The forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force next month, and proposes that companies should gain parental consent before processing the personal data of children under a certain age. But what do parents think that age should be? In this blogpost, LSE’s Sonia Livingstone and Kjartan Ólafsson of the University of ...more

On Safer Internet Day 2018, Global Kids Online partners recognise the pressing need to research and support children’s rights in a digital age. Mariya Stoilova argues here that to harness the positive potential of children’s internet use and to limit the harm, it is vital to understand how children are ...more

Today is Safer Internet Day, a day when the international community of industry, NGOs, parenting advocates, educators, researchers, parents and young people celebrate what’s good about the internet, and issues a call to action to create a “better internet for everyone, in particular the youngest users.” What better time to ...more

The latest EU Kids Online Survey in Italy investigates how children experience harmful content online, including feeling upset, uncomfortable or scared. Because the number of children who have felt bothered by something online has more than doubled since 2010,  Giovanna Mascheroni explores what action must be taken to educate and ...more

How can makerspaces help parents encourage their children to become digitally literate? The MakEY research project brings together researchers to explore the benefits and challenges of running making workshops in a variety of settings. In this post, Alicia Blum-Ross and Sonia Livingstone explore ‘makerspaces’ and what they mean for parents and children. Sonia ...more

Sunday was Human Rights Day and Sonia Livingstone and Jasmine Byrne are discussing the global digital parenting divide. Presenting data from several countries of the Global Kids Online project, this post asks how can we support parents to support children around the world? Sonia is Professor of Social Psychology at LSE’s Department of Media ...more

The “Parenting for a Digital Future” blog has tried to capture the diversity of families’ experiences with the internet around the world by including reflections on fieldwork conducted in many different countries. In this post, Sonia Livingstone, Dafna Lemish and Sun Sun Lim highlight what they learned from working with ...more

Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green followed a class of London teenagers for a year to find out more about how they are, or in some cases are not, connecting online in their everyday lives. This post discusses their findings about social class from this research for their book, The Class: living ...more

Because it is #nationalplayday today, and children are out of school for summer holidays, we are discussing strategies for managing screen-time.  This post features an infographic created by Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross, together with the Connected Learning Alliance, which addresses more effective methods for parents than simply 'watching the clock'.  Sonia ...more

How much is too much when it comes to ‘screen time’? Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross round-up the advice that is being given to parents about screen time rules, where reports represent advice on a scale from fear to hype. Rather than measuring screentime purely by the clock, Alicia and Sonia ...more