challenging childhood, challenging children: children’s rights online

Challenging Childhood, Challenging Children: Children’s Rights Online

Brian SimpsonNovember, 2011

Challenging Childhood

‘Traditionally the development of intimacy required privacy. Intimacy without privacy reinvents what intimacy means.’Sherry Turkle Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other (New York, Basic Books, 2011), p.172.

Challenging Children

‘What once we might have seen as a problem becomes how we do things.’(S. Turkle, op.cit., p.178).

‘Erikson said that identity play is the work of adolescence. And these days adolescents use the rich materials of online life to do that work.’(Ibid., p.179)

Children’s Rights

‘States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.’(UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, art. 31)

What is appropriate in the online world?

Sexting

as play as identity formation as about girl’s sexuality as about children reinventing childhood as about the law being redefined