance Wikipedia,
there's always this yearly campaign where you have to donate this $1 or
whatever. And it's funded usually within a day or two:
that's how much people like Wikipedia without any advertisements. All of this is
community generated, so if you really find content or anything that you find
worthy for you, for your child, support it.Support it in any way you can:
spread the word, or offer this $1 or whatever
donate and contribute, because that's how you'll shape the internet and make sure
that it's not going to be just this crazy commercial and
advertisement-filled bubble, which tries to extract money from your kid.
But really something open-source, shared and where people that are really
contributing to something positive get what they deserve, the real reward for the
work they're putting in. In terms of the tips and tricks for parents I would
encourage them greatly to use the online repositories of
positive content. One example is the Better Internet for Kids (BIK) portal
which has a lot of resources of where to find positive content. You have for
instance search engines that are geared specifically for children content, you
have all kinds of different websites in all kinds of different languages. Then
you have also portals
for parents where they can exchange and share whatever content they've found.You
have expert web sites created by child development experts like Common Sense
Media which really cherry pick and find the best content for children be it apps
web sites. So really, I would encourage them to look through
kinds of resources to find the best content.The last part of the advice for parents, I
would say is spend your time with your kids. Positive content is not
a sort of a digital or virtual nanny for your kids, it's not about finding good
content and then sticking them in front of the screen so they can learn and
watch. You really have to be there, to accompany your children and
experience what they experience, share, talk about it: that's how you get the
best and the most out of the positive content that there is.
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