EU Policy Reflections on the Intersections Between Digital and Social Policies Supporting Children as Digital Citizens

This chapter analyses EU digital and social inequalities and rights-based policies from the early 2010s–2020s to explore how policies are evolving to further reflect how digital technologies are embedded in children’s everyday realities. Progress made to bring the social lens into digital policymaking and the digital dimension into social and rights-based policies is highlighted whilst places are identified for further integration. In the early 2010s, EU policies focused on child safety concerns without taking a holistic approach to how digitalisation interacts with children’s rights. Policymakers were concerned with whether children should be granted access to the digital world rather than how. Today’s children’s social environments increasingly have a digital dimension, one that brings home, school, family, and civic participatory spaces together. The more integrated digital technologies become in children’s lives, the more key it is that policymakers take a social inequalities approach to ensure that the digital environment acts as a venue for children’s rights and not a point of further division. To respond to this reality, policy frameworks must reflect the porous boundaries opening up between policy areas. Digital policies and social and rights-based policies must recognise the intersections between these fields to the digital generation.