Digital disconnection as a socially embedded practice: A 360° examination of children's everyday negotiations across family, school, and peer contexts in Flanders, Belgium

Abstract

This study conceptualizes children's digital (dis)connection as a relational and moral practice embedded in the intertwined structures of family, school, and peers. Using a 360 degrees interview approach, this study situates children, parents, and teachers within relational clusters to examine how digital (dis)connectionis negotiated across overlapping social contexts. Drawing on Giddens' Structuration Theory the analysis demonstrates that children's decisions about when and how to disconnect are not simply the product of adult regulation or individual self-control but recursive processes through which social structures are both reproduced and transformed. Across contexts, shared moral frameworks of attentiveness, respect, balance, and responsibility shape how disconnection is practiced, interpreted, and justified. Children actively reinterpret these frameworks through their own reasoning and emotional engagement, turning externally imposed rules into reflexive acts of self-governance. By examining how children navigate, comply with, and contest moral expectations surrounding digital (dis)connection, this study advances an understanding of digital agency as relationally constituted and morally grounded. The findings invite a shift from protectionist or developmental framings of children's digital lives toward relational and dialogical approaches that recognize children as active moral agents in co-creating thesocial norms that organize everyday (dis)connection.