How to cope and build online resilience

Abstract

We conclude that online and offline vulnerability are interrelated.The so-called double jeopardy effect means that children with more psychological problems suffer more from online as well as offline risks.They not only face more difficulties managing their emotions, conduct and social behaviour 'in the real world', but are also more likely 'in the online world' to feel bothered and more intensely upset.Several recommendations are offered to help children improve their online resilience.These range from teaching children how to use (online) proactive coping strategies from an early age in both formal and informal contexts to helping children tackle their psychological problems and build self-confidence, paying special attention to more vulnerable children, i.e., those low on selfefficacy and high in psychological difficulties.As regards parents, promoting internet access and use among them is crucial, as parents who are frequent internet users themselves feel more confident with the medium, and also feel more confident in guiding their children on the internet, promoting a positive attitude towards online safety and proactive coping strategies.Finally, teachers also have a role to play by stimulating their pupils to resort to proactive problem-solving strategies as well as teaching them how online tools and applications work.Sufficient digital skills among the teachers themselves are therefore essential.As regards parental mediation, monitoring or mediating approaches seem to be more beneficial for children's online resilience than restrictive ones.Nevertheless, the results are not straightforward and varied depending on the type of risk.For instance, children of more restrictive parents tend to go offline more often when online bullies victimize them.Negative relationships between parental mediation and resilience could be explained by the less resilient teens seeking more social support, whereupon the parents decide to mediate their child's internet use more actively. SummaryThis report presents new findings on the coping strategies children use when bothered by something online, and whether or not they evaluate these as helpful.We focus on resilience -the ability to deal with negative experiences online or offline.We identify which children are most vulnerable in terms of harm experienced from online risks.We also identify which factors make some children more likely to use positive coping strategies that help them solve the problem and/or give them emotional support.Last, we consider resilience among children from a cross-country perspective.Most children evaluate the coping strategies they use as helpful.Talking to somebody is the most popular employed strategy, regardless of the type of risk, especially among girls and younger children who tend to employ this communicative strategy more often.In the case of online bullying, 77% of the victims talked to someone after a bullying episode while 53% did so after seeing disturbing sexual content.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.