In the same boat: Parents’ and teachers’ role in protecting elementary school students’ online rights

The study offers a socio-legal typology describing how parents and teachers facilitate or hinder the protection of elementary school children in the online world. Drawing on interviews with 75 elementary school students, 15 parents, and 20 teachers in four Israeli schools, the findings distinguish four patterns of adult practices: restricting children’s rights, mobilizing children’s rights in cases of rights infringements, fostering children’s rights consciousness, and waiving children’s rights. The findings showed that most children held a favorable view of practices that protected their rights and were critical of adults who waived their rights. The conclusions delineate the importance of applying rights terminology to analyze parents’ and teachers’ practices. A terminology of rights underscores that restrictive practices should be embedded in principles of proportionality, highlights the balance between autonomy and protection, clarifies the implications of ignoring online injury, distinguishes between practices whose implications differ although they co-occur, and provides a relatively stable framework that can be adapted to changing online contexts. The conclusions also underscore that parents’ and teachers’ roles in fulfilling young children’s online rights are inherently intertwined and complementary. This mutual responsibility can afford opportunities for effective collaboration but might also lead to waiving children’s rights to protection in the online world.