What actors and factors shape children and young people’s digital skills? And how do their digital skills impact the rest of their lives? These are the two research questions addressed in this paper, along with an analysis of how the research literature to date has measured digital skills. The findings reported here come from a systematic evidence review of the antecedents and consequences of digital skills (Haddon, Cino, Doyle, Livingstone, Mascheroni and Stoilova, forthcoming) as part of the ySKILLS project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.

This paper reports on findings from an exploratory study on social media dilemmas (SMDs) mothers experience about their children’s social media presence when their mothers-in-law share about their offspring online, violating their boundaries expectations. The work is theoretically informed by systems theory and communication privacy management theory. A parenting forum was researched to investigate how mothers themselves frame these dilemmatic situations through a thematic analysis of a sample of 1224 posts from 38 discussion threads focusing on these issues. This work shows the disorienting nature of SMDs leading mothers to seek support through online communication. Findings from this study further suggest that sharing about minors on social media can cause dialectical tensions between interacting systems (i. e. the nuclear and the extended family), with mothers claiming and expecting first-level agency in managing their children’s digital footprints to foster systemic differentiation in the digital home.

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While the Internet is part of everyday life for many children, inequalities exist in their digital skills, with little known about the influence of perceived discrimination on these inequalities. Building on survey data collected from nationally representative samples of 10,820 children aged 12–16 in 14 European countries, we seek to understand whether and how disadvantaged children may fall behind their more advantaged peers across Europe with respect to digital skills, as well as the role played by perceived individual and social discrimination in acquiring these skills. The findings show that perceived individual and social discrimination affect the relationships of socio-cultural resources (age, gender, preference for online social interaction) and personal resources (self-efficacy) with digital skills. Therefore, even in countries where Internet use is an integral part of children’s lives, interventions should be made to prevent perceived offline discrimination translating into digital inequalities.

Posting about one’s pregnancy on social media has become a common practice for many expectant mothers in the global North. However, social media sharing implies transcending the conventional time and space boundaries of interpersonal communication. As such, women may feel ill at ease when deciding whether and how to narrate their journey online. This article examines mothers’ pre-birth social media dilemmas via a thematic analysis of 1237 posts from 26 threads on a parenting forum in which expectant mothers discussed their doubts and fears about sharing their pregnancy on social media. The dilemmatic dimension of social media sharing challenges the simplistic idea that sharenting is a practice most women naively adhere to without question. Indeed, the present research shows that online posters face dilemmas about performing their pregnancies on social media and collectively learn to make sense of and question a culture of surveillance, while reclaiming their self-representational agency in the process.