A new British study recommends that children should be helped to have "digital flexibility". How can children be helped to achieve this?
With social media dominating one's life, children, teens, and even adults, they have to face the kinds of influences that come with such use.
And according to new research led by Britain's East University, experts recommend helping children become "digitally more resilient" through a team effort if they are to learn how to "thriving online". Digital resilience is the ability to learn to recognize, manage, and recover from online risks, such as bullying and inappropriate content.
The research argues that to activate digital resilience, it must include all parties, children, their parents, teachers, and any element affecting the child’s life, at the community level, as well as governments and Internet companies, especially that digital resilience is necessary to help individuals and families flourish and thus societies in The current digital age.
Precautionary recommendations
Osama Al-Nuaimi, a consultant psychiatrist, said in an interview with Sky News Arabia that teaching our children how to avoid bad content in the digital world and deal with it based on their upbringing, morals and knowledge is very important, and there is now a trend to teach younger children how to identify digital risks and distinguish between them, especially those related to By bullying, harming and eavesdropping, so that we gain these children skills that provide them with the proper handling of these intrusions in the digital world and not respond to them with anger or being drawn into them.
Al-Nuaimi considered that the most important thing for our young children in this context is to learn how to recover from these bullying or inappropriate content if they are exposed to it, and that we do not have a psychologically deformed child that will be the seed for a group of mental disorders and diseases in the future.
Dr. Al-Nuaimi indicated that the internet world today is an arena for a number of positives and negatives, and despite the responsibilities of parents and the burdens of education and others on them, the reality today also requires them to learn to arm themselves with digital flexibility. If we do not teach our children these defensive skills, they may be victims of these harmful content, especially psychologically.
Al-Nuaimi pointed out that if a child is subjected to bullying on the basis of, for example, a picture he posted on the Internet, the first sound step from the parents is not to blame this child for uploading that image, but rather we must understand that there are some content that can be shared with others and others are private. And it should not be published on the Internet, so that the child does not feel that we have closed the door to dialogue with him.