What Is Digital Maturity in Children?

The problem with this type of technologies is that this algorithm. I’m not necessarily thinking of TikTok, but TikTok has a very good recommendation algorithm. This is really designed to keep your brain stimulated every X number of seconds so that you don’t get out of this loop, which is something you as a person don’t realize, but your brain gets constantly stimulated. And our brains are used to these constant trigger stimulation notifications that we get on our phones, and the more frequently we receive them, the more we want them.

The internet is something that requires a lot of knowledge for a young person in order to be able to navigate it securely. So digitally mature are the children that know how to tell what is wrong and what is right. And also they know how to use all this right information to their benefit, it’s not just about screen time.

Digital maturity is about any interaction a person has with technology. This technology can be screen time, social media, AI, any technology around us that we are interacting with and we are using for learning, entertainment, anything. Digital maturity covers everything. There are children that end up being cyber bullied, being at risk of believing things that are not right, being in situations where they feel inferior to their peers. And this is a serious problem because when we were kids, we were only comparing ourselves to our classmates. Now the children of today, they’re comparing themselves to everybody on the internet, that being good or bad, nobody knows for this for the time being, but it’s something that definitely puts more pressure on them.

At young ages, we can catch all this or we can educate people early, so then they take these learnings through their life. The more stimulation we are used to receive, the more we need. So us, that we grew up in a time where we didn’t have these constant notifications arriving on our phones from a very young age, who didn’t have this need for instant gratification that the notification gives you.

Whereas nowadays, children are used to be doing this from very young, and that means that their attention span gets shorter. That means that their need for excitement becomes different. And that’s why it’s important to deal with this early on, because that allows for developing their ability to concentrate. These constant notifications basically reduce our ability to concentrate for a long time.

We developed, together with other partners in other universities in Europe, we developed an index that is meant to quantify this digital maturity in children. Essentially, this index is comprised of ten dimensions, which are different characteristics that all together, added together, leads to how digitally mature a child is or not. There are different dimensions there.

The most important ones are how children can use technology to support their learning. There are also other dimensions that have to do with the regulation of emotions, because we noticed that their emotions can be exacerbated from things that they’re exposed to on the internet and also support-seeking behavior. This is very important for children because they’re young, as all of us were young, and we didn’t know exactly how to assess information around or how to assess different triggers.

So this index is a uniform metric that can be used in different countries, in different children to measure the maturity of different children. And that is something that we plan to make available online, so that parents and educators that want to assess the maturity of children they are dealing with, they can go online and they can answer a set of questions and they can get some indication.

Of course, these are not set in stone, but they can get some indications that can help them develop or design different learning plans for children they are dealing with. The ability to use technology well is something that can make someone better at his job or her job, and generally, digital maturity determines how somebody can benefit from technology or not.