A matter of logics and practicalities: How the state,parenting,and children connect in a digitalized childhood

Abstract

Important contributions have been made to understanding how screens shape children’s lives, but the arrangement of the constitutive components of digitalized childhoods is not yet fully elucidated. This article draws on a mix of methods to map out how the practicalities of digitalized childhoods are induced by logics embedded in the interconnected spaces of the state and parenthood. To this end, assemblage theory is employed to help explore how the digitalization of childhoods unfolds within an arrangement of diverse scales and complexities. The article draws on ongoing debates within childhood studies concerning children’s agency and the methodological construction of childhoods.

Introduction

How do digital technologies shape contemporary parent-child practices? The field of childhood studies (Balagopalan et al., 2023; Tisdall et al., 2023) has long addressed the phenomenon of digitalization of childhood (Ames and León, 2021; Ergler et al., 2016) as well as the parental mediation of its harms and benefits (Wilson, 2016). However, while it is widely agreed that digitalization is one of the most pressing phenomena in contemporary childhoods (Kumpulainen et al., 2022), few have explored its constitutive aspects. In this article, we build on the turn toward New Materialism and posthumanism within childhood studies (Lee, 2000; Prout, 2005; Spyrou, 2018) and argue in line with Spyrou (2017), Kraftl and Horton (2019) and Lenz Taguchi and Eriksson (2021) for a methodological decentering of the child as a promising trajectory towards understanding children’s lives through their embeddedness in material-discursive networks. A methodological decentering of the child allows for an exploration of digitalized childhoods as material spaces, constituted by logics inscribed in connecting societal spaces. This analytical lens enables us to give specific attention to how parent-child practices are constructed within contemporary digitalized Norwegian childhoods, and also, to show how this methodological approach can be employed in other methodological and empirical contexts that explore the entanglement of contemporary childhoods and the logics of digitalization.

By combining ethnography, interviews, and an analysis of state policies, we explore how digitalized childhoods unfold within the three spaces of the state, parenting, and childhood. The result is an analysis of how these three empirical spaces are connected in constructing a digital childhood assemblage that pivots on the smartphone’s ability to establish specific material-discursive relationships in contemporary childhoods. To this end, we have situated the analysis within Deleuze and Guattari’s process-oriented methodology (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988/2020) with the aim of contributing to new understandings of the digitalization of childhood.

The Norwegian digitalized childhood

The Norwegian childhood is a construction (James and Prout, 1998) that comprises humans and non-humans situated within the specific geographical and historical context (LLobet and Vergara del Solar, 2022; Tisdall et al., 2023) of the child-centered Norwegian society that politically situates egalitarianism and emancipation as its basis for democracy (Broch, 2023a, 2023b; Wagner and Einarsdottir, 2006). The state’s family and child policies are a fundamental part of the Norwegian welfare system aimed at creating equal possibilities for all children (Garvis et al., 2019; Kristjansson, 2006), and the strive for highly competent digital citizens is one of the state’s main instruments for building and upholding an egalitarian and democratic society. This has led to digitalization being perceived as “a natural part” of Norwegian kindergartens and schools. Consequently, “a digital foundation” has been implemented in the national pedagogical framework, aimed at securing equal access to digital technologies nationwide (Ministry of Education and Research, 2023).

The political drive for a digitalization of Norwegian childhoods has unfolded synchronously with significant technological and economic changes. The development of an extensive infrastructure for internet access, technological advancements, and a decrease in the prices of digital devices has led to Norwegian children being at the top in a recent European survey reporting on smartphone use and estimated time spent online (Bakken et al., 2021; Smahel et al., 2020). National surveys show similar trends. In 2021, 87% of 9-12-year-olds reported using the internet daily for an average of 150 minutes (Media-Norway SN, 2021). 70% report spending at least 3 hours daily in front of a screen (Young Data, 2022). These figures show how digitalization has become an essential part of Norwegian childhood and point to how Norwegian children today seem to live what Sherry Turkle has termed ‘fully tethered lives’ (2017).

Digitalized childhoods in childhood studies

Within childhood studies, digitalization has mainly been analyzed from three perspectives. First, scholars have studied parental mediation of children’s screen time (eg., Kalmus et al., 2022; Nagy et al., 2023; Sarre, 2013). These contributions have provided important knowledge on the domestication of mobile technology (Willett, 2016, 2017), parents’ role in their children’s digital lives (Ask et al., 2021; Dias et al., 2016), and the negotiation of screen time (Aarsand, 2007; Aarsand and Aronsson, 2009; Mukherjee, 2021). A second strand of research has underlined how the risks, harms, and benefits of digitalization are perceived by children, parents, and the media (Bond, 2010; Plowman et al., 2010; Rose et al., 2022; Wilson, 2016). Researchers have also studied children’s agency (Forsberg And and Strandell, 2007) and meaning-making (Broch, 2024; Mertala and Meriläinen, 2019) in relation to digital devices. Studies showing how digital tablets are being positioned as objects of play (Lundtofte et al., 2019) and as facilitators of interaction with the wider world (Ruckenstein, 2010) have also contributed to understanding the role digital devices play in the everyday meaning-making of children.

Although substantial contributions have been made in analyzing screen use within childhood studies, the majority of research has departed from an axiomatic of an already digitalized childhood. This has inevitably led to a strong focus on outcomes. Research that explores the effects of digital literacy and the ‘digital divide’ (Bjørgen and Erstad, 2015; Erstad et al., 2020; Livingstone et al., 2021; Livingstone and Helsper, 2007), new forms of socialization (Kapella, 2020; Smahel et al., 2020), new forms of play (Boudreau and Consalvo, 2014; Carter et al., 2020; Ito, 2013), and the platformization of family life (Sefton-Green and Erstad, 2025) has contributed with significant new knowledge on the social effects of digitalization’s entry into children’s lives. But these perspectives have not engaged significantly in an exploration of how bodies, matter, and ideas emerge relationally (Spyrou, 2019) into digitalized childhoods. To complement the already extensive body of research focusing on outcomes, we employ an analytical lens that directs attention to the construction of digitalized childhoods as material practices induced by logics embedded in interconnected societal domains, instead of directing attention towards how children and parents maneuver an already digitalized childhood (Holmarsdottir et al., 2024). Building on insights from what has been termed the “new wave” in childhood studies (Kraftl and Horton, 2019), we employ foundational concepts from Deleuze and Guattari, which have significantly influenced the emergence of both New Materialism (Fox and Alldred, 2016) and posthumanism (Barad, 2007; Spyrou, 2018). In this way, we aim to offer exploratory and inventive ways of analyzing childhoods from within a poststructuralist critique of ‘authentic representations’ of children’s agency (Balagopalan et al., 2023).

The childhood assemblage as an analytical tool

By engaging with Deleuze and Guattari’s (D-G) theories, we situate our project theoretically within a tradition of similar ontological positions within childhood studies. In line with ideas that established the field in critical opposition to universalizing developmental psychological assumptions on childhood (James and Prout, 1998), Lee (2001) has argued for engaging with D-G’s assemblage theory as a productive way of comparing childhoods because it offers ways of directing attention away from the essentialist child body and towards the capacitating extensions children live through. In a similar vein, Prout (2005) and Oswell (2013) have argued for understanding children as ‘decentered’ in the meaning that their capacities, powers, and thus also their agency, should be understood as derived from connections made with their surrounding world. Hickey Moody (2013), Sparrman (2020), MacLure (2016), Ringrose (2011, 2011) and Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2014) engage directly with D-G’s theories in empirical work on children, while in a related ontological position that share many of the core principles, Spyrou has argued for an ontological turn in childhood studies that builds heavily upon Barad’s posthumanism (Spyrou, 2017, 2019). In a related vein, Kvale Sørenssen and others have employed actor-network theory in an exploration of how materialities partake in the enactments of social norms (2021). In an engagement with this core theoretical framework in childhood studies, we employ a set of foundational concepts from D-G’s book A Thousand Plateaus (1988/2020), where the duo mapped out the central tenets for the concepts of the assemblage and de-/reterritorialization. These two concepts are central to our argument and will consequently be laid out in the following section.

At the center of D-G’s affective assemblage theory is the premise that all bodies, ideas, and materialities come into being through constitutive relations with other bodies, ideas, and materialities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988/2020). This non-essentialist ontology is a theoretical framework where language, bodies, ideas, and the practicalities of the material world emerge into what D-G called assemblages (Fox and Alldred, 2016). It is important to note that the concept of the assemblage was never meant to be understood literally as different ‘things’ assembled (Buchanan, 2021). Assemblage is a translation of the French word agencement. Agencement is the action of the verb agencer, which can be translated into “to arrange, to dispose, to fit up, to combine, to order” (Law, 2004: 41). An assemblage is, therefore, best understood as a continually ‘working arrangement’, within a particular order. Keeping the connotations of the original French agencement in mind also makes it clear how agency is at the core of the assemblage (Buchanan, 2021).

In A Thousand Plateaus, D-G explicated the inner mechanisms of the assemblage, detailing its value as an analytical concept (Brown, 2022). An assemblage, they argue, operates at the intersection of two axes. The first axis concerns the relation between statements and content – what is said and what is done. Here, statements are attributed to bodies, materialities, and actions, thereby giving them certain properties. This process of attributing is bidirectional so that, on the first axis, every assemblage is made up of both statements and contents in reciprocal presupposition to each other (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988/2020). This arrangement makes it possible to analyze the intertwining of expressions and material practicalities in an empirical field. For example, a childhood includes contents that concern the ways bodies intermingle; children and parents have distinct positions within the material social space. Toys, screens, clothes, food, and drinks are also part of the contents of the childhood assemblage. But these bodies and objects are also attributed with statements that confer distinct properties. A child can, for example, be described as adorable or defiant, resilient or unruly, and colors can be expressed as girl or boy colors. These statements effectuate what D-G termed as incorporeal transformations (1988/2020) – transformations of bodies without modifying the bodies themselves. This bi-univocal system on the first axis of the assemblage is a necessary premise for everyday linguistic exchanges, given that it produces order in the material world (Høstaker, 2014).

All assemblages are territorial (Bonta and Protevi, 2004). This means that they always exist in a milieu from which new potential constitutive connections can be made. The second axis of the assemblage regulates its territorial borders (De Landa, 2006). Consequently, it concerns what D-G called deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Deterritorialization is the process of ‘uprooting’ the assemblage from its territory. Reterritorialization is its correlate and signifies the act of reconnecting and reconstituting the assemblage’s territorial relations (Zourabichvili, 2012). An example of how such a de-/reterritorialization unfolds can be seen in how the predominantly non-digitalized childhood of the pre-Internet era reassembled into the largely digitalized childhood seen today. This happened when the territorial border between childhood and digital technology was removed, resulting in the reterritorialization of a predominantly localized childhood into a new digitalized childhood set in a global digital territory – a territory that is now providing a profound new set of material potentialities to be actualized. But it kept its linguistic sign, namely the expression ‘childhood.’ This illustrates how content can also attribute properties to statements, as ‘childhood’ remains the same expression today as it was 30 years ago, even though the material-practical lives of children today are vastly different. In this article, the digitalized childhood is operationalized along these two axes, as a territorialized manifestation of logical statements and material practicalities that deem certain actions rational, while others are made irrational. The result is a methodological apparatus highly attuned to how affective relations transform and reshape children’s lives and parent-child relationships.

Scripts and apparatuses of resonance

According to D-G, territorializations cannot be understood as instances of absolute unity or stability (Deleuze, 1995), but they can lead to what they called appearances of unity, formed by bi-univocal relationships between the assemblage’s elements. These are territorializations that specify and localize bodies’ capacities, temporarily restricting new connections from being made (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988/2020). Such appearances of unity are indicative and essential for the functioning of modern state societies because they produce consistency among the different sections within the state (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988/2020).

Turning to actor-network theorists’ concept of scripts gives us a constructive way to illustrate how this apparent unification can unfold within the lives of children. Scripts are latent instructions built into the design of technologies that not only enable certain ways of using devices, but also have the capacity to instruct users similarly to the way stage actors are instructed by playscripts (Akrich, 1992; Latour, 1999). When a child interacts with a smartphone, the result is not only an expansion of that child’s agency into a new digital realm. Since the smartphone is a highly scripted entity, its usage is constrained to adhere to a predetermined path such that the smartphone, in effect, works as an entity that specifies and localizes the child’s agency. The smartphone hence acts as an apparatus of resonance (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988/2020) – an apparatus that produces resonance among different parts of society by imposing specific material-discursive relations onto certain societal domains. Consequently, when interacting with digital devices, children become components in the co-production (Jasanoff, 2004) of the emerging flows of digitalization in society, while alternative extensions they potentially could live through are being obstructed. Hence, through reterritorialization, contemporary childhoods are constantly being aligned with a globe-spanning technological play (Silcock et al., 2016).

Research design

The data presented in this article stems from textual analysis of governmental policy strategies, family interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork carried out with a group of children for 6 months in 2022 and 2023. The participants are all from a Norwegian majority-ethnic background. The researcher who did the fieldwork did not know any of the participants beforehand, but was acquainted with an employee at the children’s school who mediated contact with the first participating family. All other participants were recruited through strategic snowball sampling (Parker et al., 2019). All participants live in a small coastal city and are part of the same peer group. All the children come from a mix of working-class and middle-class backgrounds and all were 8 years old when the fieldwork was carried out. Data was produced at home, in school, in the local community, and at sports activities. All the participants were informed of the voluntary nature of participating, and after having given their written consents/assents, the participants could, at any time, choose to withdraw from the study. Identities are protected by using pseudonyms. The ethnographic data were produced as fieldnotes and the interview data were recorded, transcribed, and coded using thematic categories (Lareau, 2021). In keeping with a critical reflexivity when researching with children (Connolly, 2017), the data should not be understood as detached from the specific social, gendered, and generational forces embedded in the project design, but rather as a product of these, as it is these, along with the contextual responses adopted by the participants, that together make out the empirical potentialities from within the data has been produced. For this article, which draws much of its data from fieldwork with one family, the researcher initially came into contact with the family by first having done fieldwork with other families within the same social network. Consequently, access and a shared understanding of the researcher as a trusted adult who ‘hung around and asked questions’ when the children spent time together were already established.

Empirically, and in line with the idea of methodological decentering, the article pivots on the digitalization of eight-year-old Nora’s childhood and how it is affected through relations to her divorced father, with whom she lives, and the state. Our modus operandi, in this regard, is to draw a map – a cartography of the constitutive connections that surfaced during fieldwork, and that make out some of the essential building blocks of the digitalization of Nora’s childhood. By both holding on to a relational ontological methodology while at the same time adhering to the ethnographic idea of ‘thick descriptions’ of lived experiences, we argue for an ethnography that explores Nora’s childhood through what Zigon has described as ‘a situation’; an “assemblage widely diffused across different global scales that allows us to conceptualize how persons and objects that are geographically, socioeconomically, and culturally distributed get caught up in shared conditions that significantly affect their possible ways of being-in-the-world” (Zigon, 2015: 502). Aiming for an ethnographically informed analysis of Nora’s digitalized childhood – i.e., her being-in-a-world conditioned by digitalization, we have chosen to include data from both Nora’s father’s life and the interconnected political space of the Norwegian state.

The analysis of relevant governmental policies concerning the digitalization of childhood was carried out to gain an additional layer of data. State space, the first of the three spaces the following analyses engage with, is constructed with data from five white papers and political strategies that articulate the political logic for the digitalization of Norwegian childhoods. These political documents help establish the administrative apparatus of the welfare system that, through institutional policies, inserts itself into the private space of childhood. The selection of the political documents was made according to two criteria: the documents had to be of recent publication, so that they could be considered to form the bases for current policies, and they had to politically address screen use and/or digitalization in children’s lives.

Three spaces of a digitalized childhood

The following section presents data from three spaces of a digitalized childhood. These spaces are not meant to represent the totality of domains relevant to the digitalization of childhood, nor are they, in essence, distinctive separated spaces at all. The separation is an analytical construct undertaken to be able to map out how the entanglements of different societal scales produce the apparent unification of a digitalized childhood. Accordingly, the next section presents data from what we term a state space, a parenting space, and a childhood space with the intent to show how digitalization flows through these spaces, attuning bodies to conform to a uniform resonance.

State space

The digitalization of Norwegian childhoods is encouraged, advised, and politically endorsed (Ministry of Children and Families, 2021; Ministry of Education and Research, 2017). The white papers and political strategies that empirically construct the state space organize the digitalization of childhood mainly along two lines of reasoning. The first concerns the individual child’s needs and the second concerns the state’s needs. While the first addresses digitalization in schools and kindergartens as a tool and an activity to provide for children’s social and individual development (Undheim and Ploog, 2023), enabling “them to experience life mastery and succeed in further education, work, and societal participation” (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017: 12) the second centers on the importance of providing the ‘right’ kind of digital education to ensure “the foundation for developing digital services that Norway can thrive on in the future” (NOU 2013:2, 2013: 10). The first part of this dual reasoning states that digitalization should be “a natural part” (Ministry of Education and Research, 2023) of the pursuit of an egalitarian and democratic welfare state. This view is in line with how the European Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027 states that “digital education should play a pivotal role in increasing equality and inclusiveness” (European Commission, 2020: 8); a view founded in UNs Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989) and foundational ideas within children’s rights studies concerning the balancing of protection from harm while simultaneously empowering children to maximize the opportunities of the digital age (Livingstone and Third, 2017; Unicef, 2021). The second strand of reasoning can be found in the strategy for the digitalization of the Norwegian education system, which focuses on future human capital. Here, the connection between education and work life is conveyed as one where it is expected that the early school years should lay the groundwork so that students and future workers can obtain the required skill sets for a digitalized university sector and work life. The strategy states that “primary education forms the foundation upon which all further education and development are built. Schools are […] expected to contribute to our society’s ability to manage digitalization” (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017: 3). Additionally, an increasingly digitalized work-life demands that the education system: “[…] provide employees who are up-to-date and possess the skills and competence needed for their professions.” (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017: 6). By binding childhood and digitalization together through political statements, the state, in effect, endorses a reterritorialization of childhood by attributing distinct properties to the material contents of childhood. In line with what other scholars have pointed out (Balagopalan et al., 2023; Hart and Boyden, 2019; Lupton, 2017), the quotes above show how the state’s political and economic logics aim to shape the material practicalities of children’s lives. However, the state does this merely as a result of it being a part of a larger global system where labor, bureaucracy, and digitalization operate in competitive and ordered segments that structure states’ possible room for maneuverability (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988/2020). Thus, within the larger global political system, digitalization can be argued to operate as an axiomatic, producing isomorphic resonances between different states (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988/2020).

The parent space of Hans

For Hans, a divorced mid-level manager in an IT company and father of 8-year-old Nora, the political push for the digitalization of childhood produces some notable practical consequences because, as a parent, Hans has to maneuver an ordered parenting space, induced by the logics of the digital axiomatic. Like many parents, he is, at times, concerned about the amount of time Nora spends on her smartphone. However, he is also inclined to view Nora’s screentime in terms of its outcomes in line with the state’s view of childhood – as a preparation for the competitive university and work life that awaits her:

[Screen use is a] necessary evil if we can call it that. It's a fact that, no matter how we twist and turn it, they [the children] will have to use communication over digital platforms. They will have to use…ninety percent of all professions today, you must use something digital. And in all stages of our education, you will have to use digital tools, so being a bit ahead and being a bit...being intuitive, learning things, and menus on TVs and all that, it's – there's a kind of intelligence there, being able to envision a system or when you get a new TV or – you can't even get a dishwasher now without it being an app and some Wi-Fi and stuff, right? So, while I fix it in fifteen minutes, my mom and dad spend two to three hours, and then they still have to call me, and they [pointing to his daughter Nora and her friends who sit nearby] are so to speak, born with it. You have IQ and EQ, and then you can call it DQ, digital [intelligence]... right? So, I think it's positive, I mean – they have to have it.

Stricter regulation of screen use is being debated (The Government, 2024; The Norwegian Media Authority, 2023). However, for now, the dominant political view seems to leave little room for maneuvering outside the logic of the digital axiomatic. Consequently, we argue that there is a distinct relationship between state space and Hans’ parenting space, where, in line with the workings on the first axis of the assemblage where statements and contents operate as reciprocal attributes, the first space’s logics order the second’s material practicalities by imposing a set of expectations concerning the acquisition of digital skills in early childhood. These expectations make it difficult for Hans and Nora to deviate from the path created by the digital axiomatic. In his wish for Nora to succeed in the competitive world that awaits her, Hans has few choices except to conform. Consequently, Hans’ parenting space is constantly being reterritorialized to align with the state’s political and economic goals.

The early childhood space of Nora

Analogously to how the logics of state space are affecting the material practicalities of Hans’ parenting space, so is the childhood space of Nora affected by her father’s parenting space. During a field interview, Hans described how he introduced Nora to digital screens when she was a toddler – not because she wanted it, but because he needed it:

On weekends when Nora was little, I rigged up a fully charged iPad and a bowl of cereal – all that was needed was milk – everything was ready. So, when she woke up on Saturday or something like that, I just helped her out, poured some milk and then I went back to bed, and then she came in an hour later. By then, she had eaten and been watching a bit, and now she was bored. Then it was nine o'clock or something like that. So, I got an extra hour of sleep. The stimulus with a screen started very, very early.

As the quote above shows, screens were first introduced into Nora’s life because they could help create a certain order by restricting Nora’s movement so that she did not need parental supervision. Hans mentions how the stimulus with screen started early in Nora’s life, but one might as well argue that it is he who is primarily receiving a stimulus – an incentive that enables him to sleep for an extra hour. Understood this way, the iPad can be described as a predominantly practical tool; ordering bodies through the creation of resonances between the daily practicalities of family life and a larger societal digitalization. The iPad was introduced because Hans desired to sleep for an extra hour. For Nora, this alteration embodies a qualitative change in her capacity to make connections by redistributing her agency along a digital network that decreases her physical ‘wriggle room.’ In this sense, the iPad is a device that primarily answers to Hans’s desires, making whatever stimuli Nora is receiving an outcome of Hans’s needs, not the other way around. Thus, this early instance of screen use can be said to develop from specific desires within spaces external to Nora’s childhood and not from her desire to interact with a digital device. The result is a reterritorialization of Nora’s early childhood through digitalization’s ability to envelope specific corporal dimensions of family life. This illustrates how the logics of the digital axiomatic cuts across both axes of the family assemblage, capturing and reterritorializing material and bodily practicalities.

The childhood space of Nora and her friends

Nora is a popular girl, and her home is frequently used for hanging out after school. School finishes a few hours before Hans comes home from work, so Nora and her friends usually have a few hours alone before he comes home and starts cooking dinner. During these hours, the group of friends spends most of their time on the large corner sofa in the living room. All of Nora’s friends, except one, have their own smartphone, and they rarely spend time together without in some way using them – either as the center of their attention or as a part of a social and/or physical activity. Sometimes the smartphones are used for watching videos while doing gymnastics or dancing. Other times the friends make drawings on paper together, copying pictures found online. However, most of the time when the group gathers on the sofa after school, they use their smartphones to play online games. The games they choose to play are usually not particularly challenging or even oriented towards competition or winning. They seem more often to be of the type that allows for a group of friends to spend time together in a virtual world, using the game as a shared focal point. These games might involve simple tasks such as trading objects, gathering materials, animals, and fruits, or solving simple tasks together. Sometimes they are just hanging out together in virtual worlds, visiting each other’s virtual houses, or hanging out on the same virtual street. This activity is usually carried out by the group of friends gathering on the sofa with their smartphones, simultaneously interacting with the others inside the game while also speaking directly to them outside of it. Other friends who are not physically present might also participate. These are then on a loudspeaker so that they can join in on the conversation. Hence, the smartphones possess similar ordering capabilities as the iPad in Nora’s early childhood had, making it possible for the group of friends to spend time together without having to be in the same physical room. Nora’s smartphone also provides order to Hans’s life, reassuring him of Nora’s whereabouts after school.

During an interview with Nora and her parents, Hans described how he had made it convenient for Nora and her friends to hang out at their house:

I have arranged a lot of charging cables [Hans points to the sofa]. I've connected six different charging cables, so no matter what kind of phone they have, they can connect to a charger.

Most of Nora’s friends have inherited their smartphones from parents or older siblings, and as a consequence, many struggle with worn-out batteries that need frequent charging. From Hans’s perspective, installing the charging cables by the sofa then becomes a question of logics; with ease of access to charging cables, the group of friends can play games on their smartphones without leaving the comfort of the sofa. Thus, this material change in the childhood assemblage is initiated by a parental logic that only becomes meaningful within the context of the digital axiomatic; when digitalization becomes a ‘natural part’ of childhood, installing accessible charger cables becomes a matter of efficiency and safety. Whenever Nora and her friends are spending time at the house while Hans is not home, as Hans points out:

They don’t have to manage with sockets alone and those sorts of things. It is a matter of ‘help to self-help’ – it's incredibly important, otherwise you have to do everything yourself and then you have to watch everyone yourself, but if you facilitate things, ‘the wheels roll by themselves’.

These material changes are not neutral alterations. By installing charging cables by the sofa, specific scripts come into play. The group of friends needs the smartphones’ ordering capabilities to construct their preferred after-school activity, and since their smartphones need frequent charging, the sofa with the charging cables close at hand becomes the best alternative for hanging out. Thus, the private space of the sofa becomes a place where the material practicalities of childhood are aligned with both state and parental logics. Through constraints in his own parenting space, where digitalization seems unavoidable in his wish for Nora to gain the necessary skills for the life she is about to enter into, Hans constructs new constraints in Nora’s childhood space. But constraints should not be understood as inferior to liberties – in the digitalized childhood assemblage, these are two parts of the same whole. While Nora and her friends have their agency in physical space constrained by the scripts introduced by digitalization, these same scripts allow them to experience a new set of possibilities in a digital space. Thus, agency is both constrained and enabled by the affective qualities of the digitalized assemblage, which suggests that smartphones and internet access operate in a twofold way – both as tethers and as distributors, setting bodies in motion through the hardwired connectivity of the internet’s infrastructure (Massumi, 2002). The final section explores the practicalities of this double-sidedness.

The extended space of the digitalized childhood

One day during fieldwork, I went to visit Nora after school, where I met her and three of her classmates outside the house where they were letting the dog, Albert, spend some time outside before they went inside. I am the last to enter the house, and when I walk into the living room, they are all already sitting on the big corner sofa right where Hans has arranged with the charging cables. As I walk over to the sofa, they hardly seem to notice me as they all sit hunched over their phones, eagerly waiting for a game to start, or maybe taking the first initial steps into a digital world that just now starts to reveal itself on the screen in front of them. It is February, so the four children, having just come in from walking home from school through the snow, now sit relaxed and enjoy the warm air in the living room while speaking to each other in low voices. Their eyes and fingers are locked onto their smartphones – cheeks still red from the cold air outside. The only constant noise is the low buzz from the heat pump blowing warm air into the room. After having had winter hats on, the children’s hair is flat in some places and straight up in others, and all four are dressed in thin wool from neck to toe, as is normal for children during winter in Norway. The group sits clustered together with their feet up on the sofa. From where I sit, on the edge of the sofa, observing the children with their focused gazes, it becomes apparent that we no longer inhabit the same spaces as we did just a few minutes ago in the garden. While I am only present in the living room, the children are now experiencing an additional digital territory that belongs to the game they are playing. As far as I can tell, these two spaces are experienced as one continuous space, extending from the physical living room, where the children all sit still next to each other on the sofa, and into the game, where they all move along with each other. In the extended space of the digitalized childhood, sitting down and moving around work as presuppositions – necessary premises for the exploration of digital territories in the bodily shape of avatars; agents of becomings (Broch, 2024; Buchanan, 2021). Consequently, in contemporary childhoods, digitalization effectuates incorporeal transformations – bodily changes without modifying the bodies themselves. When the friends start playing a game called Teamwork, which involves several players communicating and working together to get through an obstacle course, these incorporeal transformations come to life. While playing, conversation, staring at the screen, immobility, and movement become constitutive features of the same reality:

Boy 1: You must jump! Don’t jump so fast!

Girl 1: But… I died!

[Girl 1’s avatar fell down a hole in the obstacle course she was trying to jump over. A few seconds later she is back in the game and ready for another try.]

Girl 1: I am jumping!

Boy 1: Come on, jump!

Girl 1: Ok, go!

The extended childhood space where physical immobility merges with digital mobility is the territory of the digitalized childhood assemblage per se – brought into being by the reterritorialization of the familiar home environment by the logics of the digital axiomatic and the smartphone’s ability to act as an apparatus of resonance.

Conclusion

Using D-G’s assemblage theory as an explorative lens, we have shown how the reciprocity between logical statements and material practicalities constitutes the digitalization of contemporary Norwegian childhood. The analysis has shown how digitalization acts as an operational axiomatic – a formatting principle that constructs and restricts movements by fixating elements in bi-univocal relationships (Bonta and Protevi, 2004). Consequently, the material practicalities of parent-child practices are made to resonate with a larger societal arrangement, making both childhood and parenthood an enactment of a state-endorsed ‘society made durable’ (Latour, 1990) – a technology-dependent societal stability. For the state, this stability operates through the creation of an ordered territory. For Hans, the stability comes in the form of a fixed parental territory encircled by a threshold. Crossing the threshold comes with a cost – to deviate from a digitalized childhood creates dissonance with other societal forces that are made to resonate with the digital axiomatic. For Nora, the stability is felt through the ordering capabilities of the smartphone – an apparatus of resonance – not practical by itself but made practical by the economic and political logics in society. Nora’s smartphone operates in a dual fashion; on one side it obstructs potentialities and aligns her life with a global generic technological play. On the other side, it distributes agency and enables new forms of digital-physical social life to arise. Thus, the apparent unity of digitalization and childhood can be argued to primarily pertain to a specific way of ordering different social spaces (Winner, 1989), and not necessarily to the needs of children and parents. By mapping out how the digital axiomatic flows through and aligns these three interconnected spaces, this article complements and engages with both earlier research that focuses on how children and parents maneuver already digitalized childhoods (Holmarsdottir et al., 2024) and research that starts from a relational ontological perspective (Sørenssen and Franck, 2021). Consequently, we have shown how digitalization should not predominantly be understood as something that is introduced to children by commercial actors, but rather as a force situated within the state and induced by its inherent logics. As a result, future inquiries into digitalized childhoods – academic and regulatory, must find ways to grapple with the diverse scales and complexities that make out the digitalization of children-parent practices.