A ten-year-old child draws on a tablet. An adolescent prepares photographs to post on a social network. A group of students requests images from an AI generator. All three observe and create, yet they do not do so before a neutral surface. They intervene in an application with its conditions, a recommendation system that organises what is visible or a model that has already taken some of the formal decisions.
Growing up among images brings together four articles and two guides on that environment. It does not address 'art for children' nor does it reduce the discussion to the dangers of screens. It examines the systems in which children and adolescents learn to observe, produce, select, publish and participate, and asks what they are able to decide within them.
Why now
The report Childhood, adolescence and digital well-being, published in 2025 based on a consultation with nearly 100,000 children and adolescents in Spain, offers the scale of the environment: 92.5% participate in at least one social network, 75.8% in three or more and the average age of access to the first mobile phone is 10.8 years. These are data on access and use. They do not in themselves demonstrate an effect on creativity, observation or visual learning.
Institutions have also shifted the question. In 2026, the OECD and the European Union published an AI literacy framework for primary and secondary education that is not limited to teaching how to use tools. In July 2025, the European Commission published guidelines on the protection of minors that address the design of platforms, including recommendation systems and certain features aimed at prolonging usage. In September 2026, it also presented the EU KIDS Act proposal. It remains subject to the ordinary legislative procedure: it is not yet a regulation in force.
The focus shifts from merely what young people do to also include the infrastructures that prepare their options. That is the starting point of the special feature.
Four articles
Artificial intelligence in the art classroom: what a child learns when generating images. Generating an image may require describing, comparing, selecting and editing. The article distinguishes these operations from the decisions taken by the system and asks what actually allows for the evaluation of a finished image.
Social networks and visual education: what they teach adolescents to observe. The feed does not merely distribute images: it selects, orders, repeats and measures. The text examines these conditions without attributing to them a unique aesthetic or a causal effect that the sources do not allow one to demonstrate.
Apps for creating in class: data, accounts and the rights of minors. An application may incorporate accounts, storage, terms of service and data processing. The article proposes the questions that a centre or a workshop should resolve before adopting one.
Young people in museums: real participation or decorative consultation. Consulting, testing, producing, exhibiting and deciding do not grant the same power. The cases of Rompepuertas, in Zaragoza, and From the classroom to the museum, by the Juan March Foundation, allow for the distinction to be specified without converting either into a universal model.
Two guides
How to exhibit or publish works by children and adolescents. Separates authorship, medium, exploitation rights, personal data and image before exhibiting, publishing, submitting to a competition, archiving or selling a work created by a minor.
How to organise a digital creation workshop with minors. Orders the decisions on objectives, tools, accounts, privacy, AI, accessibility, publication, archiving and closure before, during and after the activity.
The common thread
The six texts avoid two shortcuts. The first consists of presenting children and adolescents as passive users of inevitable systems. The second consists of attributing to them full responsibility for choices made within environments designed by adults, institutions and companies.
Between these two extremes lie concrete decisions: who opens the account, what materials are introduced, what recommendations appear, what participation is granted, who authorises a publication, what is preserved and how the role of a tool is explained. This special feature attempts to render them visible.
From where I write
I am not an educator, psychologist or clinical specialist, and these texts do not offer pedagogical or health advice. I write from the perspective of digital creation, cultural mediation and the work of Kripties Fundación in social inclusion through art.
This position does not grant general authority over childhood or education. It does, however, necessitate an examination of the conditions under which activities are designed, tools are chosen, works are displayed and what an institution permits to be decided is presented as participation.
What remains open
The special feature does not yet answer how recommenders influence the formal decisions of adolescents, what results are produced by artistic workshops with AI or to what extent participatory programmes modify an institution. The available sources allow for these questions to be delimited, not resolved.
Neither is there a single answer for all ages, contexts or tools. A local application, an educational platform, a social network, a museum and a visual generator organise distinct possibilities. Comparison requires describing each case before generalising.
About the open conversation
Projects that document not only the result, but the decisions, are of particular interest: what the participants learned, what the institution decided, what the tool did, what data were processed and what occurred with the proposals, archives and accounts upon completion.
If you work in education, museums, cultural mediation, child protection or research and can contribute a case, a datum or a verifiable discrepancy, write to me. Contributions will be used to correct, expand or discuss the analysis; an individual experience will not be presented as general proof.
The author's relationship with the cases
I am the president of Kripties Fundación, which works in social inclusion and cultural mediation through art. The Foundation maintains no economic, professional or collection-based relationship with the other institutions cited in this text.
Sources
- UNICEF España, Infancia, adolescencia y bienestar digital (in Spanish), 2025; DOI 10.30923/IABD202510.
- OECD and European Union, Empowering Learners for the Age of AI, 2026.
- European Commission, guidelines on the protection of minors under the Digital Services Act, 14 July 2025.
- EUR-Lex, proposal for an EU KIDS Act, COM(2026) 681 final, 17 September 2026.