Shame and the virtual gaze: Supporting children's encounters in online worlds

• Shame can be productive in what it reveals about the self and relations with others.
• The virtual gaze over children's lives is now pervasive due to emerging technologies.
• A child's experience of shame under a virtual gaze may be more difficult to endure.
• Online worlds also open new opportunities to support children’s emotional lives.

As the virtual gaze of another becomes an increasingly prevalent feature in children's lives, this paper aims to explore some of the emotional complexities of the emerging physical/virtual landscape of children's experience. Based on an analysis of the emotion of shame, the paper explores the new challenges that children face both now and in the future in their virtual encounters and relations with others. It is argued that virtual spaces bring new dimensions to emotional experience, at times making it more difficult to realise the productive potential of shame. This is because the gaze or imagined gaze of another, as invoked through the experience of shame, occurs in conditions of uncertainty, has no boundaries and may arise at any time in the future. These insights are significant if we are to support children in building a capacity to restore the self and be resilient in these new spaces of social encounter.