🌱 More Than Robots #89 May 2025

Everything is blooming most recklessly - Rilke

As the web is consumed by vegetative electron microscopy, here are fresh seeds and lights in the dark

📖 Research

Children and parents: media use and attitudes report 2025

Sixteen per cent of 3-17s livestream their own videos: This increases to 21% of 13-17s. The majority of parents do not think the benefits outweigh the risks of their children being on social media, messaging and video-sharing apps

Rethinking journeys to adulthood

As a society, we have not kept pace with the changes in young people’s lives. In a context of constrained public spending and cost-of-living pressures, policies and services have struggled to respond, families have been asked to do more, and young people feel as if the stakes are higher than ever.

Developing Parents' Digital Financial Capability

Children and parents’ financial skills and confidence are closely linked. What system changes might help enhance parents’ digital financial capability?

Teens, Social Media and Mental Health

74% of teens say these platforms make them feel more connected to their friends, and 63% say they give them a place to show off their creative side. 55% of parents report being extremely or very concerned about the mental health of teens today. Also Minors’ health and social media: an interdisciplinary scientific perspective

Understanding and addressing fraud against children and young people

Fraud has become a near universal part of CYP’s everyday life. This directly challenges preconceived notions that online fraud happens to ‘other people’,

IWF 2024 Reports Assessment: Combating Online Child Abuse

291,273 reports were confirmed to either contain criminal imagery of child sexual abuse, link to this criminal imagery or were found advertising it (a 6% increase from 2023). 

Playing the Player: Unfair digital gaming practices

46% of players experienced financial detriment from digital gaming. 52% encountered privacy harms. Also: Key principles on in-game virtual currencies and "Leave our kids alone!": Exploring Concerns Reported by Parents in 1-star Reviews

Adults joining and supporting young children’s touchscreen use

The strongest predictor of adult-child co-use use was respondent’s attitudes to technology

A digital playground The real guide to Roblox

An account registered as a 42-year-old could add and publicly interact with our accounts registered as children as young as 5 years old and privately chat with accounts registered as 13 years old and above. Also: Case Study – What does a teen actually see on Instagram?⁠

🧰 Resources

Deceptive design educator slide deck

Over 200 slides with visual examples of online dark patterns and deceptive designs

Terminology Matters: Second Edition of the Terminology Guidelines

Updated, survivor-centred, and precise language to describe sexual exploitation and abuse of children

Social AI Companions: Risk assessment

In-depth, third-party evaluations of AI safety for children

Dimensions of AI Literacies

A flexible and transformative lens for understanding teaching and learning practices in an AI-enabled world

🗳️ Take part

The Good Childhood Report 2025: Sector Professionals

The Children's Society are seeking to gather professionals' insights into children and young people's wellbeing to inform The Good Childhood Report 2025.

💡Inspiration and opinion

Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI

More than half of all searches don’t actually generate any kind of web traffic for the website that produced the search results.’

Adolescence and The Siren Call of Screens: Towards humanised screen life

Screens can serve both as tools and as weapons, and so they require us not only to defend against them, but also to wield them and understand them.

Parenting in the age of neoliberalism: how extrinsic values have reshaped childhood

The real challenge for modern parents and caregivers isn’t simply resisting individual problematic messages in children’s media. It’s recognising and pushing back against an entire economic system that positions children as consumers, parents and caregivers as economic units, and families as inconvenient obstacles to productivity. Also: When spending and investing feel like play

…and finally

Who is really driving?