🏰 More Than Robots #94 October 2025

“Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.” ― Samuel Pepys

There's a LOT going on. So let us start before we get stopped.

📖 Research

COVID Inquiry: Children & Young People’s Voices

“[My social worker was] at the end of my driveway while I was, like, in the porch. It was weird.” (Aged 16)

Children And Gaming: An Analysis Of Parental Attitudes

Over half of parents have observed gambling-style mechanisms in games, and 41% express concern about this exposure. Also:Young People And Gambling-Related Influencer Content and Gambling advertising is inherently misleading and A rapid evidence review of skins gambling

Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions

Some AI companion platforms actively exploit the socially performative nature of farewells to prolong engagement...Emotionally manipulative farewell messages influence users at a moment of high vulnerability—just as they attempt to exit. Also: Understanding The Impacts Of Generative Ai Use On Children

Teens, Social Media, and Image Based Abuse

The massive profits that social media companies are taking while enabling these harms need to be addressed and to become the focus of political will. Also: Sexual Violence, Criminal Law and the Metaverse

Girls’ Attitudes Survey 2025

41% of 11–21-year olds have both public and private accounts to protect themselves online

A Life Behind The Screens

Although there has been some variation in individual devices there has been no decline in smart device ownership overall. Also: Internet Matters Pulse and Digital Youth Engagement Update

The relationship between media literacy and well-being

We found a statistically significant, positive association between media literacy and well-being

Digital Literacies and Video-Sharing Platforms in Early Childhood

There is a dearth of evidence-informed guidance making the VSP practices of young children a challenging and emotive landscape to navigate

The Relationship Between Parental Monitoring and Adolescent Smartphone Addiction

Parental monitoring not only directly reduces mobile phone addiction but also exerts an indirect influence by enhancing parent-child attachment

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🧰 Resources

Everyday Digital: Parenting

A new professional training course that explains how to help families who are struggling with digital and screens.

Ludocene

Games discovery from people you trust. A free tool designed to help people of all ages find and enjoy video games. Also: Video games and literacy

Digital Wellbeing for 3 to 5 year olds

Resources, games and guides from the Sesame Workshop

A Guide To AI In Schools

This guidebook is not meant to be prescriptive or definitive. Rather, we envision it as akin to an invitation to observe a conversation in the teachers’ lounge about how teachers think about AI. Also: Checklists for apps and platforms in early education and A child rights audit of GenAI in EdTech

Health and Diet Inequalities Dashboard

Easily compare UK parliamentary constituencies on health, diet, and poverty indicators. Also: Fair Education: England’s Report Card and The educational backgrounds of Britain's leading people

Generation New Era

A new UK-wide birth cohort study aiming to follow the lives of 30,000 children born in 2026, and their families.

💡Inspiration and opinion

Policy guardrails needed as babies around the world begin to interact with AI

We have no idea how emotionally hollow interactions with bots will shape a developing brain. But we’re about to find out.

Why 3-year-olds need smartphones*

The last thing parents want is for the full weight of the internet to slam into their child’s prefrontal cortex at the wrong time.

Large Language Muddle

So, inconstancy, fallibility, forgetfulness, suffering, failure — these, apparently, are the unautomatable gifts of our species. Well, sure. To err is human. But does the AI skeptic have nothing else to fall back on than an enumeration of mankind’s shortcomings? Are our worst qualities the best we can do? Also: Why technology needs artists

Absolving The System And Solving Parents

We must not continue in the current situation in which there is a belief that ‘educational inequality and social immobility can be tackled through effective parenting’; not only does this place an unfair burden on parents, it leaves unchallenged the system which has resulted in the inequality and social immobility

…and finally

Small is beautiful