Lisa Kervin

This paper theorizes intergenerational play through Indigenous epistemologies, tracing a shift from playing on to playing with Country. Drawing on a multidisciplinary residency, it shares a relational yarn between the two authors to foreground Country as a co‑participant in learning. Using Indigenous research orientations—walking, listening, and cultural mentoring—the study unsettles Western habits of extraction and speed. Findings position play as ecological knowledge making, identity as becoming through kinship, and creativity as attunement to Country’s rhythms. Intergenerational play emerges as a practice of resurgence and sovereignty, inviting educators to recognize play as a lifelong student of Country.

In 2026, Play School marks 60 years as a foundational Australian children’s program, offering a timely moment to reconsider its role in supporting early literacy and adult–child interaction. This paper investigates how co‑viewing Play School episodes creates opportunities for meaningful engagement between young children aged under five years and their accompanying adults. By identifying specific segments within episodes and analysing the interactional possibilities embedded in them, the paper explores how children respond to the program and how adults mediate these responses to foster participation, meaning-making, and early literacy practices. Observations highlight the significance of decision‑making, agency, shared enjoyment, and embodied engagement—including movement and play—as central features of the co‑viewing experience. These findings demonstrate that Play School’s distinctive interactive design continues to invite conversational turn‑taking, joint attention, and language-rich exchanges that align with contemporary understandings of early literacy development. As debates about screen use for young children persist, this research underscores the importance of recognising media programs like Play School as potential catalysts for high‑quality adult–child interaction. The program’s enduring format and intentional scaffolding of participation offer valuable insights into how screen media can support - not replace - early literacy learning.

Material things have long encouraged intergenerational learning in museums. Beyond passive objects, things provide opportunities for children and adults to explore and engage in intriguing encounters, provoking shared storytelling and renewing relationships. Following the need to democratise who gets to tell stories about things in museum spaces, we worked with young children and adults to create a digital archive of stories about ‘tiny treasures’—small but special items, such as bejewelled brooches, found coins, collected shells and more—during digital playgroups at the Children's Technology Play Space (a research space located next to a children's museum at the University of Wollongong, Australia). Adapting a long‐standing activity in the children's museum, we invited children and adults to discover and investigate the ‘tiny treasures’ using digital technologies and play‐based inquiry. Children, parents, grandparents and carers generated mini‐collections, shared in conversations, and remembered or imagined tales about the tiny treasures through 3‐D scanning, augmented reality and digital storytelling. We suggest that embracing digital and intergenerational approaches encouraged participants to make connections between different ages, times, spaces, technologies and treasured things, offering opportunities for extending conceptualisations of children's archival practices.

Young children increasingly encounter digital technologies in their everyday lives, yet little is known about how adults and children interact with these tools during spontaneous, unstructured play. This study examined adult–child interactions in a dedicated digital play space located within a children’s museum on a university campus. Thirty-six families with a child aged 2.5–5 years old attended 2-h digital playgroup sessions, during which continuous video and audio recordings captured dyadic exchanges. Using inductive analysis of 71 digital interaction episodes, we identified three interrelated themes that shaped how digital play unfolded: expertise, control, and pace. These themes influenced whether adults supported or constrained children’s agency as they navigated digital and non-digital play materials. The findings show how adults’ moment-to-moment decisions—including their own curiosity about the technology—can redirect, extend, or limit children’s discoveries. Digital tools created distinctive opportunities for joint exploration but also introduced challenges to interactional richness when adult attention shifted toward the technology rather than the child. This paper offers an account of how digital play is co-constructed and highlights the importance of attuned adult participation in technology-inspired play.

There is much concern surrounding children’s digital technology use. Research has shown that educators feel uncertain about, and would like more examples of, how to integrate quality digital pedagogy into their practice. Drawing upon video data of a simulated surfing experience, this article contends with three core hesitations surrounding children’s digital play: that it is sedentary; that it is isolating; and that it disconnects children from offline worlds. The authors engage with theories of affective pedagogy and socio-materiality to consider how bodies matter in children’s digital learning and lives. The authors follow scholarship that has disrupted the normative displacement of bodies – material and corporeal – in education. The authors’ analysis attends to withness , highlighting the connections between digital and non-digital, people and place, embodiment and affect. The authors’ aim is to offer inspiration about what is possible in activities specifically designed to engage children and adults in play with digital technologies.

Children’s screentime is commonly viewed as passive and problematic. Current focus on reducing the time children spend using digital technologies has meant screentime is quantified often at the expense of considering the quality of children’s digital interactions. These ‘clocking’ practices tend to overlook the potential for children’s digital play to foster movement and relationships with others. Building upon childhood scholarship that has suggested children’s experiences of time are not always linear, nor in line with adults’ expectations, we consider alternative temporalities in relation to children’s screentime. We explore video data from weekly digital playgroups in the Children’s Technology Play Space (CTPS), a living lab for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, focused on movement to highlight that children’s play can intersperse between the digital and the physical, and at times can concurrently be both. As such, we challenge the assumption that screentime is always sedentary. Considering how interactions between children, adults, nonhuman things, and digital technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) enabled varied movement and imagination, we invite conceptions of children’s sedentary screentime to be re-thought.

Background: Technology is integrated into many children’s daily lives, with parents’ and health professionals’ perspectives shaping children’s technology use. Measuring and understanding these perspectives are essential for developing strategies for supporting adults in decision-making that help children thrive in a digital world. Objective: This systematic review aimed to investigate the psychometric properties of questionnaires used to assess parents’ and health professionals’ perspectives on young children’s use of technology related to health, well-being, and development. The secondary aim was to synthesize findings on these perspectives. Methods: Peer-reviewed papers published between January 2010 and September 2024 were identified through searches in 7 electronic databases. Studies were included if they examined parental or health care professionals’ perspectives on technology use among children aged birth to 5 years. Two reviewers (CLR and IPHA) independently conducted the data extraction and study quality assessment. Reported psychometric properties of the questionnaires were synthesized. Deductive thematic analysis was used to explore the content focus of the questionnaire used in the included studies and synthesize the reported perspectives. Results: In total, 85 studies were included, all involving parents. No study investigated health professionals’ perspectives. The methodological quality of the studies was generally low, with 62 studies scoring below the threshold for acceptable quality. In total, 52 studies reported psychometric properties of the questionnaires used, of which, only 15 studies reported more than 1 measure of validity or reliability. A total of 75 studies reported participants’ perspectives on children’s technology use. Findings revealed that parents generally supported the role of digital devices in enhancing learning but expressed concerns about potential negative impacts on children’s physical health, emotions, and behaviors. Conclusions: Parents’ perspectives on children’s technology use were frequently assessed through questionnaires, though the validity of these questionnaires was often poor, with limited psychometric testing. Parental perspectives were mixed with educational benefits being recognized, while countered with concerns about the impact on children’s physical health and development. High-quality questionnaires are needed to generate stronger evidence informing strategies to support families in technology use decision-making with and for children.

This study employed netnography across two early childhood education services that used the Storypark platform to explore how educator-family relationships are enacted through digital communication. Although Storypark is designed to foster collaboration and partnerships, this study indicates that its affordances do not consistently translate into practice. Analysis of digital posts and family interviews revealed that educators primarily used the platform for one-way information sharing—such as announcements and documentation of children’s learning—rather than reciprocal dialogue or co-construction of meaning. Families demonstrated greater engagement when educator communication was personalised, underscoring the relational value of human voice over platform features. Drawing on an ecological systems theory and behaviour setting theory lens, this disconnect highlights tensions between the platform’s intended relational function and its everyday use. While digital platforms hold significant potential to extend intersetting knowledge between home and early childhood contexts, this potential is not self-activating. Intentional framing, recognition of familial voice, and dedicated time for reciprocal practices are essential. The findings signal a need for professional learning that positions digital communication as a pedagogical and relational practice rather than a compliance task. Bridging this gap could transform platforms like Storypark into spaces of authentic connection, shared meaning-making, and mutual knowledge exchange.

There is little guidance for parents on how to support children during co-use, co-viewing, and co-playing with digital technologies. Given the critical role of the home learning environment and the widespread use of digital technologies in children’s homes, it is essential to gain a deeper understanding of current interaction patterns during digital technology use to inform relevant guidance and support for families. This scoping review overviews and consolidates the literature on young children aged birth to 8 years, and their social interactions with family members during shared use of digital technologies. It considers the types and features of interactions studied across the various contexts of children’s digital use and draws on this evidence to provide a forward-looking research agenda. Comprehensive searches of 4 electronic databases (SCOPUS, ERIC, PsycInfo, Web of Science) using terms focused on the child, other person/s, the social interaction, and the digital element were conducted for the years 2015 to 2023. This yielded 46 studies reporting on young children’s social interactions during shared digital experiences in family contexts. Synthesis of the findings were organised and discussed according to each study’s characterisation of interactions, including attributes of oral language, communication support of children’s understanding, social interactions and connections, and familial negotiations. These themes were explored to highlight patterns and trends in the literature. Across the studies, findings point to a complex and dynamic relationship between children, their parents, and digital technologies within the home context and family dynamics – highlighting the critical role of various child, adult, and digital factors (e.g., child age, parent digital literacies, app design) in shaping the interaction. Understanding how these factors influence children’s social interactions during digital experiences is crucial for developing effective guidance and support for families.

BACKGROUND Technology is integrated into children’s daily lives, with parents’ and health professionals’ perspectives shaping children’s technology use. Measuring and understanding these perspectives is essential for developing strategies for supporting adults in decision-making that help children thrive in a digital world. OBJECTIVE This systematic review aimed to investigate questionnaires that have been used to assess parents’ and health professionals’ perspectives on young children’s use of technology related to health, wellbeing, and development. The secondary aim was to synthesize findings on these perspectives. METHODS Peer-reviewed articles published between January 2010 and September 2024 were identified through searches in seven electronic databases. Studies were included if they examined parental or healthcare professionals’ perspectives on technology use among children aged birth-5 years. Two reviewers independently conducted the data extraction and quality assessment. Deductive thematic analysis was utilised to explore the content focus of the questionnaire used in the included studies and synthesise the reported perspectives. RESULTS Eighty-five studies were included, all involving parents. No study investigated health professionals’ perspectives. The methodological quality of questionnaires used was generally low and only 39 studies reported psychometric properties of the questionnaires used. Of these, 15 studies reported more than one measure of validity or reliability. Seventy-five studies reported participants’ perspectives on children’s technology use. Findings revealed that parents generally supported the role of digital devices in enhancing learning but expressed concerns about potential negative impacts on children’s physical health, emotions, and behaviours. CONCLUSIONS Parents’ perspectives on children’s technology use are frequently assessed through questionnaires, though the quality of these questionnaires was often poor, with limited psychometric testing. Parental perspectives were mixed with educational benefits being recognised but countered with concerns about the impact on children’s physical health and development. High-quality tools are needed to generate stronger evidence informing strategies to support families in technology decision-making with children.