Children and Families: Everyday Digital Media Culture

Digital media permeates many aspects of society and is increasingly entangled in how children and families engage with the world. Even those who do not engage with digital media at home live within digitally connected environments where practices like surveillance, datafication and connectivity shape their lives in subtle yet consequential ways (Samuelsson et al. 2023; Sefton-Green et al. 2025). For instance, children's personal information (their ‘digital footprint’) is being collected even before their birth (e.g., ultrasounds), which raises questions about children's rights to privacy in a digital world (Leaver 2017; Livingstone et al. 2019; Pangrazio et al. 2025). Increasingly, the practices of surveillance through data tracking and algorithmic profiling are becoming readily available through advanced technological infrastructures that include data collection platforms and facial recognition systems. In this way, children are born into digital worlds through the infrastructures and digital practices of others alongside their own interactions with digital media. Public and academic discourses about digital technologies and children often have focused on presumed risks: exposure to inappropriate content; health and development concerns related to sedentary behaviour or reduced social interaction; and fears around digital surveillance, online interaction and online safety (Berriman 2022). Such approaches often feed into binary framings of digital media engagement, highlighting either opportunities or risks and leaving little room to recognise that children and families engage with digital media in meaningful and participatory ways (Livingstone et al. 2017). The impact of AI (artificial intelligence) is rapidly increasing demands on children and young people, requiring new skills in digital literacy, ethics and navigating AI environments (Leaver and Srdarov 2025). Recent Australian legislation that limits social media access for those under 16 aims to protect children from mental health risks, and yet it also raises complex questions that are positioned at the intersection of policy, culture and children's rights. These evolving concerns, alongside rapid digital technological change, reflect the ongoing uncertainty around how to best support children living within a digital world. For example, this duality—between risk and opportunity—remains a central theme in both research and public discourse on children's digital lives. Understanding how digital media engagements (re)shape childhoods and family life is a continually evolving social project that requires recognising children and families' digital media use as situated and context-specific. That is, digital media use is grounded in the specific environments, relationships and practices in which digital media is used and contextualised, recognising that these engagements are shaped by the social, cultural and institutional contexts surrounding them (Danby et al. 2018). When children are framed as passive and vulnerable media users, it becomes impossible to understand them as active and knowledgeable participants in their digital everyday lives. On the one hand, digital media can enrich children's and families' experiences and social connections; on the other, digital media can generate a range of social and cultural anxieties. As the field of digital media rapidly expands its influence and impact on everyday lives for many of us, how children and families encounter and interact with these technologies warrants ongoing critical examination that recognises the complexities and moves beyond binary understandings of digital media engagement. Digital media serves as an arena for social and cultural engagement (Sparrman 2019), while also reflecting wider societal frameworks that shape, define and regulate conceptions of childhood (Coulter 2020). Digital media culture is not passively consumed by children and adults; rather, it is actively constructed through their everyday interactions and engagements. This version recognises children and adults as being agentic cocreators shaping digital cultures, negotiating norms and values, and exploring identities across diverse settings. Drawing on theoretical perspectives associated with the sociologies of childhood (Corsaro 2015; Danby 2002; James et al. 1998), the studies in this collection recognise children as active participants in the social, political, economic and cultural contexts that frame, define and set the conditions for the lives of children. In this way, this special issue aims to explore the diverse dynamics of children's and families' everyday digital culture in situated and contextualised ways. Rather than assuming the universal effects of digital media, the studies collected here examine how children and families engage with digital media in meaningful, contradictory and often surprising ways. The editors are delighted to have produced a special issue that explores the complexities of digital media cultures. This special issue began with a collaboration between researchers in Sweden and Australia, brought together through two international networks: Global Childhoods (University of Gothenburg) and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. Over 2 years, this small group met regularly to explore shared interests in the intersections of children, digital media and global childhoods. Together we reflected on methodological and ethical challenges in cross-national research, shared data and feedback and prioritised contributions from early-career researchers. At that point, we decided to collate our work into a special issue on digital media. We were delighted when the Children & Society commissioned us with the task of creating this special issue. To ensure that the issue had a global perspective, a worldwide call went out. The collection of these articles highlights the global, cultural and discipline-specific aspects of children and digital media. To illuminate geo-cultural variations within digital media cultures, the special issue includes studies from diverse national contexts—including China, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Brazil, Colombia, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United States, Norway, Canada and more—to broaden the understanding of digital childhoods. The 14 articles are organised around three thematic orientations: family life, institutional contexts and identity and peer culture. The first set of studies explores the role of digital technologies within the intimate sphere of family life. Social media has given rise to a culture of sharing, in which parents engage in the exchange of experiences concerning parenting, child development and behavioural issues in online spaces (Blum-Ross and Livingstone 2017). The practice of ‘sharenting’ involves parents sharing narratives and insights about their experiences in raising children (Steinberg 2017). While seemingly fostering a sense of community among parents, it also gives rise to concerns regarding privacy and children's rights (Abidin 2020; Ågren 2023). This topic is explored in the article by Alexandra Ruiz-Gomez, Lidia Marôpo and Ana Jorge, who examine sharenting practices on Instagram, focusing on a British mother's portrayal of her child with Down syndrome. The mother's advocacy challenges stereotypes and fosters a sense of community, while also raising ethical concerns regarding privacy, commodification and the child's autonomy in self-representation. Building on these concerns about how digital technologies shape parental practices and child representation, Philippa Amery, Susan Danby and Margot Brereton shift the focus from online portrayals to the embodied, day-to-day interactions mediated by smartphones within an Australian family's life. Their research challenges the assumption that smartphones are purely disruptive by showing how they can be integrated into mother–infant interactions in participatory ways. Yet, they also acknowledge the delicate balancing act that parents face in using digital tools while remaining emotionally and socially attuned to the child. Extending the exploration of parental attitudes towards digital media, Amanda Levido, Sara Matthews, Philippa Amery and Emma Cross investigate parents' perceptions of digital technologies for learning at home in Australia. Drawing on qualitative data, they reveal how trust in digital media's educational potential varies according to socio-economic status, digital literacy and home routines. Their findings add complexity to the notion of ‘supportive’ home learning environments by illustrating how digital confidence is not evenly distributed across families, thereby complicating the notion of uniformly ‘supportive’ home learning environments. Similarly, the article by Irina Silva, Susan Danby and Beth Saggers explores young autistic children's digital experiences at home in an Australian context, highlighting how parents actively use digital resources to support their child's opportunities to be social members of family life while engaging in digital experiences to support learning and developmental opportunities. Staying in an Australian context, parent–child relationships are explored also in an article by Karen Murcia, Emma Cross, Julia Seitz and Geoffrey Lowe. Following a 10-week programme of co-playing digital games, the researchers highlight how parents, through shared play experiences, moved from viewing digital technologies with anxiety to recognising their potential for fostering creativity and agency in children. From this finding, three guiding principles for parents are offered based around the concepts of attention, interest and interaction. Broadening the scope to a global perspective, Natalie Coulter, Diana Carolina García-Gómez, Sarah Healy, Hyeon-Seong Jeong, Maureen Mauk, Lindsay C. Sheppard, Rebekah Willett and Xinyu ‘Andy’ Zhao present a collective paper consisting of curated multinational (Australia, Canada, China, Columbia, South Korea and the United States) thought pieces on family media practices during and after the pandemic. Their study reveals how the increased presence of digital technologies in domestic life intensified parental responsibilities and anxieties, especially around screen time, creativity, schooling and regulation. They argue for broader institutional support to support families to navigate these challenges and make informed choices about digital media use. Focusing on families separated by physical distance, Kaidong Guo's study of Chinese ‘liushou’ (left-behind) families illustrates how digital technologies bridge separation by enabling emotional closeness through video calls, shared photos and messaging apps. This research highlights how digital intimacy complements, but cannot fully replace, physical copresence, revealing ambivalent notions of home and care across distance. Finally, Savadov and Plowman investigate parental mediation strategies in Azerbaijan, showing how cultural norms and gender dynamics influence how parents manage children's digital media use. Their study reveals how fathers exercise legislative power in setting rules, while mothers implement these rules amid tensions between mediation and the desire to be accepted as ‘good mothers’. These findings underscore social and cultural influences on parental mediation that differ significantly from those commonly found in the Global North contexts. The second theme shifts the focus to policy and institutional frameworks that influence children's engagement with digital technologies, primarily situated within a Nordic institutional context. This section begins with two studies from preschool settings in Sweden. The current Swedish government recommends that preschools consider being screen-free, a focus addressed in Pernilla Lagerlöf's article. Her study explores children's negotiations of digital media policy in Swedish preschools, showing how children resist adult-imposed terminology and rules while asserting their own perspectives. This research illustrates the gap between adult-driven regulations and children's lived experiences and raises questions about how policies can better incorporate children's voices. Building on the examination of policy impact in early childhood education, Malin Nilsen's article investigates the use of a multilingual picture book app in Swedish preschools, to reveal how digital tools can reinforce children's multilingual identities and foster connections across cultural and linguistic divides. Shifting from educational settings to digital support services, Jenny Krutzinna and Elisabeth Staksrud highlight the challenges associated with digital help resources for children and young people, revealing how such tools can inadvertently overwhelm or alienate their intended users. Their analysis exposes tensions between the design logic of online platforms and the diverse emotional, cognitive and cultural needs of children, especially when seeking help. The final set of studies explores how digital media shape children's identities and peer interactions, emphasising the creative and social aspects of their engagement with digital technologies. Hoa Pham and Marek Tesar's case study of Nhi, a five-year-old Vietnamese girl, shows how video-making activities at home enable self-authoring and identity formation. Through her English-language videos, the child creates a hybrid space to integrate personal experiences and cultural influences, highlighting the role of digital media in shaping both linguistic and personal development. Complementing this focus on identity formation, Pål Aarsand's article focuses on Minecraft fanart, analysing how Swedish children use digital drawing to express creativity and engage with gaming culture. By exploring how children discuss and create fanart, the study highlights the depth of learning and collaboration involved in these practices, as well as their role in fostering peer culture. Extending the investigation of digital identity into transnational contexts, Mariana Lima Becker and Alex Corbitt follow Brazilian transnational families in the United States, showing how children use platforms like Roblox to sustain both local and diasporic identities. Digital play becomes a translingual and transcultural practice that both connects and distinguishes children from their peers, offering new ways of being ‘in-between’. This study also raises important questions about equity, access and representation for immigrant children navigating multiple cultural worlds. The contributions in this Special Issue paint a nuanced picture of children's and families' digital lives, underscoring the complex interplay between agency, culture and technology. Children emerge as active participants in shaping their digital experiences, negotiating rules and creating meaningful content. At the same time, the role of adults—whether as parents, educators or policymakers—remains crucial in fostering safe and empowering digital environments. These studies collectively emphasise the need to respect children's perspectives, support their digital competencies and address the broader structural and cultural factors influencing their digital engagement. Rather than prescribing universal models of ‘healthy’ digital use, the research in this issue invites a situated, context-sensitive approach that foregrounds children's voices and acknowledges global diversity in digital childhoods. This collection raises important questions about how digital media is reshaping childhood and family life across diverse global contexts. It calls for future research to more closely attend to the voices, practices and experiences of children and families. In so doing, it offers a more nuanced and inclusive framework for understanding children's digital lives, and sets a research agenda that acknowledges the opportunities and complexities of growing up in digitally mediated environments. We thank the Australian Research Council and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child (Project CE200100022). This work was partly supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. The authors have nothing to report. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The authors have nothing to report.

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