Abstract
For many families, young children’s engagement with screen-based technology is an ongoing concern in terms of physical, social and cognitive development. They are uneasy with the difficulty children have disengaging from screens and concerned that this behavior is obsessive or a sign of addiction. However, technology is recognized as having a “rightful role” in early childhood contexts. This scoping paper reports on a review of literature relating to digital play for children aged birth to five years, with the aim of further understanding digital wellbeing. Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory serves as a theoretical framework for understanding why many young children enjoy digital play and become deeply engaged, with a disconnect between how young children and adults perceive digital play. Concerns about children’s deep immersion with digital play are interrogated to understand the connections with perceived addictive traits. The review highlights the critical importance of supporting children’s agency and digital citizenship skills from a young age, including the ability to critique content, balance screen-time with non-screen time and to develop self-control and self-regulation as a means to promote long-term positive outcomes for children in their digital lifeworlds and beyond.
Highlights
Young children’s increasing engagement with technology is an ongoing source of interest and often concern as technology’s ubiquity overlaps with pervasiveness
The literature search found a paucity of information relating to digital wellbeing for play and digital technology, these were not strongly represented in the research relating young children
Digital wellbeing research was not discussed in research findings relatto children five years of age or under, despite their significant interactions with digital ing to youngDigital children, but rather identified for older children and adults
Summary
Young children’s increasing engagement with technology is an ongoing source of interest and often concern as technology’s ubiquity overlaps with pervasiveness. Concerns about children’s use of digital technology have increased further due to the impact of COVID-19 and associated changes to the way society normally operates. Even prior to the impact of COVID-19, screen time use by young children had grown due to the increased accessibility of Internet-enabled touchscreen devices. Children begin engaging with apps and touchscreen devices as infants [2] and the Australian eSafety Commissioner [3] recently reported that 94% of Australian children are accessing the Internet by four years of age. Other research indicates that the vast majority of children aged birth to 16 years have access to a tablet (91%) or smartphone (86%) and engagement with digital content through viewing platforms such as YouTube is common [4,5]
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