TECHNOLOGY'S Child
"Davispinpoints criteria forthetypesofpositiveinteractions withtechnologythatpromotechildren'shealthydevelopment."
TECHNOLOGY’S CHILD
DIGITAL MEDIA’S ROLE IN THE AGES AND STAGES OF GROWING UP
KATIE DAVISTHE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND
PREFACE
Research on kids and technology can be complicated, confusing, and inconclusive. Headlines and talking heads are even worse. This book brings clarity to the current state of knowledge related to technology’s role in child development and provides guidance on how to apply the insights to individual children and adolescents so that their digital experiences will support rather than undermine healthy development.
The book examines the variety of ways that young people engage with technology across the course of their development, from toddlers who are exploring their immediate environment to twenty-somethings who are exploring their role in society. At its core, Technology’s Child is about what happens when child development interacts with technology design and how this interaction is complicated by children’s individual characteristics and their social and cultural contexts.
My research indicates that technology supports healthy child development when it’s self-directed and community supported; it impedes development when it’s not. By selfdirected, I mean technology experiences that are initiated, sustained, and ended voluntarily, and that support a feeling of personal accomplishment and growth. By community supported, I mean technology experiences that are embedded in
broader contexts of support. Sometimes the support is surrounding the technology use, like when a parent or sibling helps a child navigate the interface of a literacy app and reinforces the learning concepts during and after the app session. Sometimes the support comes from within the technology experience itself, like when a teen finds a supportive online community whose members affirm the teen’s marginalized identity, or when a social media platform works out a thoughtful, effective approach to moderating hate speech.
Creating the best-case scenario isn’t easy. It requires attention and work on the part of families and teachers, researchers, policymakers, and tech companies, and even young people themselves. The insights from this book will provide actionable guidance for each of these stakeholders.
So, what counts as “technology” for the purposes of this exploration? I focus my analysis on technologies that have one or more of the following qualities: digital (the 0s and 1s that undergird the pixels on your computer screen), interactive (the response you get when you make a swiping motion on your phone), and networked (the ability to consume and share content and connect with others across devices). Many of the technologies I examine have screens (phones, tablets, laptops), but not all (smart speakers, smart toys, and other devices powered by Internet of Things [IoT] technologies). For the most part, I focus on existing technologies that are already ubiquitous in the lives of most children in developed countries, but I’ll also consider some emerging technologies, too.
WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is for anyone who is interested in and concerned about the impact of technology on children’s development,
from birth through emerging adulthood. I cover a lot of research terrain in these pages, which I’ve attempted to distill into a set of readily accessible and actionable ideas for:
• A parent who is trying to keep up with the technologies their children use daily, curious and perhaps a bit (or very) concerned about how these technologies are impacting their children’s development, and who is seeking practical guidance on how to make good decisions when it comes to their children’s technology use.
• A teacher who wants to understand the broader context of their students’ digitally mediated lives outside the classroom and use technology to support meaningful, rich learning experiences inside the classroom.
• A policymaker—whether at the local, state, or federal level—who is seeking evidence-based insights to guide policy decisions aimed at mitigating the negative effects of technology while retaining its positive influences in children’s lives.
• A design team, project manager, or executive at a tech company who recognizes the importance of drawing on research knowledge to inform their decisions about how technologies are developed, disseminated, and marketed to children of different ages and their families.
• A researcher or student who would like to inform their own thinking about and understanding of technology’s role in child development.
As evidenced by this list, the solution to supporting children’s positive technology experiences is not an individual one; it cannot and should not fall on individual parents, teachers, or tech developers. We must start looking at the broad conditions of children’s technology use if we want to
create an ecosystem of digital experiences that align with their developmental needs.
Ultimately, this book should give readers a way to think through and make sense of what’s going on developmentally when a child interacts with a digital device, and what conditions are likely to make their experiences more selfdirected and community supported—in other words, more supportive of healthy development.
One thing is clear from the disparate research studies addressing kids and technology: it’s time to get specific. We need to look at specific technologies, specific children, and the specific contexts connecting the two if we want to truly understand what’s going on with technology’s role in child development.
WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK
Technology’s Child is shaped by my knowledge and expertise as a researcher. I’ve studied children’s and teens’ technology use for more than fifteen years. It’s also shaped by my experiences as a parent (chapters 2–4), a former elementary school teacher (chapter 5), and a sister (chapter 7). I use these personal experiences in the chapters following here to help bring aspects of the research I’ll explore to life.
I don’t intend my experiences to represent some sort of norm in children’s technology—I intend the opposite. I use these personal experiences to call attention to the individual, personal dimensions of research on children and technology. Examining the when, why, and for whom of technology’s impact on children requires paying attention to individual differences, instances when children and their circumstances don’t conform to the average trend line.
My stance as a researcher is every bit as individual and specific as my role as a parent, teacher, and sister. I was trained by two developmental psychologists (Howard Gardner and Kurt Fischer) in an education school (Harvard Graduate School of Education). For the last ten years, I’ve worked at the University of Washington Information School, surrounded by colleagues whose work represents a broad range of scholarly disciplines, but I’m perhaps most influenced by those working in technology design. As a result, in my own work, and in this book, I bring together the fields of human development, education, and technology design.
This particular scholarly mix accounts for the two distinct questions that I explore in these pages. The first is an empirical question, something that a psychologist or other social scientist would ask: What is the impact of different kinds of technologies on different kinds of children (experiencing different social, cultural, and economic contexts)? If I had written the book after my doctoral studies, I would have stopped there (in fact that’s exactly what I did with my first book, The App Generation, coauthored with Howard Gardner).
But my work for the last decade has been just as focused on exploring the design of new technologies as it has been on studying the impact of existing ones. So the second question guiding this book is a more action-oriented question, something that a design researcher would be more likely to ask: How can technology be designed to support children’s development?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KATIE DAVIS is Associate Professor at the University of Washington Information School, where she is a founding member and CoDirector of the UW Digital Youth Lab. She is the co-author of The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World (with Howard Gardner) and Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring (with CeciliaAragon).
Author photo by Ann Spurling
C h i l d
Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up
Katie Davis
What happens to the little ones, the tweens, and the teenagers, when technology—ubiquitous in the world they inhabit—becomes a critical part of their lives? This timely book brings much-needed clarity to what we know about technology’s role inchilddevelopment.Betteryet,itprovidesguidanceon how to use what we know to help children of all ages make the most of their digitalexperiences.
From toddlers who are exploring their immediate environ-ment to twentysomethings who are exploring their place in society, technology inevitably and profoundly affects their development. Drawing on her expertise in developmental science and design research, Katie Davis describes what happens when child development and technology design interact, and how this interaction is complicated by children’s individual characteristics and social and cultural contexts. Critically, she explains how a self-directed experience of technology—one initiated, sustained, and ended voluntarily— supportshealthychild development, especially when it takes place within the contextofcommunitysupport.
Children’s experiences with technology—their “screen time” and digital social relationships—have become an ines-capable aspect of growing up. This book, for the first time, iden-tifies the qualitative distinctions between different ages and stages of this engagement, and offers invaluable guidance for parents and teachers navigating the digital landscape, and for technologydesignerschartingtheway.
“
Technology’s Child is the book we’ve been waiting for—deeply informative about how connected technology impacts children’s sense of self, their relationships, and their learning. This thoughtful and deeply researched account will inform parents, educators, and (hopefully) designers, too.”
DEV ORAH HEITNER, author of Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World
“Katie Davis offers a deeply insightful and accessible overview of technology’s role in child development, from birth through late adolescence. Technology’s Child covers key issues that are of primary concern to researchers, parents, and, indeed, young people themselves.”
P ATTI M. VALKENBURG, Professor, University of Amsterdam
“
This is a rare gem of a book. Refusing to succumb to either technology panic or boosterism, Davis offers advice that is balanced, sensible, and grounded in deep listening to both young people and grown-up experts.”
M IZUKO ITO, Director, Connected Learning Lab, UC Irvine
“A valuable addition to the field. Davis pinpoints criteria for the types of positive interactions with technology that promote children’s healthy development while never losing sight of the critical role of parents, caregivers, and educators.”
S TEVE YOUNGWOOD, CEO, Sesame Workshop
US
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