Sharing this insightful article by Briony Lipton, posted on the ABC's Religion & Ethics page. 

Moral imagination in a digital world: Holding space for childhood - ABC Religion & Ethics

Children today are growing up in a world increasingly shaped by algorithmic platforms, disembodied connection and constant stimulation. As parents and educators, we’re often told to manage this by setting limits on screen time, installing filters or teaching cyber safety. But these are only part of the picture. What if our most important task is not just to control exposure — but to nurture moral imagination?

Moral imagination is the capacity to pause, to feel and to act with ethical clarity. It allows children to reflect on their experiences, consider the perspectives of others and imagine alternative ways of being in the world. This isn’t simply about right and wrong. It’s about developing an inner life strong enough to meet the complexity of the world.

This idea is central to the educational philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, the early twentieth-century Austrian philosopher and spiritual thinker who founded anthroposophy and developed what is now known as Steiner or Waldorf education. Grounded in a view of the child as a developing physical, emotional and spiritual being, Steiner education emphasises rhythm, reverence and relationship as essential conditions for healthy development. Rather than rejecting technology outright, it seeks to protect the child’s inner life, introducing digital tools only when they align with developmental readiness.

In a digital culture that often flattens nuance and accelerates reaction, moral imagination offers a much-needed form of inner anchoring.

Reframing the digital challenge

Too often, conversations about children and technology become polarised. Either we’re told to embrace digital fluency, or we’re warned to avoid screens entirely. But the real question isn’t whether technology is good or bad. It’s how it aligns (or doesn’t) with the child’s developmental needs.

Young children, in particular, are still building the inner scaffolding of memory, rhythm and embodied presence. When digital environments overwhelm these capacities with speed, abstraction and disconnection, it becomes harder for children to process experience in integrated, soulful ways.

And it’s not just what children are exposed to, but how they are formed by it. Repeated imagery, algorithmic feedback, and performative engagement shape their identities, relationships and values, often before they are developmentally ready to navigate such complexities.

Without a cultivated moral imagination, children do not have the developmental grounding to process what they’re seeing. Repeated exposure to emotionally charged, fragmented content can diminish empathy, flatten ethical nuance and erode a sense of inner anchoring.

Not all tech is bad — but it isn’t neutral

Digital technology is not inherently harmful. Social media can offer spaces for connection, creativity and peer belonging — especially for young people marginalised by dominant norms. But the platforms children use daily are not designed with their developmental wellbeing in mind.

Much of the content children encounter is shaped by algorithms optimised for engagement, not care. These systems reward outrage, conformity and comparison, often targeting children along gendered lines. Girls are subjected to narrow beauty standards, body surveillance and the pressures of self-objectification. Boys are increasingly pulled toward influencers who valorise misogyny, dominance and emotional detachment.

This is not just an individual or parental problem. It’s a structural and cultural one. Recent policy interventions — such as Australia’s new social media minimum age legislation and national school phone bans — reflect growing concern. But while these efforts may offer short-term protection, they don’t necessarily build the inner capacities children need to navigate the world.

Children’s developing soul life

This is where Steiner education offers something distinct. Rooted in a spiritual understanding of the human being, it sees childhood not as a preparatory stage, but as a sacred phase in its own right. One that requires careful, rhythmic unfolding. Steiner described human development as progressing in seven-year phases, each bringing forward new soul capacities: physical vitality, emotional life, imagination, judgement and moral discernment.

Between the ages of 7 and 14, children are especially sensitive to rhythm, warmth and imagination. Between 14 and 21, the “astral body” awakens, bringing with it a deeper emotional life, social complexity and the beginnings of moral selfhood. It is here, Steiner believed, that moral imagination becomes possible. Not as obedience, or early intellectualisation, but as ethical judgement grounded in felt experience.

In this framework, technology is not rejected outright. But it is approached with great care. The question isn’t if children should go online, but when, how and why. What capacities are we supporting? What inner rhythms are we disrupting? The goal is not to shield children from the world, but to prepare their inner life to meet it with clarity, integrity and resilience.

Creating a moral atmosphere

Moral imagination does not develop through instruction alone. It requires a living context — a moral atmosphere — in which children learn through imitation, example and inner resonance. Rather than delivering answers, this kind of atmosphere helps children ask meaningful questions and gradually develop a felt sense of rightness that arises from within.

Such an atmosphere is built not through rules or rhetoric, but through immersion in stories, beauty and experiences that speak to the whole human being. It cultivates wonder, gratitude and imaginative capacity — not as soft skills, but as spiritual and ethical foundations. Reverence is expressed in small but powerful ways: in rituals that mark transitions, in our tone and presence, in the unspoken dignity of how time and space are held.

Artistic expression, movement and engagement with the senses are central — not peripheral — to this process. These experiences offer children ways to meet the world through feeling, will and creativity. This is not a curriculum of compliance, but a pedagogy of presence. It supports the development of moral imagination as an embodied, relational capacity: something lived in the body, awakened in the heart and eventually expressed through choice.

Supporting moral imagination

When children experience the world as meaningful and trustworthy, they begin to sense their own responsibility within it. Like all deep capacities, moral imagination grows slowly. It develops in the soil of rhythm, story and relationship in the presence of adults who model reflection rather than reaction. 

In a digital age that values immediacy, cultivating this kind of inner spaciousness is itself an act of resistance. In a culture that prizes speed and reaction, making space for this kind of slow, relational becoming is not just protective — it is profoundly countercultural. 

Here are some ways we can support its growth:

Create a culture of open conversation

• Let children know they can talk about what they see online, without fear of shame or overreaction.

Model reflective thought

• Share how you navigate digital dilemmas. “I saw something today that felt off — I needed to pause and think about why.”

Ask questions that spark ethical awareness

• Questions like “How might someone else feel seeing that?” or “Was it kind, or just popular?” can help children practice perspective-taking.

Name values, not just rules

• Talk about kindness, inclusion and courage — not just time limits or safety. Families can co-create digital agreements rooted in their own values, using resources like the Family Tech Agreement template.

Protect rhythm

• Carve out spaces for sensory rest and emotional recovery — screen-free times, not as punishment, but as nourishment.

Support dignity and digital consent

• Help children understand bodily autonomy online: “Your image belongs to you. Trust your instincts.”

Guardians at the threshold

We don’t need to fear technology, but we do need to meet it with discernment. Not all harm is immediate. Some harms unfold slowly, in what we forget to protect: silence, rhythm, inner spaciousness, a sense of the sacred.

To nurture moral imagination is to defend the child’s capacity to feel and reflect before reacting. To imagine alternative futures. To stand in their own ethical centre rather than being swept along by the currents of conformity or consumption.

Protecting children in a digital age means more than managing screen time. It means cultivating their capacity to meet the world with clarity, care and courage. It means trusting in the soul life of the child — and in our role, not as controllers, but as companions and guardians at the threshold.

Briony Lipton is an academic and writer who lives and works on Yuggera country, south-east Queensland. Her interdisciplinary work spans gender, care, leadership and education. She is also a parent and student of anthroposophy.