Abstract
Katie Davis's book, Technology's Child: The Influence of Digital Media on Child Development, provides captivating insights and clarity on the impact of technology on various stages of growing up, along with practical advice on how to tailor this knowledge to individual children and teenagers. It explores the diverse ways in which individuals of different age groups interact with technology as they progress through various stages of development. This includes toddlers who are in the early stages of exploring their immediate surroundings and young adults in their twenties who are navigating their roles in society.
The book is divided into nine chapters and enriches the notion of three essential themes: context, technology design, and individual children. These themes together play a crucial role in shaping whether digital experiences exhibit self-directed learning and receive support from the community. The book's opening chapter provides an introduction to the three themes for creating the conditions for self-directed and community-supported technology experiences. The second chapter takes a closer look at being a ‘good enough’ digital parent (p. 37), which is a reminder to parents that they should not aim for perfection but should rather accept their imperfections. This acceptance serves two crucial purposes: it supports their children's resilience and helps parents maintain their own well-being amidst the highs and lows of parenthood. Similarly, a “good enough” digital parent does not aim for perfection but acknowledges that not every technology experience will be ideal. In terms of their own technology use, “good enough” parents recognize that occasional distractions with screens or devices are not catastrophic, and they do not jeopardize their child's chances of having a happy and fulfilling life.
In chapters 3, 4, and 5 the focus starts from early childhood, where they are shaped by the author's experience as a parent where she looked for ‘loose parts’ in children's digital play as one of the important self-directed technology experiences besides the concept of open-ended, self-paced, and the absence of dark patternsuch as the time pressure, game characters, rewards systems, or virtual toys or virtual pets. It is connected to the digital futures for learning (Ross, 2022) where it gives opportunities for speculative methodologies and works for researchers and educators interested in creatively embracing the future of learning, especially for children where it is necessary to have open-ended, self-pace, self-directed play as the concept of loose parts in the digital play.
The author also considers ‘who's in control, your child or the game?’ as a reminder that self-directed digital experiences are voluntary when the child fully controls the play. The role of parents is crucial for children as the creators, mediators, and representatives of the media environment in which their children grow (Nathanson, 2015) and significantly shapes their children's experiences and behaviors too.
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 of the book offer a seamless transition from the portrayal of childhood to the stages of tweens, adolescents, and adults. These chapters explore the moments when and the ways in which digital experiences amplify vulnerabilities and influence the development of one's identity and their connection to the social issues they are passionate about. Finally, the last chapter concludes the book with a model where the three themes (context, technology design, and individual children) are discussed as factors shaping the children's tech experiences, and self-directed and community support surrounds and is within the technology. The ‘ownership and initiative, competence and mastery, and belonging and connection’ (p. 206) are also emphasized in this chapter as the outcomes of developmentally supportive tech experiences.
In the preface to this book, the author remarks that “the solution to supporting children's positive technology experiences is not an individual children's effort” (p. xi). Her point is that the idea that promoting positive technology experiences for children is not solely an individual effort, but also of parents, teachers, policymakers, design teams, project managers, tech company executives, and researchers, which also become the targeted audience for this book. The “Taking Stock with the Three D's”—what's going on Developmentally, Going Deeper, and Design considerations—which the author included in each chapter of the book, successfully addresses the two empirical questions about the impact of different kinds of technologies on different kinds of children and the ways technologies can be designed to support children’s development.