Children's interactions with digital devices

Abstract

The role of digital devices such as touch screens in children’s lives at home and at school has increased at an accelerated pace during the past eight years. Parents and teachers act as children’s main monitors, instructors, and guides for interacting with digital devices. This project reviews parental influence on children’s digital usage via parents’ attitudes, their own usage, their support, and mediation. Results show that children's experiences of using digital devices is affected by the diversity of parental influential factors. The positive effects of parental usage, support, and mediation possibly promote children's experiences with digital devices. Furthermore, the use of digital devices in school are also found to improve children's writing, drawing, foreign language learning, and social collaboration under some conditions. However, the review of children’s use of digital devices in classrooms reveals conflicting results on the development of intellectual and social aspects, which calls for more communication among teachers on instruction and guidance.