Early childhood – comprising the perinatal period through age 5 years – can be a particularly contentious topic when considering the engagement with digital technologies. During this period of caregiver adjustment, fatigue and sleeplessness, many new parents and caregivers experience social isolation, anxiety or depression, relationship discord, and pressure to create a positive caregiving environment without (at least in the United States) a comprehensive set of social supports. It is during this phase that children develop their first relationships with technologies, including mental models of how technologies work and what purposes they serve. At the same time, rapid brain maturation drives bursts in sensory, language, cognitive, and motor development (Shonkoff 2017) that shape how each individual child experiences and processes their caregiving environment and the wider world around them.

Caregivers hear frequent messaging about the importance of the first 5 years of life for determining children’s wellbeing later in life, with good reason. Developmental science and economic analyses have demonstrated that investment in early childhood education, caregiver-child relational support, and material supports for families (e.g., housing, food subsidies) lead to positive returns in the form of improved life-course outcomes (National Research Council and Institute of Medicine 2000; Heckman 2011). Decades of studies such as the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Michigan (the city where I practice developmental behavioral pediatrics) have shown that positive early relationships, scaffolded autonomy support, exposure to literacy and numeracy concepts, and other aspects of quality early education are linked with higher high school graduation rates, lower risk of substance use, and more positive health indicators into adulthood (Parks 2000). Pediatric providers are instructed to screen for developmental delays, and families to connect with developmental therapies, under age 5 so that the highest yield can be gained while children’s brains are the most ‘plastic’ and responsive to intervention (AAP Committee on Children With Disabilities 2001). Thus, the first 5 years of life are understood as a crucial window of opportunity for helping children meet their potential and live empowered, healthy lives.

An unintended consequence of such developmental messaging – particularly within the context of 21^st-century neoliberal capitalism – is the prevailing idea that children’s experiences need to be intensely curated in order for them to reach academic and financial success. Technologic or economic concepts such as optimization or productivity trickle down into how caregivers think about how to cultivate children’s abilities through intensive parenting – often founded on middle-class white values and norms (Hays 1998). Regarding children’s relationships with technology, this has led to an over-focus on parent-level control behaviors (e.g., “screen time” restrictions) without wider consideration of how the modern digital environment either supports or undermines families’ needs (Radesky and Hiniker 2021). This chapter describes how aligning digital design with how young children experience their environments might mitigate the polarized “screen time” debate and instead support children and caregivers’ self-actualization within healthy digital spaces. Creating a digital environment that will support children’s play and autonomy, rather than exploit children’s vulnerabilities, can shift the conversation away from restriction and more towards a central tenet of early childhood development: autonomy support.

Countering ‘Screen Time’ Individual Responsibility Assumptions

Young children are uniquely sensitive to their caregiving and physical environments because of their smaller size, malleable neurodevelopment, and dependence on both adults and systems available in their community (e.g., child care, preschool, mental health supports, material supports such as food and housing). This dependency often leads to over-sentimentalizing of, or paternalistic approach to, children when it comes to policymaking or design decisions. Rather than seeing infants, toddlers, and preschoolers as agents in their own right, adults in policy, business, and technology sectors tend to think of children as objects to be controlled or protected, rather than scaffolded. One reason for this may be that it is easier to exert control or protection at scale with a one-size-fits-all approach, while scaffolding is tailored to the individual child at their specific developmental moment. This essay focuses on approaches that might provide more early-childhood-centered digital experiences, but larger-scale public health or policy measures are discussed briefly in the Conclusion.

Although early childhood scientists, clinicians, and educators understand the unique perspective of young children and the developmental forces that shape their interactions with the world, this knowledge is only translated into digital experiences by a limited number of companies and creators. The large platforms that act as children’s entry points into the internet and who write the algorithms that determine what children are served often take a simplistic approach to young children’s needs and perspectives (Radesky and Hiniker 2021). As is reviewed below, many aspects of the current digital ecosystem overtly treat children as consumers or as a means to monetization.

Yet, conceptualizing young children’s media use as interaction with a digital environment – rather than focusing on individual behaviors such as “screen time” – is not only more autonomy-supporting but also represents better public health. Tom Frieden’s Health Impact Pyramid (Frieden 2010) underscores the power of modifying environments to make default decisions healthier – such as making fruits and vegetables more affordable or removing trans fats from restaurant food (Brownell and Pomeranz 2014) – rather than relying on each individual family to change their health behavior. The same concept holds for children’s relationships with technology. When clinical guidance recommends limiting media use around meals or bedtime, but digital design encourages longer or recurrent use, we are not setting families up for success. When evidence suggests that quality of content is key for young children’s wellbeing (Linebarger et al. 2017), but automated systems decide what trending content children are offered on the most popular platforms, the digital environment is not providing families enough power to shape their children’s relationships with media.

Digital environments that are most child-centered by default, including features that meet children ‘where they are’ while supporting user agency and disengagement, are more likely to allow equitable access to positive digital experiences. In health care, interventions that rely on individual behavior change – for example asking every parent, regardless of their digital literacy or income levels to help their child set up complicated privacy settings or avoid racist content on a recommender feed – are more likely to lead to inequities (Lorenc et al. 2013). In contrast, interventions that provide positive opportunities as a default setting – without extra steps or specialized knowledge – are more likely to be accessed by a range of populations with different levels of marginalization or opportunity.

Equitable access to positive digital experiences can also be considered in terms of neurodiversity. Children with autism spectrum disorder, learning differences, executive functioning/attention deficits, or other sensory differences may develop different relationships with technology (Lane and Radesky 2019) – much of it adaptive, some of it compulsive. Even within typically developing children, there is considerable inter-individual variability in the way children process information, progress along different developmental streams (e.g., visual-spatial, language, emotional control, motor coordination) (Levine 2012), or elicit caregiving responses that influence family technology habits.

Nested within this psychosocial context, this essay will describe a framework for child-centered digital design that builds upon decades of child-centered design work in television and video production. Four child development domains are discussed: 1) seeing children within their relational context, 2) early childhood attentional control and reinforcer sensitivity, 3) developing cognitive and critical thinking capacities, 4) and emerging emotion and state regulation. These domains are not exhaustive, and frequently intertwine, but are offered as those most central to how digital products meet, or fail to meet, young children’s needs. Finally, a series of benchmarks for considering children’s agency and autonomy within digital spaces is provided.

Child-Centered Design in 20^th Century Technologies

Sesame Street, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and other content from the Public Broadcasting Services has effectively taught young children for decades. These productions hired creators, writers, and artists who took intentional effort to understand how children experienced their shows. Through work with child development scholars, teachers, community advisors, and meaningful product testing, child-centered media designers respected and harnessed the unique ways young children process information and stories. Several concepts that informed the creation of children’s TV content remain relevant to digital technology design:

• The video deficit. Until children develop symbolic thinking, mental categorization, and memory flexibility around 18 to 24 months of age, they do not process two-dimensional information from screen media the same way an adult does (Barr 2013). In other words, they do not understand that a screen-based depiction of a cat symbolizes a differently-appearing three-dimensional cat that they might see in their neighborhood. Scaffolding and co-viewing from parents (Zimmermann et al. 2016), repetition, and contingent touchscreen hotspots (Kirkorian, Choi, and Pempek 2016) can help younger toddlers bypass the video deficit, but research shows that infants under 15 months of age generally do not understand the verbal or visual-spatial content offered on screen media. Therefore, child-centered content creators have generally not targeted infant audiences (and those that have, such as Baby Einstein, have faced lawsuits for false educational claims).

• Importance of parasocial relationships. Young children are drawn to familiar, friendly characters, pay more attention to them, and learn from them more easily than from unfamiliar characters (Brunick et al. 2016). This alignment is due to young children’s tendency towards “magical thinking” and related love of stories that reflect their own inner dramas (Fraiberg 1996). For this reason, the experiences of characters from Elmo to Dora have been leveraged for educational purposes – while other characters have been leveraged to sell children fast food (Kotler et al. 2012).

• Formal features can overload children’s processing. Young children learn best from formal features (e.g., scene cuts, visual and sound effects) that are relevant to the curriculum and storyline, while extraneous or excessive features can impose a higher cognitive load that distracts from underlying educational objectives (Kirkorian, Wartella, and Anderson 2008).

• Learning occurs when young children transfer knowledge from media to their physical and social worlds. In psychological research on young children and media, learning is defined as a child remembering knowledge that they experienced in a digital context and applying it in a non-digital context (Barr 2013). For this reason, child-centered TV and videos often provide stoppage points to disengage from media and engage with caregivers or their environments.

Early Childhood in the Modern Digital Environment

Young children’s experiences of digital media have been remarkably altered by modern design affordances such as:

• Mobility, meaning children can carry games and videos throughout daily routines, rooms of the house, car rides, etc.

• Contingent touch-based interfaces and interactive nudges, which provide feedback, highlight different choices, or “gamify” an experience by providing tokens or rewards.

• Personalization, either through creation of avatars, profiles, stating preferences, or inferences made by platforms based on the user’s prior behavior.

• Monetization through freemium models (i.e., app is free, but contains in-app purchases or upgrades to the paid version) and advertising, which appears in both traditional (e.g., pre-roll video advertisements on YouTube) and “stealth” (e.g., influencer marketing) forms.

• User-generated content, which varies significantly in quality (Radesky YouTube 2020)

• Automated recommender systems that harness patterns and trends in usage data to predict what a child user might want to watch next.

These affordances interact uniquely with the following early childhood development concepts relevant to life course wellbeing.

Seeing children within a relational context

Early childhood is characterized by interdependence between the child, caregivers, and the family’s psychosocial and cultural context (Sameroff 1975). What this means in clinical and research terms is that it is impossible to study (or design for) children without considering the language environment, emotion socialization, and other caregiver practices that help children internalize and make meaning of themselves and the world around them. Infants are not only receptacles for language exposure (Kuhl 2010), informal instruction (Callanan, Cervantes, and Loomis 2011), and household stimulation (Urke, Contreras, and Matanda 2018) that caregivers direct to them, but they reciprocally elicit parenting responses and shape caregivers’ wellbeing (Sameroff 1975). Infants and toddlers monitor what their caregivers pay attention to, and actively draw caregivers’ attention to their own activities, in an effort to gain the caregiver’s help in meaning-making (Tomasello 1995). The more coherent, sensitive, and reflective a caregiver’s mental working model of their child is, the stronger the child’s emotional development and inner sense of self (Rosenblum, Dayton, and McDonough 2006). Thus, in the clinical field of infant mental health, informed by attachment theory and trauma-informed care, parents and their young children are the focus of simultaneous dyadic intervention intended to improve children’s self-regulation, parent mental health, and the overall relationship.

In contrast, many modern technologies are designed for a single user, personalized for that individual’s preferences and behaviors. Individual-user assumptions may make dyadic interactions around mobile and interactive media challenging. In our research comparing the design affordances of toys and touchscreen games, we found that parent-preschooler interactions were facilitated by designs that allowed dyads to gather around the object, interact at their own pace (informed by the flow of their own social reciprocity), and participate equally (e.g., card games, LEGO, or multi-touch input apps such as Toca Kitchen). In contrast, fast-paced games or e-books with extraneous hotspots (i.e., parts of the screen interface that would animate or generate sound when touched) led to children creating a “solitary space” around the tablet, from which parents disengaged and did not try to participate (Hiniker et al. 2019).

In our review of the educational app marketplaces, designs that facilitate caregiver-child interaction – such as multi-touch input or prompts for the child to engage with their parent – were exceedingly rare (Meyer et al. 2021). Instead, the dominant design approach in many free and low-quality apps was use of engagement-promoting features that can command a child’s attention effectively, but at the expense of socially referencing co-present others. While young children certainly can and should use media individually, many educational apps are missing an opportunity to connect with how young children really learn (Vaala, Ly, and Levine 2015). It is possible that the paucity of dyadic design in top-downloaded educational apps reflects caregiver desire for their child to be able to use the app on their own – in other words, a market demand for apps that effectively engage attention or calm behavior, rather than require caregiver input.

In summary, interactive designs can either support how young children learn from their social and physical environments or entrain attention to a degree that effectively manages behavior but may not promote socially-mediated learning (Hirsh-Pasek, et al. 2015). However, there is likely a place in the middle, where skilled creators understand how to engage children with good storytelling and provide opportunity (but do not require) caregiver-child interaction around technology. This design approach is analogous to the parenting concept of autonomy support, wherein the caregiving environment supports the child’s exploration with enough hints and scaffolding to do more than they could do independently but does not constantly manage the child’s experience.

Child-centered Solutions: Digital design that engages caregivers and siblings along with the child helps young children learn from media more effectively (Kirkorian et al. 2008; Rasmussen et al. 2016). Designs can include multi-touch input, turn-taking, prompts for family conversation, and user-paced gameplay. In addition, child-centered design could also more broadly respect the need for caregivers to disengage from their own technology at times (Hiniker et al. 2016), particularly during scaffolding moments or for parents’ own solitude and wellbeing.

Early childhood attentional control and reinforcer sensitivity

Young children’s weak attentional control and open-minded exploration is adaptive; it allows their attention to be drawn to salient, novel stimuli that they have not yet seen or incorporated into their mental models (Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl 1999). Flexible attention also means that neurotypical infants and toddlers can easily be oriented by their caregivers to important stimuli – new things to discover, or dangerous things to avoid. Short attention spans are frustrating to parents when their children cannot stay engaged in independent play for more than a few minutes, but also a relief when upset children are easily distractible by transitioning to something shiny and new.

In the toddler and preschooler years, sensitivity to rewards and reinforcers also emerges. Behavioral conditioning in the form of social (e.g., praise) and tangible (e.g., stickers) rewards is therefore effective for increasing desired behaviors such as toilet training. Caregivers can also unintentionally reinforce negative behaviors such as tantrums by showing strong reactions or allowing children to escape non preferred activities.

Behavioral economics and persuasive/reward-driven design are common in modern digital products (Eyal 2014), but young children may be particularly sensitive to them. For example, distraction from irrelevant hotspot interactivity (e.g., animations that are not relevant to the story, such as a dancing sun or flowers in a story about cooking) undermines preschoolers’ and kindergarteners’ comprehension from electronic books (Bus, Takacs, and Kegel 2015). On the other hand, older children with more impulse inhibition and attentional control learn to filter out some of these salient features. Despite research and learning science consensus that over-the-top interactive features do not support learning (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015), they remain common in commercially available educational apps in the form of virtual stickers, coins, stars, and fireworks (Meyer et al. 2021). Attractive visual lures and rewards are also commonly used to encourage prolonged gameplay, ad viewing, and purchases (Meyer et al. 2019; J. Radesky et al. 2022) that serve monetization goals in mobile games.

Attention-grabbing and rewarding design features do not only take the form of interactive nudges; they also are common in user-generated content on popular platforms such as YouTube. In our analysis with Common Sense Media of over 1600 videos viewed by 0-8 year old children, we found frequent branded, high-pleasure (e.g., unboxing), or outrageous (e.g., pranks) content that engages young viewers through similar mechanisms (Radesky 2020). We concluded that many child-directed creators are driven by monetization goals - on some channels, duration of ads exceeded that of the video (Yeo et al. 2021) - and therefore produce content that will gain attention and trend.

In interviews with child-directed industry representatives, we found that design teams often criticized the engagement-prolonging and monetized design of “app farms” that offer simplistic digital play experiences as a means to advertising or in-app purchase revenue. Instead, they conveyed that authentic engagement for young children occurs through creative storytelling and strong characters (Rotem et al. 2023), as well as the importance of testing children’s meaningful comprehension of digital content.

Child-centered Solutions: When designed well, interactivity attracts young children’s attention to relevant stimuli, scaffolds the child’s navigation and comprehension of storytelling, and provides natural reinforcers that support the child’s internal motivation. This is similar to previously published frameworks focused on emerging adults, in which Gardner and Davis distinguish between app-enabling and app-dependent stances (The App Generation 2013); in the case of young children, interactive design elements that promote digital autonomy are starting to be described (Ge et al. 2023) but require further evaluation in naturalistic settings. In our review of app marketplaces, open-ended “sandbox”-type apps like those from Toca Boca and LEGO scored highly on metrics of educational quality (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015) because they provided more autonomy and exploration. On video-streaming or video-sharing platforms, visual cues that support pausing, disengagement, or play are more appropriate than time-based cues (e.g., countdown clock), navigation constraints (e.g., autoplay with no pause button), or cues that urge the child to compete for additional rewards (Radesky et al. 2022). Minimization of extraneous or monetized interactivity will be particularly helpful for neurodiverse children who often have executive functioning deficits such as weaker information processing/filtering, impulse inhibition, or creating coherent mental models of experiences.

Developing cognitive and critical thinking capacities

Many adults do not understand the complex data collection practices and business models of technology platforms. Young children, who are in stages of sensorimotor (ie, exploring the world with their senses and bodies), magical, and egocentric thinking, have not even reached the concrete or logical aspects of reasoning that precede more abstract understanding of such complex systems. Theory of mind – the ability to understand another individual’s perspectives and motivations – emerges around age 3-4 years in neurotypical children (Wellman 2014) and lays the foundation for understanding the persuasive intent of advertisers that emerges in middle childhood (Radesky et al. 2020). Thus, young children cannot be expected to critically understand the commercial messages or persuasive motivations of advertisers or influencers.

Our interviews with 5-11-year-old children reveal that they naturally pick up on surface cues in digital products to draw inferences about what is going on “behind the scenes” of the user interface. For example, children expressed accurate reasoning about why they were recommended certain videos on Netflix (which states “because you liked…”) or how to pick safe usernames on ROBLOX (since this is taught during account creation) (Sun et al. 2021). On the other hand, children had less consistent reasoning about what inferences technology companies were making about them (e.g., their gender, age, personality), as these processes are not transparent to users.

Therefore, young children’s mental models of how their favorite apps, influencers, or advertising works will be very different from those of the adults who design these products. Because of reward sensitivity described in section 2 above, they may be particularly susceptible to “dual-process” marketing approaches that harness both emotional and cognitive processes to engage viewers with brands (Nairn and Fine 2008).

Child-centered Solutions: At minimum, technology platforms can avoid manipulative advertising (Meyer et al. 2018; Radesky et al. 2022) and extensive data collection (Reyes et al. 2018) that occurs in many child-directed apps and platforms. These practices are being actively debated by advocates and policymakers in the United States, but are encoded in law in other countries such as Brazil and the United Kingdom. Other regulatory solutions currently being considered include banning “stealth” advertising to children, increasing the clarity of influencer disclosures, providing more control over data (e.g., allowing caregivers or youth to view or delete what platforms know about them), and to exercise more autonomy over what appears in their recommender feeds.

In addition, products could be transparent about their data collection and advertising practices. Loading screens, account setup, and home screens are prime opportunities for surfacing what data flows occur between devices and companies, what privacy settings do, where companies store their “memories” about children, and how it uses this information. In early childhood, children might only pick up on anthropomorphized or concrete cues to support digital literacy, which could be built upon as children become more logical and abstract thinkers. For example, Fred Rogers showed child viewers how his puppets and stage worked, to support their thinking about how media are constructed; similar approaches could be used for today’s popular characters and shows, to promote digital literacy as a mechanism for increasing child autonomy (Ge et al. 2023).

Emerging emotion and state regulation

Early childhood is a window in which children and their caregivers learn about their emotions and how to manage them through iterative cycles of distress, disruption and repair (Beeghly and Tronick 2011). Unpredictability and challenge are essential aspects of raising young children, while negative behaviors are actually communicating underlying emotional states. For example, tantrums communicate that a child is frustrated or overwhelmed, negative behaviors hold clues to a child’s sensory profile (for example, kicking under the table in children who seek joint input to stay focused) or lagging skills (for example, frequent interrupting in a child with limited impulse control or working memory).Graded challenge through scaffolding from a caregiver or teacher are a prime way that children build skills they could otherwise not achieve on their own. Such friction, in the developmental context, also yields distress and discomfort that parents report soothing with media (Danet et al. 2022). Excessive use of mobile devices can make family members feel cut off from one another’s perspectives and feelings (Oduor et al. 2016) or represent a virtual escape for parents from their child’s negative emotions (Torres, Radesky, et al. 2021). Over time, repeated use of mobile devices to calm young children is associated with more emotional reactivity (Radesky et al. 2023), suggesting that devices are displacing the emotional work of helping a child understand and handle strong emotions.

Therefore, a tension exists between the easy-to-use, “frictionless” environments common in digital platforms, the immediate behavioral control they often provide, and longer-term processes in children learning to regulate their emotional and physiological states. To caregivers, digital platforms promise convenience and certainty, while much of raising young children involves tolerating uncertainty, joining children in magical (not logical) thinking, and realizing the individual developmental path that each child follows. Child-centered approaches can be leveraged to help caregivers with their own trajectory of understanding their child and building strategies that support long-term emotional wellbeing.

Child-centered Solutions: Storytelling and parasocial relationships can be leveraged in early childhood to teach social-emotional skills and self-regulation. Well-designed programs like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, which focuses on emotional awareness and problem-solving through songs and stories, have been found to improve social-emotional skills in young children, especially when co-viewed by parents (Rasmussen et al. 2016). Interactive mindfulness apps such as Stop Breathe & Think Kids allow children to identify self-regulation missions based on the mix of emotional states they endorse. Designs are needed that encourage body movement and grounding exercises, parent-child co-regulation (e.g., dancing, yoga), disengagement before sleep, and learning social emotional skills that can be transferred to the 3-dimensional world.

The domains discussed above are intertwined and depend on one another, the caregiving environment, and other contextual factors. They are not exhaustive and are shaped by other developmental streams such as motor coordination and sensory integration. I highlighted them as components of early child-centered approaches because they influence broader developmental constructs, including children’s identity development, resilience, self-efficacy, and sense of purpose and belonging within their community.

Conclusion: Operationalizing Digital Agency and Self-Actualization Through Developmental Windows of Early Childhood

Early childhood is a developmental stage in which children are often treated as objects to be cultivated or protected, rather than subjects with their own autonomy to support. Young children’s agency within digital spaces can be supported through design that lets them explore, fail, and self-correct; learn about the digital world through transparent cues; engage and disengage at will, at first with the support of caregivers and then through their own mindful relationships with tech; and share their experiences with caregivers. Table 1.1 provides examples of how these might be operationalized at different early childhood stages.

Table 1.1 Manifestations of Agency and Autonomy in Early Childhood

Similar frameworks are now emerging in the child-computer interaction field (e.g., Wang 2023). These design frameworks focus on supporting children’s ability to develop intrinsic motivation and self-regulation, think critically and make informed decisions, and develop digital literacy. Typologies of design Wang and colleagues identified in their systematic review included 1) Scaffolding (just-in-time prompts, scaffolded choices), 2), Decomposing (storytelling, gamification to help children understand processes), 3) Peer support (collaboration and comparison), and 4) Nudging (default options, creating friction, alerts and feedback). Autonomy-supporting designs have been tested in small deployments, but need broader testing in commercial products at scale, ideally through industry-academic collaboration (Radesky and Hiniker 2021). Such an effort would not only allow establishment of child-centered design norms within industry, but also provide critical experimental data about whether and how digital design influences child wellbeing.

Early childhood-centered approaches also will involve moderation or limitation of the amount of marketing and monetization directed to young children, which our research shows is commonplace in apps popular on the app store (Meyer et al. 2018; Radesky et al. 2022) and on YouTube (Radesky et al. 2020). While ad-supported digital products do not need to be banned altogether, the high advertising load (Yeo et al. 2021), inappropriate ad content (Meyer et al. 2018), and manipulative ad designs (Radesky et al. 2022) can be regulated. Television advertising rules do not apply to internet products, so Federal Trade Commission rulemaking in this area is needed. Data collection, targeted advertising, and engagement-prolonging nudges have been addressed by the Age Appropriate Design Code in the United Kingdom and the state of California, but these policies focus more on minimization of harm. Industry-academic collaboration and innovation will be more likely to generate solutions that meet children where they are, inspiring creativity, social reciprocity, and autonomy. In addition, early childhood-centered digital designs would help relieve the angst that caregivers feel about ‘screen time’ – will build upon existing 20th center child-centered practices of storytelling, relatable characters, language and concepts that are meaningful, and autonomy to generalize knowledge gained in digital spaces to the rest of their lived experience.

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