Developing Digital Self-Regulation in Adolescence: A Developmental Self-Determination Model of Digital Self-Regulation

Abstract Digital technologies, such as social media, messaging, gaming, and emerging AI platforms, are deeply embedded in adolescents’ daily lives and shape their learning, social relationships, recreation, and identity development across contexts. In response to concerns about distraction, mental health, and academic engagement, schools and policymakers have increasingly emphasized restrictive approaches to digital use, including smartphone bans and access limitations. Although such policies may reduce short-term exposure, they often overlook adolescents’ developing self-regulatory capacities and basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and developmental science, this article introduces the Developmental Self-Determination Model of Digital Self-Regulation (DSMDS), a conceptual framework that reconceptualizes digital regulation as a developmental, capacity-building process rather than a problem of exposure control. Within DSMDS, digital literacy competence is defined as the knowledge and meaning-making foundation of digital self-regulation, whereas regulatory strategies are the behavioral and contextual tactics through which that understanding is enacted across devices, platforms, and activities. The model further theorizes how autonomy-supportive practices across peer, family, school, and policy contexts may scaffold regulation during periods of ongoing executive function development and how these supports may, under favorable conditions, be internalized over time. Importantly, DSMDS treats such progression as contingent rather than inevitable, emphasizing uneven literacy development, problematic engagement, and contextual pressures as important boundary conditions. The framework provides a developmentally grounded roadmap for research, policy, and educational practice aimed at fostering adolescents’ more intentional, context-sensitive, and self-directed engagement with digital technologies.