Children have always learned how to behave by watching other people. The difference now is that some of the people they are watching are inside systems that count the applause.
That is the more interesting question underneath a Children and Screens webinar being held Wednesday afternoon on how digital life intersects with moral development. The session, “Learned Behavior: How Youth Digital Life Shapes Moral Development,” is not another argument about whether screens are simply good or bad for children. The stated questions are more specific: how moral behavior develops across childhood and adolescence, how digital media may intersect with that process, what positive social behavior looks like online, and how young people apply their values across digital and offline settings.
That framing matters because “screen time” is often too blunt a category for the problem people are actually trying to understand. Watching a documentary, arguing in a group chat, playing a cooperative game, scrolling a recommendation feed and posting a joke for classmates are all technically screen use. Socially, they are completely different environments. They expose a child to different models of behavior, different expectations and different kinds of feedback.
And feedback is where the question gets especially interesting. In ordinary life, children learn social rules through a messy collection of consequences. Someone laughs. Someone gets hurt. A teacher intervenes. A friend stops talking to them. A parent explains why something was cruel. A kind act is noticed, or sometimes it is not. The lesson arrives through people and relationships.
Online, some of those same lessons arrive with counters attached. A joke gets likes. An insult gets replies. A confrontation gets shared. A public apology receives praise or suspicion. A supportive comment may disappear into a thread while a more provocative one attracts an audience. The platform is not the only teacher, but it becomes part of the classroom because it helps determine which behaviors become visible and which reactions are rewarded with attention.
That does not mean the internet is teaching children to be immoral. It means the social environment has changed in a way that makes moral learning harder to separate from media design. A young person can understand that kindness is good while also learning, through repetition, that ridicule gets a faster response. They can know that empathy matters while watching cruelty become entertainment. They can also see extraordinary generosity, mutual aid, advocacy and support spread through the same systems. The lesson is not one-directional. The reward structure is simply more visible.
Children and Screens is bringing together researchers whose work approaches that problem from several directions. Moderator Marina Krcmar of Wake Forest University studies media effects on children and families, including moral reasoning and prosocial learning. Lindsay Hahn of the University at Buffalo directs research on media psychology and morality. Eva Telzer of UNC Chapel Hill studies adolescent development, peer relationships, prosocial and risk-taking behavior, and social media. Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president of Global Education at Sesame Workshop, brings the perspective of designing media intended to teach young audiences.
The panel is scheduled from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Eastern and is part of Children and Screens’ “Character Matters: Values and Resilience in the Digital Age” series. Importantly, the event is a discussion of research and development questions, not the announcement of a single study proving what the internet does to morality. That distinction is useful because moral development itself is not a switch that technology flips. It is a long process shaped by family, peers, schools, culture, temperament, experience and, increasingly, digital environments.
The language adults use around those environments is part of the story too. Words such as bullying, toxic, supportive, kind, mean and problematic are constantly applied to online behavior. Adults often speak as though those labels have fixed meanings. Children, meanwhile, are learning what those words mean by watching the behavior that gets attached to them.
A child may hear that bullying is wrong, then enter a space where a pile-on is framed as accountability. They may be taught that kindness means helping someone who is struggling, then see support performed publicly because public support earns social approval. They may watch someone condemned as “toxic” for behavior that would have been described very differently in another setting. None of this means the labels are useless. It means the definitions are being taught socially, in real time, by adults, peers, creators and platforms at once.
That is why the most useful version of this conversation probably is not “What is the internet doing to kids?” That question imagines the child as a passive object being acted upon by a giant machine. Children are watching, interpreting, imitating, resisting and experimenting. They are trying out identities and learning the consequences, just as young people always have.
The difference is that the room is bigger now.
A teenager testing a joke is no longer necessarily testing it on three friends. A child learning what counts as admirable behavior may be watching people whose approval comes from thousands of strangers. A mistake can be preserved, recirculated and discussed long after the moment that produced it. A good deed can travel too. So can courage, empathy, cruelty, generosity and humiliation.
For parents and educators, that makes the challenge more complicated than reducing exposure. If moral development partly depends on observation, then the question is not only how long children are online. It is what they are seeing people do there, what happens to those people afterward, and what the surrounding system appears to say about the result.
Kids have always learned how people are supposed to behave by watching other people.
Now some of the people they are watching have a like count underneath them.
SOURCE NOTES
• Children and Screens: Children and Screens event page
• Children and Screens: Marina Krcmar, PhD speaker bio
• Children and Screens: Lindsay Hahn, PhD speaker bio
• Children and Screens: Eva Telzer, PhD speaker bio
• Children and Screens: Rosemarie T. Truglio, PhD speaker bio
Event and speaker details attributed to Children and Screens materials cited in SOURCE NOTES. Cultural framing is RMN's.