Concern over young people’s relationships with technology has been a regular focus of US public discourse and policy debates ever since young people led adoption of digital and social media in the late nineties. Concerns over digital marketing and online predators drove the passage of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in 1998 (boyd et al. 2011). The aughts saw the start of a steady stream of books suggesting that digital technology “stupefies young Americans” (Bauerlein 2009), makes us shallow thinkers (Carr 2010), and socially disconnects us (Turkle 2017). These concerns, and adult desire to limit and regulate young people’s technology engagement, have been amplified by the growth of youth mental health issues since the 2010s, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite lack of supporting evidence, a dominant narrative that technology use is driving a teen mental health crisis has taken hold. In June 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. News outlets wasted no time in circulating headlines stoking adult fears: “Social media is driving teen mental health crisis, Surgeon General warns” and “Social media poses profound risk of harm.” The actual advisory acknowledged a more nuanced, and measured, reality: “There is broad agreement among the scientific community that social media has the potential to both benefit and harm children and adolescents” (5).

The dominant narrative that screen time causes teen mental health problems is grounded in persistent intergenerational dynamics and fears over new technology and youth culture. It persists even in the face of a countervailing scientific consensus (Odgers and Jensen 2020; Orben and Przybylski 2019) and lived experience in how technology is increasingly essential for learning, creation, and social connection. Media and technology researchers have documented these intergenerational conflicts that have accompanied every wave of youth “new” media adoption ever since Stanley Cohen (1972) coined the term “moral panic” to describe adult reaction to mods, rockers, and skinheads. New technology, media, and youth cultural forms threaten adult norms and taste, and are routinely demonized and blamed for broader societal problems by the establishment.

Recognizing how cultural stigmas and fears over youth behavior color today’s discourses of teens and tech is essential to combating an often well meaning but misleading dominant narrative. This narrative is not only misleading, but materially harmful in diverting attention from well-established and critical drivers of wellbeing and mental health problems. In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, the last decade saw significant growth in well-documented mental health stressors that disproportionately impact vulnerable and marginalized youth. These stressors span online and offline settings and include poverty, educational pressure, climate anxiety, hate, and political polarization. Specific features and uses of technology can amplify or mitigate these stressors. However, these dynamics can’t be understood through a simple narrative of technology addiction or harm, and can’t be resolved through blanket adult-driven, age-based prohibitions or screen time rules.

The dominant narrative also fails to recognize the diversity in experiences, dispositions, vulnerabilities, and ways of using technology. The advisory acknowledged a truth that is backed by research and common sense, but was glossed over in the headlines: “different children and adolescents are affected by social media in different ways based on their individual strengths and vulnerabilities, and based on cultural, historical, and socio-economic factors” (5). For some teens, online connections to affinity networks and identity-affirming content are indispensable sources of connection, comfort, care, and support. Other teens find their social media feeds full of content that wastes their time or erodes their confidence and self-worth, and seek steps to limit their engagement. Most youth use varied technologies on an everyday basis, ranging from media creation and consumption apps, social media, and communication tools and games, and don’t see “technology” or even “social media” as singular or monolithic influences in their lives.

As longtime researchers of young people’s lives and uses of digital media, we are committed to uplifting more grounded, textured accounts of the relationship between media and wellbeing (Ito et al. 2009, 2018; Ito, Odgers, and Schueller 2020; Weinstein and James 2022). We are clear-eyed about both the benefits and challenges that digital and social media can present for youth’s physical health, mental health, social connectedness, learning, and civic development, among other outcomes. But we seek to elevate research that details where, how, when, and especially for whom those benefits and challenges manifest. Such research is essential both for public understanding and for technology design, intervention development, and policy.

This essay collection came together as part of a movement to bolster young people’s wellbeing in a technology rich world. Essays provide readers with relevant, foundational insights from developmental science, sociocultural perspectives, wellbeing research, dignity theory, and more. The collection also describes relevant approaches, methods, and measures (e.g., youth codesign, critical race theory, critical digital literacies) for researching youth wellbeing as well as constructive design frameworks for technology design, online communities, and interventions. Insights across the collection make the case for four necessary frame shifts around tech and youth wellbeing:

• From Technological Determinism to Social Shaping of Technology: Technology both shapes and is shaped by social and cultural contexts, and is not an independent force causing a mental health crisis. Technology is intertwined with well-established influences on health and wellbeing including individual vulnerabilities, poverty, social connection, and marginalization.

• From Individual Screen Time to Sociotechnical Drivers of Wellbeing: Individual screen time is an inadequate (and problematic) measure for interrogating wellbeing; wellbeing is situated and shaped by diverse facets of young people’s lives that cut across online and offline settings.

• From One-Size-Fits-All to Tailored, Asset-Based Solutions: Young people’s experiences with and orientation to technology are diverse, and are situated within economic, social, and cultural inequalities. Solutions must be tailored to and tap the assets of marginalized and vulnerable youth to be effective and equitable.

• From Top-Down to Community-Driven, Participatory Design: Designing for youth wellbeing requires critical, humanizing, and participatory approaches that bring youth expertise to the table, and accomplishes this in ways that acknowledge and remediate structural inequalities and power dynamics between adults and youth.

In this introduction, we describe how the essays in this volume make the case for these four cross-cutting commitments to challenging inaccurate and damaging dominant narratives about young people, technology, and wellbeing.

From Technological Determinism to Social Shaping of Technology

The dominant narrative for understanding the relationship between young people and technology is rooted in technological determinism – a belief that technology is an independent force standing outside of culture and society. Headlines suggesting that social media or screen time “drives'' or “causes” a teen mental health crisis position technology as an independent force with homogenous effects. It fails to recognize that technology is both shaped by and shapes society and culture in unequal and heterogenous ways (Benjamin 2019; Pinch and Bijker 1984; Hine 2011). As health researchers record high levels of persistent sadness, hopelessness, and distress (particularly among those who identify as girls and/or LGBTQ+) (CDC 2023), an urgent search for tractable causes and solutions has often led to technologically determinist finger pointing at tech. Technological determinism in this vein is beguiling because it offers a clear villain and positions adults as saviors and young people as incompetent and vulnerable victims in need of protection. It also absolves adult educational and public welfare institutions of responsibility and deflects attention from well-documented mental health risks such as poverty, racism, homophobia, transphobia, achievement pressure, sexism, and loss. The essays in this volume offer an alternative, unseating technology as an independent agent and recognizing our collective responsibility by examining social and cultural history and context, and the role of diverse actors, including young people, in shaping technology.

Science and technology studies research describes the social shaping of new technology by analyzing how it grows from the history and soil of cultural assumptions, institutionalized practices, and structural inequity. The essays by Jenny Radesky and Stephanie Reich and her colleagues critique the capitalist imperatives of big tech embedded in features such as notifications, flashy graphics, and recommendations that are designed to keep users engaged rather than prioritizing learning, healthy development, and wellbeing. They highlight the challenge of having these features foregrounded in default settings. Tiera Tanksley’s essay excavates a different type of cultural default setting – how these platforms are descendents of a long lineage of white supremacist and anti-Black projects, assumptions, and structures. She describes how “race is a technology” and “anti-blackness can be thought of as an algorithm,” challenging narratives about the neutrality and universalism of platforms and the code that guides them. Educational technology is not exempt from these fraught legacies. Cherise McBride and Earl Aguilera describe dehumanizing ideologies of control, hierarchy, and racial reductionism embedded in a training simulation for teachers.

Authors in this collection hold industry accountable, but they also surface the power and responsibility of varied stakeholders in fostering a healthy tech ecosystem. Recognizing the social and cultural shaping of technology creates openness to counter narratives and designs, policies, and practices fostered by diverse youth and their communities. The essays highlight the roles that young people do and can play in shaping technology: in everyday play and engagement with online spaces (Laliberte and Katz; Milosovic et al.; Reich et al.; Salen Tekinbaş et al.), through design and co-design with adults (Tanksley; Weinstein et al.), as participants in youth advisory boards (Chamaraman et al.; Kerr et al.), and as storytellers and creators (Clark et al.; McBride and Aguilera). Salen Tekinbaş and colleagues offer a framework of “sociotechnical design” that conceptualizes design as a feedback loop among platform features, rules, culture, and activities. In this framing, youth play an essential role in fostering healthy online spaces and interactions.

Essays focused on research in educational and youth development settings highlight the creative agency of educators and youth workers (Laliberte and Katz; Clark et al., McBride and Aguilera) and the “collegial pedagogy” that fosters intergenerational co-creation (Clark et al.). Conducting research during the Covid-19 pandemic, Laliberte and Katz describe young people and educators’ creative reshaping and use of platforms to support essential social connection and wellbeing practices. McBride and Aguilera argue that teachers are designers with “expertise that might inform not only the use of technology, but its very design.” They offer principles for humanizing design in technology and education, including a focus on community-centered design where “design happens with and by participants, rather than ‘for’ users whose needs must be interpreted.” They describe counter narratives about agency and interdependence produced by students and educators in a course analyzing Toni Morrison’s Beloved, using a metaphor of collaborative quilting and the open-ended publishing tool Padlet. Tanksley supports critical and creative design thinking in her course on Race, Resistance, and Technology, where students designed apps like KarenKatchers, to keep Black youth safe through community alerts about Karen incidents.

The stakes are high for ethical and effective intervention in the complex dynamics that influence wellbeing and young people’s online engagement. Well-intentioned policy, guidelines, and programs have unintended consequences when they don’t take into account the intertwining of culture, everyday practices, structural inequity, and technology. For example, Stephanie Reich and her colleagues describe the far ranging negative consequences of the Child Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA), which was intended to protect young people by limiting their access to online platforms. “In practice, age-gates allow platforms to treat everyone as a homogenous group with the same (lack of) protections and policies. Further, companies have little incentive to verify users’ ages.” In a related vein, Tijana Milosovec and her colleagues describe how young people resist adult-designed and adult-imposed cyberbullying interventions because they don’t take into account the underlying motivations for bullying, and how they are rooted in offline dynamics. “In order to design interventions that are meaningful from a youth perspective, we need to see cyberbullying through a broader, relational lens that factors in both online and offline aspects of youth sociality.” This point, that offline and online social and cultural dynamics are inseparable, offers a segue to our next topic: how to understand the relationship between technology and youth wellbeing.

From Individual Screen Time to Sociotechnical Drivers of Youth Wellbeing

Understanding technology as inseparable from social and cultural context means recognizing that its shape and influence varies based on context. The essays across this collection underline a parallel core truth about youth wellbeing: it is situated and contextual, shaped by developmental forces and diverse factors - social, cultural, and environmental - that play out uniquely based on setting and for youth with different backgrounds and dispositions.

This is yet another important frame shift from dominant public discourse. Public attention and some research related to youth wellbeing has tended to hover on screens (and especially individual screen time) as a driving force. Researchers who see tech as “the problem” make their case based on data showing smartphone adoption and social media usage rates coinciding temporally with increases in youth depression, anxiety, and suicide (Twenge 2017; Haidt 2024), or based on associations between screen time and lower mental health outcomes (Twenge and Campbell 2019). The evidence is far from clear. Comprehensive reviews of recent studies find only very small correlations between tech use and teen wellbeing (Odgers and Jensen 2020; Orben and Przybylski 2019). What’s more, the direction of influence or causality is unclear: “the fact that two trend lines increase together does not mean that one phenomenon causes the other” (Odgers and Jensen 2020).

Of course, we can’t ignore that social technologies contain features that tap into developmental vulnerabilities that all youth experience. Consider adolescents’ sensitivity to social rewards, with peer feedback being a special draw and the ways in which tech features (e.g., likes, notifications, viewer counts) play on that draw, with implications for wellbeing. Reich and colleagues’ essay takes a developmental lens on such tech designs and the underlying attention economy that profits from users’ extending time on apps, regardless of whether that time is meaningful or positive. They applaud specific design tweaks (e.g., settings that hide ‘viewer’ or ‘like’ counts or turn off autoplay) that invite older children and adolescents to take more control over their digital experiences. In a similar spirit, Weinstein et al. describe an intervention - an app called Locus - that supports adolescents’ awareness, intentionality, and overall agency with respect to their digital engagement. Tiera Tanksley’s critical race technology workshops empower Black youth to critique existing tech designs and ideate new technologies as part of a larger aim of “sociotechnical abolition.”

Developmental pediatrician Jenny Radesky applies developmental and agency lenses too, offering a measured account of an especially charged topic: digital engagement by very young children (under age 5). Crucially, she situates young children’s developmental needs, digital play, and wellbeing in a relational context, calling out the relevance of caregivers: “it is impossible to study (or design for) children without considering…caregiver practices that help children internalize and make meaning of themselves and the world around them.” Radesky critiques digital designs (e.g., single touch interfaces) that tacitly encourage solo use and lauds tech designs (e.g., multi-touch interfaces or prompts for parent-child discussion) that are “child-centered by default” and acknowledge that the relational context of play matters. Echoing Reich et al., she calls for digital environments that “support children’s play and autonomy rather than exploit children’s vulnerabilities.”

Beyond healthy defaults and tech design features, essays highlight particular qualities of communities (both offline and online) that are instrumental to youth wellbeing. Clark and colleagues describe how a youth media program’s organizational culture directly supports wellbeing. The organization embodies “a shift from ‘mental health day’... to a ‘mental health way’ – a design commitment to structure all youth activities through a lens of mental health and well-being.” In their essay depicting “care(full) online communities,” Salen-Tekinbaş et al. provide compelling evidence of the ways that particular online spaces can and do directly support positive youth development. Inspired by sites like ExperienceCraft, a Minecraft community for grieving youth, the authors distill a set of design principles at play in genuinely care(full) and caring online communities.

The essays take on board the specifics of young people’s inner lives and contexts beyond their screens - as well as dynamics that cut across online and offline life. Bradley Kerr and colleagues' essay audits the strengths and limitations of common technology use measures, and offers thoughtful guidelines for data interpretation, including underscoring the importance of “considering findings in context…of each adolescent’s unique identities and life circumstances.” They suggest that focusing on specific technology-supported activities is more productive than simple time-based screen time usage measures. Sophia Choukas-Bradley’s tour of research provides insights on social media and body-image - and her own “perfect storm” framework echoes this point. Although developmental and sociocultural messages about beauty may prime adolescents for appearance consciousness, teens' experiences with visual culture on social media are highly variable. Individual differences matter (e.g., susceptibility to social comparison) as do teens’ identities (especially gender and race), and the particular ways they use social media. Milosevic and colleagues’ research and development approach - assessing a cyberbullying intervention in partnership with adolescents - surfaces invaluable insights about the centrality of offline relational dynamics in digital cruelty situations.

Contributions in this volume challenge the narrative that social media engagement as a whole drives teen mental health problems by identifying the impacts of specific technology-supported activities. Specific forms of social media engagement can boost youth wellbeing (Rideout and Fox 2018) - for example, humanizing forms of digital storytelling can provide crucial validation for youth whose intersectional identities don’t feel fully seen (Clark et al.). Platforms like Discord are leveraged by youth in times of crisis to find mutual support (Laliberte and Katz) and to buoy young people’s overall wellbeing (as in ListoAmerica’s Discord server, with channels directly supporting “good-vibes-and-health”) (Salen Tekinbaş et al.). Other digital contexts and tech features can also exacerbate mental health challenges and ill-being for specific youth: “fitspiration” content on Instagram can amplify body dissatisfaction for young adults who aspire to a fit, muscular ideal (Choukas-Bradley). Black youth can have traumatic experiences of anti-Black racism on social media apps (including exposure to viral videos of Black death and digital harassment)(Tanksley). A “duality” characterizes the experience of many youth, including young journalist Nora who turns to AI tools for coping with grief: “There are a lot of negative things that can come out of it. But there also can be good.” (Clark et al.). Youths’ identities and contexts, the way they use tech, and the content they engage with all matter. These realities clarify why sweeping “one-size-fits-all” approaches to tech and youth wellbeing inevitably fall short (Ito et al. 2020). These essays ground research on emerging technology in established research understandings of the activities, contexts, and dispositions that we already know influence mental health and wellbeing.

From One-Size-Fits-All to Tailored, Asset-Based Solutions

Recognizing how technology experiences vary among youth with different backgrounds and dispositions means resisting one-size-fits-all solutions and interventions. Much of the public discourse on teens and tech suggests that all teens share common tech predilections and risks, that they are all “digital natives” addicted to their phones and games. These narratives fail to recognize the profound disparities in who dominant platfoms are designed for, whether due to the algorithms of anti-Blackness that Tanskley describes, or the ways in which platforms ignore the particular developmental needs and social contexts of children and adolescents (Reich et al.; Radesky). Even in wealthy countries like the U.S., youth experience significant disparities in access to technology and related infrastructures. In their research with undergraduates, Laliberte and Katz describe the dynamic struggles of low-income students in maintaining access to online learning resources as they hit a cap on their data plan, or their computer needs repairs they can’t afford. They suggest a framework of “under-connectedness” that “describes a dynamic spectrum of human experiences with technology, not a binary and static ‘divide.’”

Researchers have documented both the different vulnerabilities and strengths of young people with different backgrounds and lived experiences, and how offline and online risks are interrelated. For example, victims of cyberbullying are also likely to be bullied offline (Przybylski and Bowes 2017). Structural racism, homophobia, and sexism spill over and can be amplified through social media (Cho 2018; Noble 2018). Socio-emotionally vulnerable teens tend to rely on social media to connect with peers, and also have the most to benefit from positive online support (Rideout and Fox 2018; Rideout and Robb 2019). Choukas-Bradley identifies a “perfect storm,” where peers, family, and the media all reflect objectifying and unrealistic body image expectations on women and girls, making them more susceptible to body dissatisfaction. Tanksley describes the constant stress that Black youth experience in seeing images of Black death and dying in the media and online. Individual differences and neurotypes can also influence vulnerabilities. Kerr and his colleagues note that research focused on problematic use identifies 6-9% of adolescents as being part of this population of unique concern.

While research has clearly documented disparities in risks and vulnerabilities, it has also surfaced the unique strengths and affordances of solutions by and for these same populations of youth. LGBTQ+ and neurodiverse youth have heightened mental health risks due to social marginalization and cultural stigmas, but they also have powerful assets to offer and gain from one another through online connection (e.g., Cho 2018; Coyne et al. 2023; Craig et al. 2021; Ringland et al. 2016). Similarly, research has documented how young people who are at risk of social isolation also describe the greatest benefits of online connection (Rideout and Fox 2018; Ito et al. 2018, 2020). One-size-fits-all interventions such as blanket age-based restrictions are likely to disproportionately harm these groups with some of the greatest risk and vulnerabilities.

The authors in this volume argue collectively for design and interventions that maximize autonomy and agency, tailored to the unique strengths of particular groups of children. This can be understood as an “asset-based” orientation, which recognizes that young people and other marginalized and oppressed groups have unique strengths, and should not be understood by their deficits that need to be “fixed” by adults and more privileged groups. Radesky argues that this is true even for young children. She advocates for appreciating the importance of supporting autonomy among young children, noting that it may be “easier to exert control or protection at scale with a one-size-fits-all approach, while scaffolding is tailored to the individual child at their specific developmental moment.” This recognition of the assets of even young children echo an emphasis on humanizing and dignifying perspectives on young people that pervade the essays in this volume. Milosovec and her colleagues ground their understanding of bullying dynamics in a dignity framework for human rights, which recognizes dignity as a right that cannot be stripped away. Clark and her colleagues describe their commitment to center humanity in their work with youth creators and McBride and Aguilera outline a series of humanizing design principles for technology and education. We’ll next explore the ways in which designers have infused these critical and humanizing asset-based approaches into design efforts with youth.

From Top-Down to Community-Driven, Participatory Design

An asset-based orientation means a shift from top-down, adult-driven approaches to technology and policy design towards approaches driven by young people’s knowledge, agency, agendas, and expertise. This youth-driven, participatory design orientation begins with a recognition grounded in youth-centered research: that young people have knowledge, skills, and perspectives often inaccessible to adults, particularly when it comes to new media and technology. Prevailing adult assumptions about youth being “addicted” to their devices or “wasting time” in online games are powerfully checked by digital youth studies that describe the important role that technology plays in supporting social connection, creativity, and learning (Ito et al. 2013; Weinstein and James 2022). As noted, Radesky positions very young children as having agency that requires explicit acknowledgement and consideration in the design of technologies. In their study of college students’ experiences with “underconnectedness” during pandemic-era remote learning, Laliberte and Katz describe strategies students adapted to achieve “control and confidence” under extremely challenging circumstances. Informed by such research about young people’s media and technology engagement, many of the essays center efforts to co-design and co-create new technologies, including co-design projects, youth development programs, and community organizing.

In co-design projects, young people are brought in as valued advisors and contributors to research and design efforts led and facilitated by adult collaborators. Kerr and colleagues involved youth in the analysis of social media research methods and measures, and as co-authors to their essay. In co-designing digital wellbeing tools with youth, Weinstein and colleagues draw from Participatory Design (PD) approaches that go back to co-operative design processes tapped by software developers in 1970s Scandinavia (Druin 2002; Gregory 2003) and recent Design Justice literature (Costanza-Chock 2020). Milosevic and colleagues detail how co-design enabled essential insights from youth to inform the design and content of an AI-based cyberbullying intervention tool. Linda Charmaraman and colleagues draw from PD traditions as well as youth participatory action research approaches (YPAR), where youth share power with adults in critical inquiry and social justice efforts (Anyon et al. 2018). They “offer youth shared power with adults in a participatory environment” in the co-design of a digital wellbeing workshop tailored to racial, ethnic, and gender minority girls.

In addition to co-design projects, this volume also includes essays describing educational and youth development contexts where adults are supporting young people in critical inquiry, storytelling, and design. Tiera Tanksley sees critical understanding of how racism is embedded within technology as essential to anti-racist and liberatory design projects. Drawing from critical race theory in education (Dumas 2016; Dumas and ross 2016), Tanksley offers a framework for how Critical Race Technology Theory (CRTT) can guide the design of programs centered on technological research and design with Black youth - to “design and dream up race-conscious and justice-oriented technologies that could protect - rather than harm - Communities of Color.” Traditions of freedom dreaming (Kelley 2002) and critical race counter storytelling (Solórzano and Yosso 2002; Yosso 2013) are mobilized by Tanksley as well as McBride and Aguilera in developing educational programs that support youth of color to critique dominant ideologies and imagine alternatives. Humanizing pedagogies that develop critical consciousness and honor the cultures and linguistic repertoires of young people (Friere 1970) are central to the class McBride and Aguilera describe, which supports young people in analyzing Morrison’s Beloved through creative and collaborative digital quilting. In a complementary vein, Clark and colleagues outline a framework for “humanizing collegial pedagogy” that integrates humanizing critical digital literacies with the orientation towards reciprocity and “collegial pedagogy” advanced by YR Media’s youth media practices (Soep and Chávez 2016). Their essay describes how this ethos develops a context of trust and belonging that enables young people in telling authentic and critical stories on challenging topics such as mental health and wellbeing.

The youth development contexts described by Tanksley, McBride, Aquilera, and Clark and colleagues cultivate critical and leadership dispositions that can be mobilized for social change and community organizing. Salen Tekinbaş and colleagues’ essay centers on online communities organized and led by youth. They distill design principles for care(full) online communities that recognize “the complex interplay between the socio-technical design of an online play community and the conditions, assets, and attributes present in individual youth, their families, peer groups, and communities.” They describe design principles and strategies for how to support inclusive and caring online social connections within the complex alchemy of online contexts where young people are leading and organizing play and social interaction. They offer case studies of Minecraft and Discord servers designed to support positive social connection and wellbeing. In one example, youth tap Discord’s features to create norms, a culture and climate, and practices that are responsive to the needs of Latino youth, including the “stresses and structural inequities” that shape their lives and their interactions in the online community. These examples fill out the picture of varied ways that researchers, educators, and community organizers have worked alongside youth to design positive online and offline environments to support wellbeing.

Overview of the Volume

This introduction has surfaced four key frame shifts around technology and youth wellbeing that emerge as cross-cutting themes in this collection. We believe these evidence-driven and equity-oriented frameworks should inform related research, tech design, and policy debates, and offer a challenge to a well-meaning but often misguided dominant narrative. essays ground the necessity of seeing technologies as social and cultural products, and seeing youth wellbeing as shaped by diverse forces in young people’s lives. They argue for the necessity of solutions being sensitive - and tailored - to the needs, assets, and experiences of different youth, and describe the potentials of participatory research and design approaches.

The volume is organized according to three forms of research and design practice. Section 1 - “Understanding Young People’s Experiences with Digital Technology” includes essays focused on empirical research on young people’s engagement with digital media. The section starts with an essay by Jenny Radesky on Digital Wellbeing in Early Childhood. Sophia Choukas-Bradley offers an overview and analysis of research on adolescents, and the relationship between social media use and body image. The essay by Bradley Kerr and his colleagues unpacks the implications of using different kinds of social media use measures for our understanding of the relationship between adolescent mental health and wellbeing. Complementing the essays in this section focused on the field of psychology, Vikki Katz and Luna Laliberte offer a qualitative, sociocultural look at college student experiences with technology during a specific historical period of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Section 2 - “Dismantling the Default Setting” includes essays with a critical analytic perspective that diagnose prevalent design biases and offer alternatives. Tiera Tanksley applies a critical race approach to tech design and offers a vision for empowering Black youth to (re)design technologies in abolitionist directions. Cherise McBride and Earl Aguilera take on ed tech design, distilling humanizing principles to guide both the design of technologies and their use in educational contexts. In their essay Monica Clark and colleagues highlight humanizing collegial pedagogies that support young journalists’ reporting on, with, and for wellbeing. Finally, taking a developmental lens, Stephanie Reich and colleagues argue against one-size-fits-all design and for approaches to defaults that meet youth where they are and lend them more control over their digital experiences.

Section 3 - “Co-Developing Solutions with Young People” focuses on efforts to design technologies, stories, and educational programs that grow from the assets, wisdom, culture, and perspectives of diverse young people. In their essay, Katie Salen Tekinbaş and colleagues. describe design features of “care(full)” online communities created by and for youth. In Emily Weinstein and colleagues’ account, teens’ perspectives, pain points, and wisdom directly inform the design of interventions to bolster their wellbeing as they engage with social media apps. Young people’s experiences with cruel relational dynamics both offline and online inform Tijana Milosevic and colleague’s efforts to design effective anti-cyberbullying interventions. Similarly, in Linda Charmararan and colleagues’ essay on action research in the context of a youth advisory board, youth expertise is centered toward the design of relevant digital wellbeing interventions.

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