A Day in the Digital Lives of Children aged 0-3: Family perspectives from England, Spain, and Sweden:Paper presented at the Roundtable: The Digital Landscape: Multimodal Narratives in the Early Childhood Landscape. Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education Special Interest Group.

Gillen, Julia and Matsumoto, Mitsuko and Sundin, Ebba (2019) A Day in the Digital Lives of Children aged 0-3: Family perspectives from England, Spain, and Sweden:Paper presented at the Roundtable: The Digital Landscape: Multimodal Narratives in the Early Childhood Landscape. Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education Special Interest Group. In: American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, 2019-04-052019-04-09.

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Abstract

Children grow up in homes where digital technology has become part of social practice. From a family perspective, this may be a cause of tensions and contradictions. Parents are known to wish for more guidance as to how to bring technology into their children’s lives in beneficial ways. In this paper, we explore three European cases of family perspectives on tension and contradictions regarding digital technologies (tablets and apps, and digital TV) in respect of a child under three years old. Our participatory methodology involves video-recording, interviewing and compilation of inventories of technologies and skills. We build upon previous research in Australia with an adaption of the TCF (tensions and contradictions for families) framework (Kervin, Verenikina, & Rivera, 2018) to include the areas of practice, selections and monitoring. The three cases are studied from the six factors of the TCF. The family perspectives show some different approaches towards digital activities, but also some common awareness of the need for selections of good quality of tablets and apps as well as TV programmes. They also express some lack of guidance for the selection of children’s media including apps. In addition, the families show contradictions between permitting children’s autonomy and maintaining restrictions for the uses of tablets and apps, while this is usually perceived as less of a problem when it comes to the use of TV.