Digital media use in young children
Written By: Author(s): Lisa-Maria Müller
6 min read
This research review is based on a chapter that was previously published in Muller and Goldenberg (2022), a report in our ‘Education in Times of Crisis’ series.
Debates around the use of technology and the internet by young children have been dominated by strong opposition and concerns about its impact on children’s development as well as an urge to regulate their technology use (Livingstone et al., 2017). Debates about the right amount of ‘screen time’ largely dominated the discourse, worrying parents and educators alike (Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2018).
More recently, the debate appears to have moved on to a place where it is largely accepted that digital technologies are very much part of children’s ‘multimodal lifeworlds’ (Arnott and Yelland, 2020) from a very young age onward. The most recent data collected by Ofcom (2020) shows that 98 per cent of three- to seven-year olds in the UK watch television on any device while 51 per cent of three- to fou
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