Lydia Plowman

We report on influences on Azerbaijani families' parental mediation strategies for managing young children's digital practices at home. Data were gathered with five families in 2019 and 2023 using the Living Journals approach. Both fathers and mothers revealed the influences of gender and cultural norms on parental mediation. Fathers held legislative power by making decisions about rules; mothers exercised executive power by implementing those rules but found the process of mediation to be in tension with their desire to be accepted as a ‘good mother’. The study revealed social and cultural influences on parents' mediation strategies that differ from those identified in countries in the Global North.

This paper outlines the findings from a study that examined the tablet and app use of children aged from birth to three. The aim of the study was to examine how far use of tablets and apps promoted play and creativity. A total of 954 UK parents of children aged from birth to three who had access to a tablet in the home completed an online survey that explored the children’s use of apps. Ethnographic case studies of four children aged from birth to three were undertaken in homes in order to explore in greater depth issues that emerged in the survey. The paper reports on the way in which the use of tablets promoted play and creativity across cognitive, physical social and cultural domains. The implications for policy and research are outlined.

Prompted by discovering a paper written in 1980 which described a process of ‘ethnography by proxy’, I revisit this concept in the light of two research projects: a workplace study of an electronics company conducted in the early 1990s and a later home-based study of young children’s encounters with toys and technology. The paper defines ethnography by proxy as the process of delegating some of the ethnographer’s activities to participants in the research setting. It discusses a pragmatic response to some of the challenges of conducting fieldwork and considers the implications of delegating non-academic proxies to fulfil aspects of the ethnographer’s role, the different guises that may be taken by the ethnographer and what this shift in research relationships might mean for the interpretation of data. The concept of proxy has implications for some of the tenets of ethnographic research as it requires a re-examination of our roles and the relationship between researcher and researched.

The paper considers different ways of conceptualising the settings in which research takes place into children's everyday uses of digital technologies at home. The terms ‘ecology’ and ‘context’ are widely used to describe such settings but may be less appropriate as the boundaries between ‘home’ and ‘technology’ become less distinct. The paper traces associations between ‘ecology’, ‘culture’ and ‘context’ and outlines some of the ways in which the increasing omnipresence and invisibility of technologies in the home prompt different ways of both thinking about the research setting and suitable methods for exploring children's everyday lives. Using the Internet of Things as an illustration, it contests default understandings of context and discusses the need to reconsider our use of terminology so that it takes account of the methodological implications and its theoretical provenance.

Studies of the everyday uses of technology in family homes have tended to overlook the role of children and, in particular, young children. A study that was framed by an ecocultural approach focusing on children's play and learning with toys and technologies is used to illustrate some of the methodological challenges of conducting research with young children in the home. This theoretical framework enabled us to identify and develop a range of methods that illuminated the home's unique mix of inhabitants, learning opportunities and resources and to investigate parents' ethnotheories, or cultural beliefs, that gave rise to the complex of practices, values and attitudes and their intersections with technology and support for learning in the home. This resulted in a better understanding of the role of technology in the lives of these 3- and 4-year-old children.

The challenges of conducting research in the home, especially with preschool children, mean that the role of the home as a site for research is often overlooked by educationalists. Our repeat visits to fourteen families that included a three- or four-year-old child over more than a year as part of our study “Young Children Learning with Toys and Technology at Home” enabled us to develop research relationships that resulted in a 100 percent retention rate. we summarize the ecocultural framework that informed the design of our study and describe two methods for collecting data (“toy tours” and “mobile phone diaries”) that highlight issues relating to the rules of engagement when conducting research that generates insights into children's everyday lives at home.

There is a limited literature on pre‐school children's experiences with digital technologies at home and little discussion of the ways in which children harness these technologies for their own purposes. This paper discusses findings drawn from three studies that investigated the role of domestic technologies and digital toys and games in young children's lives. Specifically, it focuses on children's early communicative and creative experiences, concluding that digital technologies have the potential to expand young children's repertoire of activities in this context. It is therefore important that pre‐school and early years specialists recognise and respond to the expertise children will have already developed by the time they enter formal education, given the increasing technologisation of communicative and creative activities, likely to continue over the life course of those born at the start of the 21st century. Practitioner notes: What is already known about this topic Young children's emergent communicative and creative competences in the early years represent valuable starting points for their more formal development—particularly in the context of early literacy—when they start school. What this paper adds This paper explores ways in which these developing competences are supported by domestic digital technologies —the wide and increasing range of technological tools, ranging from computers and mobile phones to MP3 players and technological toys and games available in the home. It concludes that digital technologies have the potential both to facilitate communicative and creative tasks and to expand young children's repertoires. Implications for practice and/or policy Early years policy in the UK already draws attention to the need to build on the experiences children bring with them from home, including their experiences of using domestic digital technologies. Practitioners need to develop imaginative ways of responding to what children already know and can do with technology, in the context of communicating and creating, given the growing significance of digital technologies in these fields.