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DL 415

Published: December 7, 2025 • 📧 Newsletter

Digital Childhood: Protection, Preparation, and Power

The conversation about young people in a digital world has shifted from "access vs. safety" to a more nuanced question: How do we equip youth to thrive responsibly, ethically, and safely in digital spaces?

But here's the uncomfortable truth: while we debate pedagogical philosophy, the systems beneath our policies are failing. Energy grids strain under AI data centers. School databases leak millions of student records. Teachers lack training, resources, and infrastructure to deliver the digital literacy we claim to prioritize.Policy matters. But infrastructure determines what's actually possible.

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🔖 Key Takeaways

📚 Recent Work

This week I traveled to present at the 75th Annual Literacy Research Association (LRA) Conference. I presented the following research on whether "AI Partnership" means collaboration or just delegation?

You can view the slides here. I'm also testing out how to share my research notes and supplemental materials here in my digital garden.

🗺️ Digital Childhood Is Being Redefined

Protection vs. Preparation. How three governments are rewriting the rules of growing up digital.

Governments are redefining what it means to "grow up digital," but their philosophies diverge sharply. Some put up walls. Others build capacities. Each approach reveals different assumptions about agency, risk, and responsibility.

🇦🇺 Australia: The First National Youth Social Media Ban

Beginning December 10, 2025, Australia will enforce the world’s first mandatory ban on social media accounts for users under 16. Ten major platforms (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, X, Reddit, Twitch) must take “reasonable steps” to block minors. Penalties can reach A$49.5 million (≈approximately $32 million USD).

Enforcement is already underway. Meta has removed about 350,000 Instagram accounts belonging to Australian teens aged 13–15. Importantly, the law targets platforms, not young people or parents. Several platforms, including WhatsApp, Discord, Roblox, and Pinterest, are exempt.

Supporters frame this as “the first domino.” Critics warn the crackdown will simply push teens toward less regulated, less safe spaces where harmful content is harder to monitor.

🇬🇧 Britain: Media Literacy as Core Curriculum

The UK announced sweeping curriculum reforms placing digital citizenship and critical media competence at the center of primary education. The plan makes media literacy and financial literacy mandatory, while replacing the computer science GCSE with a more expansive computing qualification that includes data science and AI.

A new Year 8 statutory reading test aims to catch literacy gaps earlier, an urgent move given that 1 in 4 students leave primary school not reading at expected levels. Implementation will roll out slowly: final curriculum by Spring 2027, first teaching in September 2028.

These changes reflect a shift in philosophy. Children aren’t just digital consumers. They’re future shapers of an AI-driven society.

🇺🇸 Massachusetts: A Blueprint for Media Literacy Systems

Massachusetts released a major statewide report on media literacy education after a year-long study involving 46 educator interviews, 97 national experts, and 1,275 teacher surveys. Educators are actively teaching media literacy, but systemic supports lag behind.

Findings point to low awareness of existing resources, minimal educator training, and the absence of media literacy in statewide assessment systems. The report underscores the rising challenge of AI-generated content and recommends investing in school librarians as media literacy leaders. A practical strategy that builds on existing school expertise.

🏗️ Infrastructure: The Constraints Nobody's Naming

Policy ambitions meet physical realities. The systems we depend on, energy grids, data security, institutional capacity, aren't prepared for the digital futures we're promising.

Energy: The Foundation That Limits Everything

AI acceleration is colliding with energy realities. Storage, reliability, and cost now shape who benefits from technological progress.

Battery storage is booming, but it's still not keeping pace with data center expansion and peak-demand stress. Data center energy demand presents challenges. Forecasts project demand soaring nearly 300% through 2035. The International Energy Agency reports data centers consume approximately 1.5% of global electricity (415 TWh), projected to exceed 945 TWh by 2030.

In the PJM grid region (Illinois to North Carolina), data centers contributed to a $9.3 billion capacity market price increase, raising average residential bills by $16-18 monthly in some areas. Carnegie Mellon researchers estimate data centers could increase average U.S. electricity bills 8% by 2030.

Why this matters: The future of digital schooling isn't just about literacy, policy, or pedagogy—it's about whether the physical infrastructure can sustain the tools, platforms, and AI systems we keep imagining into curriculum. Energy is now education policy.

Institutions: The Gap Between Promise and Preparedness

Even systems that champion digital learning struggle to meet the basic obligations of safety, infrastructure, and teacher readiness.

The Federal Trade Commission ordered Illuminate Education to implement comprehensive data security reforms following a breach that exposed personal data of 10.1 million students. The breach occurred when a hacker used credentials from an employee who had departed 3.5 years earlier, accessing cloud databases containing addresses, birthdates, student records, and health-related information. Federal Trade Commission

Meanwhile, according to a recent report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), AI development risks widening existing global inequalities in income, education, and social opportunity—effectively re-creating the next great divergence on a global scale.

Everywhere, there's a mismatch between the digital world we expect students to navigate and the institutional capacity we have to support them. Capacity, competence, and the uncomfortable gap between aspiration and reality.

Before we debate AI in the classroom, we have to reckon with whether schools are even structurally prepared for the digital systems they already rely on.

🤔 Consider

We cannot protect young people from the world. We can only prepare them.

— danah boyd

Philosophy matters. Protection, preparation, and equity all intersect.

But preparation without infrastructure is aspiration. We can craft brilliant curricula, design thoughtful policies, and articulate compelling visions of digital citizenship. None of it matters if the energy grid can't handle the load, if student data leaks from systems left unpatched for years, if teachers lack training and resources, if access remains wildly unequal.

Infrastructure is literacy. Understanding how physical systems shape digital power, who controls them, and what constraints they impose is essential to navigating, and changing, the systems that govern our lives.

Policy and infrastructure choices today materially shape who thrives and who falls behind.

⚡ What You Can Do This Week

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