Protecting and promoting children's digital skills and wellbeing in the digital environment

“Youth Skills (ySKILLS)” is a project on children’s digital skills and wellbeing in the digital environment funded by the European Union’s (EU) Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme. The goal of our task (Task 7.4) is to map the project’s evidence-based policy recommendations onto the EU regulatory framework, subsequently identify potential gaps in the existing framework and, finally, translate the policy recommendations into "action points" addressed to EU policymakers. To that end, we first drafted an overview of the EU policy and legal framework relevant to children’s digital skills and wellbeing online which identifies (1) the competences of the EU, (2) existing EU policies and (3) EU legislation, and (4) the EU bodies that are responsible to provide advice, take measures or supervise matters in relation to youth’s digital skills and wellbeing in the digital age. At a second stage, we mapped the ySKILLS policy recommendations onto the EU framework and discussed the extent to which they are already incorporated in existing policies and legal instruments. Lastly, our gap analysis demonstrates where changes to the mapped legal and policy frameworks would need to be made in order to implement the ySKILLS recommendations to advance youth’s digital skills and wellbeing in the digital age.