The first thing that arose out of the research with parents was that there is a clear problem. For parents, the increased amount of time that children spend online, the breadth of their experiences and environments they engage with online exposes them to a plethora of issues, content and perspectives, which the parent will have no idea or no role, in —unless they intervene, censor content and experiences i or rely on the child to come to them and report. None of which are equivalent to a model where a parent is broadly (at specific ages) present and has control over the things a child is exposed to, mediating as they see fit. As children spend more time in online spaces, they simply cannot be parented in the same way, leaving parents concerned and at a loss with fairly basic mechanisms that they find insufficient. Some of them speak of this solution as a more sophisticated middle ground, which helps them parent and support their children without needing to be permissive or too authoritarian.

While it is clear that some parents would greatly welcome having additional tools at their disposal, a clear discussion that emerged from the research is that, while there is no right or wrong way of parenting, there is concern for these tools to be used inappropriately. Parents talked about their partners having extreme views or not respecting a child’s privacy. So, we raise the perspective that while these tools do potentially help parents protect their children from societal biases, or commercial and political agendas, what means are there to protect children from their parents?

It could be argued that should this coercive threat be realised, then it may be an inappropriate response to make the power struggle a battle between organisations and parents and to take that battle to the child’s device. Perhaps, it would be preferable to look for policy interventions to counter organisational threats. If the battle has to arrive at the child’s device, then a more child-focused approach may be more enabling. A service that engages children with value for them (and centres on the internal growth and learning of a child to understand multiple perspectives and build their own views) would surely be a more resilient offering. However, the question remains —under whose authority and guidance should a child’s perspective be defended and nurtured?

The most striking point that arose from the proposition was that teachers felt that the issue with empathy lay with the parents rather than the children. In most instances, the teachers described children as having quite plastic models of what it means to be a different person and were able to fairly easily empathise with others and alter their values if they found that they were in conflict, and were encouraged to do so. However, the children’s parents often had solidified beliefs and were now in the role of instilling or enforcing those beliefs onto their children. This meant that they were often actively constraining their children’s ability to fluidly adapt their perceptions of other people’s experience. With this perspective in mind, many participants proposed that the service be adapted to somehow include parents into the experiences, perhaps through school, community events.

Teachers also explained that what was lacking in children’s educational experience was the space to discuss, ask questions and explore the relevance of what they were learning. In this sense, the concept of learning about other people’s experience should be considered as an opportunity for them to learn about themselves and what these empathy experiences expose about who they are.

Many agreed that virtual reality was a fantastic way to create transformative experiences because of its immersive capability. However, they felt the content of some of the empathy experiences would likely be uncomfortable for many children. Therefore, the design of the experiences and the intensity with which they expose children to someone else’s life would have to be considered, not just on an age rated basis, but potentially on a case by case basis. To ensure those experiences were appropriate, it would be important to take into account what individual children are experiencing, what the community is going through andthe culture within the school. —all of which make the administering of this type of education highly challenging.

The most pressing topic was about the authorship of the experiences with many questions around proving the legitimacy of the stories being told. While it is proposed that experiences would be based on true events, they are still recreated stories that may be interpreted differently by many people. Although it is proposed for the stories to be curated in collaboration with assemblies of the public, experts, charities and individuals who have lived experiences of the issues being portrayed, it is clear that there will always be questions over the accuracy of the stories, particularly while they are being used to open children’s perceptions. There will always be some people that feel the process is brainwashing. When immersive technology gets used to provide transformative experiences for children —at what point does it become brainwashing?