Promoting the Digital Resilience of Youth

Dear Colleagues,

The digital well-being and safety of our future generations is a critical concern in today’s society. In our increasingly digitized world, one of the most important developmental tasks for youth is to acquire proficiency in managing online interactions and safeguarding themselves against digital risks. Recent media coverage has raised concerns about the negative impact of technology use on the mental health, well-being, and physical safety of adolescents. This has led to moral panic and deficit-based approaches that aim to shield and protect youth from online risks, such as parental control software, age verification systems, and AI-based risk detection. While well-intentioned, these measures may erode parent-teen relationships and undermine youth’s agency and rights to information, freedom of expression, digital technology, and civic engagement.

The goal of this special issue is to form new research frameworks that adopt a strength-based approach to creating programs, design-based interventions, and socio-technical innovations that leverage evidence-based research to foster the digital resilience of youth. In this context, resilience encompasses the social-ecological support systems, protective factors, resources, and individual strengths that youth need to thrive in a digital society. The key idea around the resilience-based approach is to shift from an authoritarian view of protecting teens to more supportive frameworks that empower them to self-regulate and manage online risks meaningfully.

In this special issue, we aim to synthesize research that moves beyond traditional approaches, which rely on restrictive and privacy-invasive mechanisms, toward resiliency and autonomy-based designs that empower teens to utilize their knowledge to self-regulate and cope with online risks. By doing so, we seek to raise important questions and recommendations for setting a forward-thinking agenda for future socio-technical research and practice on promoting the digital well-being and safety of youth. We invite researchers to submit their work that contributes to these goals and helps shape the discourse on fostering digital resilience among youth.

Dr. Pamela Wisniewski
Dr. Jinkyung Katie Park
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• digital youth
• adolescent online safety
• digital well-being
• digital resilience
• social media and youth
• youth-centered AI