What is Digital Resilience?
Digital resilience is the best way to help children stay safer, avoid harm but also, really importantly, benefit from opportunity – and has never been more relevant.
Digital resilience is a personality trait or style that we can all grow by engaging with opportunities and challenges online, rather than avoiding them.
Developing this resilience helps protect young people when they come across something inappropriate or worrying online, so they know how to respond, learn and recover.
Developing agency
Resilience isn’t as simple as developing the ability to "bounce back". It's about helping children to internalise learning so that they develop agency.
If we can help a child to have agency, it means that they are no longer dependent on an adult telling them what they should and shouldn’t do.
And we know that anyone who has agency is more likely to have better long-term outcomes: they are literally in control of their own destiny and making their own more positive choices.
Having agency is a crucial part of a resilience-based approach – and ultimately, of growing up.
The Digital Resilience Framework
Parent Zone founder and CEO Vicki Shotbolt sits on the executive board for the UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS), who produced the Digital Resilience Framework through collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute.
The framework explores social and emotional skills, safe spaces and recovery – and was created to help people adopt a more resilience-based approach.
It maps out four key elements that form the basis for digital resilience:
- Understanding when they are at risk online
- Knowing what to do to seek help
- Learning from experiences
- Recovering when things go wrong