Internet
Street
Smarts

Tristan was an 11-year-old boy who sat in on one of our workshops. He was quiet, and obviously more reserved than many of his peers, who were busy one-upping each other trying to prove they were the ones who’d seen the weirdest things online. During a break, Tristan walked up to me to show me a conversation that he had started having with ChatGPT. “How can it hear me?” he asked, at a stature of about 5 feet with the unmistakable look of curiosity in his eyes.

I did not want to shut him down. I’ve come to realize that this look of curiosity, the spirit of questioning, is what makes kids brilliant. It’s what pushes them to ask questions that many adults have stopped bothering to ask. But navigating this online world requires emotional intelligence that most adults haven’t even developed. It demands that they parse simulation from reality, intimacy from performance, fear from fact, and algorithm from truth. That’s a huge ask for an 11-year-old. It’s a huge ask, period.

Later in the workshop, I explained that large language models (LLMS) like ChatGPT don’t think or feel—they predict. That what seems intelligent is often just a reflection of what it’s been trained on. Afterward, Tristan came up to me again. “I didn’t know my friend wanted to hurt me like that,” he said. It broke my heart.

Tristan should remind us why education must go beyond awareness. We cannot hand kids tools that mimic love, harvest their emotions, and reshape their reality—and expect them to figure it out alone. Curiosity deserves scaffolding and digital safety has to mean more than just "don’t click that.” It must be building the emotional, cognitive, and cultural fluency to move through this world without losing yourself in it.

The internet is a civic space. For young people, it is where identity is shaped, relationships are formed, and harm increasingly occurs. Yet digital safety education has failed to evolve alongside the systems that endanger them. Internet Street Smarts (ISS) for Teens is a digital safety curriculum designed by Cyber Collective to meet the urgent need for youth-centered, emotionally intelligent, and structurally aware online education. Most existing programs focus on awareness over behavior change and offer generic, rule-based guidance that fails to reflect how harm actually happens online and how it fundamentally changes youth’s social and emotional health– particularly in marginalized communities. ISS Teens looks for a new way forward: building emotional fluency, structural literacy, and youth agency using real case studies, narrative storytelling, and adaptive facilitation grounded in the Digital Resilience Framework (DRF).

Tested with students ages 11–18 across New York City, ISS Teens evolved through three models to arrive at a two-hour, trauma-informed workshop that students help shape. Results show a measurable impact—confidence in digital safety rose from 81% to 96%, and students connected abstract risks like AI misuse and data tracking to their own emotions and experiences. This report makes the case for digital safety as a civic, educational, and mental health priority. One-size-fits-all curricula are far from a sustainable solution. Young people need tools that meet them where they are, and facilitators who treat this new adolescent experience with the seriousness it deserves.