An 11-year-old girl described an experience online: "There's peer pressure to pretend it's funny. You feel uncomfortable on the inside, but pretend it's funny on the outside."

Was she talking about a specific video? No. She was describing her relationship with violent content on social media. Content she encounters daily. Content the algorithms serve her whether she wants it or not.

A 15-year-old boy was more direct: "There are kids giving self-harm tips. How to hurt yourself really badly, how to self-harm without your parents knowing or how to hide it."

These aren't outliers. According to research commissioned by Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, children across age groups describe violent and harmful content as "unavoidable" online. Not occasional. Not rare. Unavoidable.

That word matters. When children describe content as unavoidable, they're not just describing what they see. They're describing their relationship with systems they've learned cannot be controlled, influenced, or escaped. And psychologically, that loss of control has consequences far deeper than disturbing content alone.

According to self-determination theory, one of psychology's most well-validated frameworks for human development, three basic psychological needs must be met for healthy functioning: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy doesn't mean freedom from all constraints. Children need boundaries. But autonomy does require the experience of acting with understanding........

© Psychology Today