The study’s most striking empirical finding is the near-total absence of perceived school-based instruction in foundational digital citizenship and online safety. Across all four student groups surveyed in Hungary and the Netherlands, every substantive response indicated that children had not encountered structured teaching on these topics at school, even though device access among the same students was close to universal. This mismatch between connectivity and curricular coverage suggests that the problem is not one of hardware or infrastructure but of institutional priorities. Children arrive at school already immersed in digital environments, yet the institutions responsible for cultivating their competences have largely left the interpretive and safety dimensions of that immersion to chance.

The survey evidence also reveals how early this informal learning begins. Parents reported that children form digital skills and habits before they ever enter formal schooling, which means that by the time teachers encounter students, patterns of use, expectations, and even risk exposure are already established. This developmental timing has consequences for policy design. Interventions that begin in primary school may arrive years after the most formative habits have taken shape, and the families who shaped those habits rarely receive guidance on how to fulfill the educational role they have effectively assumed.

The parent data from the DRONE project, which gathered responses from 135 participants across six European countries, quantifies this shift of responsibility. Families consistently identified themselves as the primary teachers of digital literacy, a role they occupy not by choice alone but because structured school programs are scarce and often implemented late. The researchers link this to a broader pattern in which formal education systems have changed far more slowly than the digital practices governing children’s everyday lives. The result is a widening gap between what children actually do with technology and what institutions formally teach about it.

This redistribution of educational labor is not neutral. The study emphasizes that community-based learning both mitigates and reproduces inequality. Families differ enormously in their own digital skills, confidence, and resources, and these differences mirror broader socio-economic and cultural stratifications. When a child’s digital education depends primarily on household circumstances, children from families with greater knowledge and capacity accumulate advantages that schools would at least theoretically be positioned to equalize. The authors argue that informal provision, left unexamined, can reinforce the very disparities that public education is meant to reduce.

The conceptual framework the researchers employ helps explain why this fragmentation has proven so persistent. Building on the ecological model of child development, they describe how digitalization has blurred the traditional boundaries between the micro-level settings of family and peer life, the meso-level connections among institutions, the exo-level structures of policy and platform design, and the macro-level cultural norms. New actors, particularly technology companies, now shape the conditions of children’s digital participation through regulation, infrastructure investment, and platform design, often without coordination with schools or community organizations. The learning ecosystem, in their terms, becomes broken when its components fail to integrate, producing fragmented and poorly coordinated arrangements that cannot sustain equitable learning outcomes.

To analyze this brokenness, the study combines three complementary lenses. The ecological model identifies where learning actually occurs, which the survey data show is overwhelmingly outside school. The rights-based framework, grounded in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and its General Comment No. 25, establishes what children and the adults and institutions responsible for their welfare are entitled to and required to do. Multi-stakeholder governance, the third lens, addresses how distributed actors with overlapping authority can coordinate their responsibilities. The authors argue that each framework answers a distinct question, and that only together do they capture the full complexity of digital literacy as a policy domain.

The rights-based dimension deserves particular attention because it reframes the debate in political rather than purely pedagogical terms. The SAILS project, which contributed the legal research component of the study, examines the balance between children’s rights to protection and their rights to participation in digital environments. These two principles are frequently treated as opposing forces, with protection arguments favoring restriction and participation arguments favoring access. The study suggests instead that both must be understood as entitlements that public institutions have a duty to support, and that current arrangements, in which families shoulder the burden without systematic support, fail on both counts.

The three EU-funded projects underlying the analysis each illuminate a different layer of the problem. DRONE focuses on digital literacy and the combat of disinformation among vulnerable groups of adolescents, drawing attention to how misinformation risks fall disproportionately on young people already facing social, linguistic, or educational disadvantage. EFFEct, funded under the Horizon Europe programme, investigates how students, teachers, school leaders, and parents engage with digital technology for educational purposes, providing the comparative survey evidence from Hungary and the Netherlands. SAILS contributes the legal analysis of children’s digital rights. Together they allow the researchers to integrate levels of analysis that are usually studied in isolation.

The authors’ argument about governance follows directly from this integration. If digital literacy is produced by families, peers, community organizations, schools, regulators, and platform designers simultaneously, then no single actor can be held accountable for outcomes, and no single reform can fix the system. They call for coordinated multi-stakeholder governance, curricular reform that addresses the identified gap in digital citizenship and online safety instruction, empowerment of teachers who currently lack the training and mandate to deliver such instruction, and inclusive community-based approaches that explicitly recognize the central role families already play. The alternative, they imply, is a continued drift in which responsibility is distributed by default rather than by design.

Positioning digital literacy as a political question rather than a technical one is perhaps the study’s most consequential contribution. The distribution of educational responsibility among states, schools, families, communities, and technology companies is a matter of power and accountability, not merely curriculum. When public institutions fail to recognize and support the actors who currently perform core educational functions outside formal schooling, they effectively privatize a public good while leaving its provision to those least equipped to carry it consistently. The researchers argue that reconstructing broken learning ecosystems requires policy frameworks that acknowledge community-based learning as a fundamental component of children’s digital development, supported rather than displaced by formal education.

For practitioners, the findings suggest several immediate implications. Schools seeking to close the curricular gap identified in the survey data would need to move beyond purely technical instruction toward sustained teaching of digital citizenship and online safety, areas where students reported no perceived provision at all. Teacher education programs would need to prepare educators for this expanded role, since the study notes that current instruction is often irregular, outdated, or narrowly technical. Parent support initiatives would need to recognize that families are already the primary educators in this domain and provide them with accessible guidance rather than assuming the school will take over. Community organizations, libraries, and non-formal learning settings would need to be integrated into policy frameworks as legitimate educational actors rather than peripheral supplements.

The comparative dimension of the evidence also matters. Because the survey data come from two European countries with different educational traditions, and the parent data from six countries, the finding that families bear primary responsibility appears to be robust across contexts rather than an artifact of any single national system. This consistency strengthens the argument that the fragmentation of digital literacy education is a structural feature of contemporary education systems rather than a local failure, and that remedies must therefore operate at the level of governance and policy design rather than through isolated institutional fixes.

Ultimately, the study reframes a familiar anxiety about children and screens into a question about institutional design. The issue is not simply that children use technology extensively, but that the institutions charged with preparing them for digital life have not adapted to the reality that most of this preparation already happens elsewhere. Recognizing families and communities as the primary site of digital literacy development, and building governance structures that support them, the authors contend, is the necessary first step toward an education ecosystem capable of serving all children equitably in a digital society.

Subject of Research: Community-based digital literacy development among European school-aged children

Article Title: Community learning drives children’s digital literacy development: evidence for reconstructing broken education ecosystems

Article References: Horgas, J., Salamon, E., & Protopsaltis, A. (2026). Community learning drives children’s digital literacy development: evidence for reconstructing broken education ecosystems. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1845968. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1845968

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1845968

Keywords: digital literacy, children, community learning, schools, parents, digital rights, education policy, Europe, digital divide, teacher training, online safety, family engagement

The study arrives at a moment when smartphone regulation of minors has become one of the most active frontiers in technology policy. Legislators and regulators in multiple countries have proposed or enacted measures ranging from age verification requirements and default content filters to outright bans on smartphone sales to children or restrictions on social media access for younger teenagers. China has been among the earliest and most aggressive movers in this space, with regulatory initiatives targeting the amount of time minors may spend on devices and the kinds of services they may access. Yet, the authors argue, these policies are typically built on adult assumptions about what a smartphone is and what it means to use one. The study set out to test a deceptively simple question: when children talk about playing with smartphones, what do they actually think they are doing, and what do they think the device is?

To answer it, the researchers turned to in-depth interviews with children, a method that allows young participants to articulate their own categories rather than respond to adult-designed questionnaires. The interviews were then analyzed through coding, a qualitative technique in which researchers systematically label segments of talk and group them into themes. This approach is well suited to capturing what developmental and learning scientists call naive theories, the informal, experience-based explanatory frameworks that children build before or alongside formal instruction. Children, like all learners, do not wait for experts to explain the world; they construct working models from whatever evidence their daily lives provide. The question the study poses is what those working models look like when the object in question is a device that is simultaneously a toy, a communication tool, a window into an algorithmic content ecosystem, and, in the eyes of regulators, a potential hazard.

The coding analysis revealed that children do not hold a single, undifferentiated concept of the smartphone. Instead, the researchers identified two distinct kinds of understanding. The first they call everyday concepts: ideas derived directly from children’s lived experiences with the devices, built up through repeated use, observation of family members, and the textures of daily interaction. These are the understandings a child acquires by watching a parent scroll, by feeling the satisfaction of a video that plays without interruption, by noticing that the phone gets warm or that the battery drains. Everyday concepts are concrete, situational, and tightly bound to what the device does for the child in a particular moment.

The second category is what the study analytically terms scientific concepts, a phrase borrowed from cultural-historical theories of learning to describe more structured, school-mediated, or institutionally transmitted discourses about smartphone structures, mechanisms, and risks. These are the explanations children absorb from teachers, public-awareness campaigns, safety curricula, and news coverage: accounts of how the device works, what it is made of, and why it might be harmful. The distinction matters because the two kinds of concepts do not always agree. A child may simultaneously hold an experiential understanding of the smartphone as a source of fun and connection and an institutional understanding of it as an object of danger and addiction. The study’s central analytical move is to show that children’s thinking about smartphones is the product of negotiation between these two registers, not the simple absorption of adult warnings.

This tension becomes especially visible when the researchers turn from what children think smartphones are to how children decide to use them. To analyze usage tendencies, the study employs the cognitive–affective–conative framework, a model from psychology that decomposes attitudes and intentions into three components. The cognitive component covers beliefs and knowledge, the affective component covers emotions and feelings, and the conative component covers behavioral tendencies and intentions. Applied to children’s smartphone use, the framework allows the researchers to ask which of these components is doing the most work in shaping what children actually want to do with the device. The answer, the analysis suggests, is the affective one: emotional experience plays a crucial role in shaping children’s usage intentions. What children feel when they use smartphones, the pleasure, the excitement, the occasional frustration, weighs more heavily in their behavioral dispositions than the abstract knowledge they may have absorbed about risks.

That finding carries a direct implication for policy design. Much regulatory and educational effort is aimed at the cognitive channel: informing children about dangers, teaching them about screen time, warning them about content. If children’s usage intentions are primarily driven by emotional experience, then purely informational interventions may be addressing the weakest lever. The authors argue that their findings point toward the development of targeted media education interventions that build on children’s existing understandings while addressing potential misconceptions. In other words, effective education would start from the everyday concepts children already hold, treat those concepts as legitimate starting points rather than errors to be erased, and work to reconcile them with institutional knowledge in ways that acknowledge the emotional realities of use.

One of the study’s most conceptually interesting contributions is its reinterpretation of the phrase playing with smartphones. In adult discourse, and especially in regulatory discourse, playing is often treated as the problem: trivial, compulsive, wasteful activity to be limited. But the study shows that children reinterpret the meaning of playing in ways that complicate this picture. For the children interviewed, playing with a smartphone is not a single behavior but a heterogeneous set of practices, each with its own meaning and emotional signature. By attending to how children themselves parse the category of play, the researchers suggest that the very vocabulary of regulation may be misaligned with the phenomena it seeks to govern. A policy that treats all smartphone use by children as equivalent play risks missing the distinctions that children themselves draw, and may therefore fail to engage the practices that actually concern adults.

The study also situates its findings within the global research framework on children’s digital rights, a body of work that frames young people not merely as objects of protection but as rights-bearing participants in digital life, entitled to provision, participation, and protection in balanced measure. From this perspective, understanding children’s own conceptions of smartphones is not a soft supplement to hard regulation; it is a prerequisite for policies that respect children as meaning-makers. The authors position their empirical work as a contribution to this framework, offering evidence of how children engage with digital technologies as active interpreters rather than passive recipients of adult decisions. The timing is significant: as more jurisdictions draft rules modeled on early movers like China, the study offers a reminder that the population most affected by these rules has its own theories about the technology, and that those theories are empirically recoverable through careful qualitative research.

Methodologically, the study is a reminder of what in-depth interviewing can reveal that surveys and usage logs cannot. Ethics procedures were rigorous: the protocol was reviewed and approved by the Committee Review Board of the School of Journalism and Communication at Beijing Normal University in May 2023, written informed consent was obtained from the legal guardians of all participating children, and verbal assent was obtained from the children themselves before data collection. The work was supported by the Youth Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences Program of the Ministry of Education of China and by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities at the University of International Business and Economics. The authors declare no competing interests. For a research community and a policy world increasingly focused on measurable outcomes, the study’s core message is quietly radical: before regulating children’s relationship with the smartphone, it is worth asking children what they think that relationship is, because the answer, split between everyday experience and institutional instruction and driven by feeling as much as knowledge, is more complex than any ban or time limit assumes.

Subject of Research: Children's naive theories and understandings of smartphones in the context of global regulatory policies on young people's device use

Article Title: Reconceptualizing digital playing: an exploration of children’s naive theories of smartphones within the context of global regulatory policies

Article References: Qu, H., & Yang, J. (2026). Reconceptualizing digital playing: an exploration of children’s naive theories of smartphones within the context of global regulatory policies. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09345-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09345-8

Keywords: children, smartphones, naive theories, digital rights, media education, regulation, China, screen time, cognitive-affective-conative framework, qualitative interviews, child development, technology policy

The review, conducted according to PRISMA guidelines and operationalised through an explicit PICOS framework, searched five databases, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Dialnet and PsycINFO, for publications from 2013 to 2023. Two reviewers independently screened records at the title and abstract stages and again at full text, resolving disagreements through discussion until consensus was reached. Because AGI does not yet exist as a clinically deployable technology, the eligible literature is overwhelmingly theoretical, ethical or conceptual rather than experimental. The authors therefore adopted an explicit hierarchy-of-evidence framework that distinguishes empirical studies, secondary reviews, ethical and normative analyses, and theoretical or speculative work, weighting the synthesis accordingly. Of 72 records initially identified, 45 studies met the inclusion criteria and were synthesised thematically using NVivo software, with methodological quality appraised through author-developed criteria aligned with the SANRA scale for narrative reviews and the AACODS checklist for non-empirical sources.

The first major theme concerns diagnosis and treatment. AGI-adjacent systems, particularly large language models and multimodal architectures already deployed under the umbrella of narrow AI, have demonstrated genuine potential to support mental health assessment by integrating heterogeneous data streams: clinical notes, speech patterns, facial expression analysis, behavioural telemetry and self-reported symptoms. Conversational interfaces accessible around the clock and at negligible marginal cost could reduce stigma by offering an anonymous, judgement-free first point of contact for people reluctant to seek human help. For underserved regions where the ratio of mental health professionals to population is dangerously low, the prospect of near-universal access to competent psychological support is the review’s most compelling promised benefit.

Yet the same technical capabilities carry the mirror-image risks. The literature consistently warns, at the level of ethical and normative analysis, that automated emotional crisis management is fraught with danger: a system that handles a suicidal disclosure with a plausible but subtly wrong response could produce diagnostic error, false reassurance or lethal delay in escalation to human clinicians. The review stresses that such risks, documented for narrow AI in embryonic form, would be substantially amplified in any future AGI system, and that presentations involving psychosis and other severe mental illnesses pose particular challenges, because the conversational fluency of advanced models can mask a fundamental lack of clinical understanding and may even reinforce delusional content.

The second theme addresses governance. The review identifies emerging regulatory instruments, mandatory algorithmic audits, transnational data protection policies and clearer allocation of medico-legal accountability, as necessary preconditions for any safe integration of AGI into mental health care. Algorithmic audits would function as a technical safeguard, probing systems for bias, brittleness and unsafe behaviour before and during deployment, while data protection frameworks would govern the extraordinarily sensitive information that mental health applications inevitably collect. Accountability remains perhaps the thorniest question: when an autonomous-sounding system contributes to a harmful clinical outcome, the chain of responsibility spanning developers, deployers, clinicians and institutions must be legally defined in advance rather than litigated after tragedy.

The third and most philosophically provocative theme concerns human identity. Drawing on established work-identity and AI ethics literatures, the authors advance theoretical constructs such as ‘existential delaborisation’, the psychological dislocation that could follow if AGI displaces human beings from work that confers meaning, purpose and social standing. They also describe the algorithmic reconfiguration of biographical narratives: the possibility that AGI systems, by curating recommendations, memories and self-reflections, could subtly rewrite the stories people tell about themselves. These phenomena are presented explicitly as theoretical frameworks rather than empirically documented outcomes, but their implications intersect with well-established knowledge that unemployment, loss of occupational identity and social dislocation are robust predictors of depression, anxiety and substance misuse. Mass technological unemployment, should AGI fulfil the most aggressive projections, would therefore constitute not merely an economic problem but a population-scale mental health exposure.

The review also highlights the risk that biases embedded in training data could be perpetuated and amplified within therapeutic interventions. If the corpora on which AGI systems are trained under-represent certain cultures, languages, genders or diagnostic populations, the resulting systems may misinterpret idioms of distress, apply inappropriate diagnostic framings or deliver interventions calibrated to populations unlike the user. Because mental health care depends on trust, cultural sensitivity and nuanced understanding of individual context, such biases are not simply statistical inaccuracies but potential sources of harm and of widening inequity between well-served and marginalised communities.

What distinguishes this analysis from much of the public AGI debate is its disciplined separation of evidence from speculation. The empirical claims about diagnostic support and stigma reduction rest on studies of currently deployed narrow AI, while the warnings about existential and identity-level harms are clearly flagged as normative and theoretical extrapolation. This evidentiary transparency matters practically as well as intellectually: policymakers and clinicians reading the review can see precisely which conclusions are grounded in observed outcomes and which are reasoned projections, allowing proportionate rather than panicked or complacent responses. The authors argue that this evidence-differentiated approach should itself become a standard feature of AI-in-health governance, ensuring that regulatory urgency is matched to evidentiary strength.

The paper’s conclusion is deliberately double-edged. AGI integration in mental health offers the genuine possibility of democratised psychological care, extending support to billions of people who currently have none, while simultaneously posing clinical-safety and existential challenges that demand urgent ethical governance. Success, the authors contend, depends on regulatory frameworks that prioritise transparency, equity, accountability and privacy, and, crucially, on the preservation of authentic human connection as the irreplaceable core of mental health care. Machines may eventually match or exceed human clinicians in informational processing, but the therapeutic alliance, the felt experience of being understood by another conscious being, remains, on the current evidence, a uniquely human asset. Whether AGI arrives by 2030 or decades later, the review’s central message is that the window for building the ethical, legal and clinical infrastructure to receive it safely is open now, and it should not be allowed to close.

Subject of Research: The impact of artificial general intelligence on mental health

Article Title: The impact of artificial general intelligence on mental health (a systematic narrative review)

Article References: Moya, C. C., & Rodríguez, E. Q. (2026). The impact of artificial general intelligence on mental health (a systematic narrative review). Discover Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-026-00589-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44192-026-00589-z

Keywords: artificial general intelligence, mental health, systematic narrative review, AI ethics, algorithmic bias, digital rights, AI-driven psychotherapy, human identity, evidence hierarchy, medico-legal accountability, algorithmic audits, existential delaborisation