Peer-reviewed article
Fostering Safe Space for Children in Online Navigation and Parent-Child Interactions
Rizu Paudel ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This research investigates how parents and children can safely navigate online spaces together and resolve conflicts about digital device use. The study explores digital safety skills for young children, the communication gap between parents' and teenagers' views on online safety and privacy, and technological tools to help families manage conflicts and regulate emotions. The work emphasizes shifting from monitoring children to empowering them and supporting emotional regulation in parent-child interactions about online activities.
Key points
- Digital storytelling can help young children understand abstract digital safety concepts like password security through engaging, everyday habits
- Parents and teenagers have different definitions of 'safe space' online, with a significant communication gap between parental intent for protection and teenagers' needs for privacy
- Design features supporting privacy negotiation, designated downtime for emotional regulation, and structured feedback foster healthy conflict management between parents and children
- Artificial Intelligence shows potential but creates tension in supporting conflict management while preserving genuine parent-child interaction
- Unresolved conflicts over online activities and privacy lead to broken trust and secretive behavior, increasing children's vulnerability to digital harms like cyberbullying and toxic content
Limitations
The document describes a dissertation investigating parent-child dynamics around online safety but does not provide quantitative results, specific outcome measures, or sample sizes. It is unclear which phases involved empirical evaluation versus conceptual exploration, limiting assessment of evidence strength.
Abstract
As children and teenagers spend increasingly more time online, digital devices have become a major source of family friction. Disagreements frequently arise over privacy boundaries, and online activities. When these conflicts are unresolved, they often lead to broken trust and secretive behavior, leaving children vulnerable to digital harms like cyberbullying, toxic content, or account hacking. Therefore, it is important to create a safe and open environment for children where in order for them to share their feelings with parents. This dissertation investigates the human and technological dynamics of parent-child interactions, developing new ways to support collaborative conflict resolution and online safety through four distinct research phases. The first phase explores how to empower young children with digital safety skills. By using relatable digital storytelling, this research shows how abstract concepts like password security can be transformed into engaging, everyday habits. The second phase investigates how parents and teenagers conceptualize a “safe space”, and highlights the communication gap between a parent’s intent and a teen’s need for privacy, identifying the mechanisms required to facilitate open communication about online risks, particularly those involving social media friends. The third phase focuses on designing and evaluating technological tools to de-escalate parent-child conflict, and regulate emotions. The study shows that design features supporting privacy negotiation, designated downtime for emotional regulation, and structured feedback fosters healthy conflict management. The fourth phase explores the emerging role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in helping parents navigate emotionally-charged moments with their teenager in the realm of conflict management. This research highlights the key tension centered on whether AI can reliably support conflict management while preserving genuineness of the parent-child interaction. Together, these studies offer various design implications and empirical insights. By shifting the focus from monitoring to empowerment and emotional support, this research provides a roadmap for designing technology that helps families manage conflicts, and safely navigate the digital world together.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Multi-phase research developing digital safety skills training for young children through storytelling, facilitating parent-teen communication about online safety, and designing technological tools with features for privacy negotiation, emotional regulation, and structured feedback to manage parent-
- Population
- Young children and parents; teenagers and parents
Key finding
Digital storytelling transforms abstract password security concepts into engaging everyday habits for young children