BUILT ALONGSIDE CANADIAN YOUTH
GROUNDED IN RESEARCH
A Hub for
Wellbeing in Digital Environments
WELCOME TO THE HUB!
How does digital technology help and harm youth wellbeing?
Explore UNICEF Canada’s 9 domains of child and youth wellbeing to find out. Each domain features videos of Canadian youth, research snapshots, and a curated selection of trusted resources related to each theme.
Click on the bubbles in the graphic to take you to each domain.
Graphic created by: Sierra Gogol
The short answer: moderate, purposeful, and socially meaningful use of digital technology tends to support wellbeing, while passive, compulsive, or excessive use tends to wear it down. But there’s so much nuance to explore…
-
How do young people themselves define personal wellbeing and digital wellbeing? And how happy are they with the role and impact of digital technology on their overall sense of wellbeing?
-
What role do digital devices and the internet play in youth education? How is education connected to digital citizenship?
-
How much free or recreational time do young people spend online, and what impact does digital play have on their wellbeing?
-
How safe do young people feel online, and how do digital technologies shape their safety in positive or negative ways?
-
How does access to the internet and digital technology affect young people’s material security and their ability to meet these basic needs?
-
How does digital technology shape young people’s social networks and their connections to family, friends, and community?
-
How does the digital world influence young people’s overall sense of health and wellbeing across physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions?
-
How are young people engaging online as informed digital citizens in social and political affairs?
-
How do digital technologies shape young people’s knowledge of, care for, and connection to nature, and how do they affect environmental sustainability?
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
The Digital Wellbeing Hub grew from real conversations with young people across Canada. Building on decades of research alongside youth at the Young Lives Research Lab, we co-launched a national study with UNICEF Canada, the Students Commission of Canada, and an 11-person Youth Advisory Committee to guide the work. Using the Canadian Index of Child and Youth Well-being as a framework, we interviewed youth across the country and analyzed existing research. We created this Hub to share what we've learned so far. As the work continues, so will this space, growing with new insights, voices, and ideas.
OUR APPROACH AND THEORY
This Hub takes a critical socioecological approach to youth wellbeing.
“Socioecological” means we see wellbeing as more than an individual matter. It is shaped by the many connected ecosystems young people are part of, “including humans, societies, the planet, technology, land, and more-than-human species” (Tilleczek et al., 2025). “Critical” means we also ask who holds power in those systems; who benefits, who is harmed, and who is left out.
The Hub is organized around the nine domains of UNICEF Canada’s Index of Child and Youth Wellbeing. These domains are interconnected, so what happens in one affects the others.
UNICEF Canada built the Index with and for young people across Canada, to capture the holistic picture of what wellbeing looks and feels like to them.
Grounded in the Rights of the Child, the Index tracks how young people are doing across 9 interconnected dimensions of life. It helps us understand and assess “the kinds of childhoods our society offers its children,” and guides action on the challenges they face (UNICEF Canada Baseline Report, 2019).
photo by: Viktor