Cyber-safety and COVID-19 in the early years: A research agenda

Abstract

Young children aged birth to 5 years are known users of the internet, both unsupervised and in collaboration with adults. Adults also use the internet to share details of children’s lives with others, via sharenting and educational apps. During COVID-19 internet use by children and families rose significantly during periods of enforced stay-home. Internet use by children, and by adults on behalf exposes children to conduct, contact and content risks online. These risks mean that cyber-safety in the early years is increasingly necessary, especially concerning increased internet usage during COVID-19. While cyber-safety is well developed for primary and secondary-school aged children this is not the case for young children, their families and educators. This paper proposes a research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years, using critical constructivism and internet studies to define the internet as a non-unitary technology. Three main objects of study concerning cyber-safety in the early years, including the reference to COVID-19 are identified for targeted research, including: technologies, context and policy.

Keywords

COVID-19 cyber-safety early childhood internet young children

Introduction

Cyber-safety education has been provided and researched in terms of its approach and effectiveness for primary and secondary school-aged children for many years (Hanewald, 2008). This is not the case in the early years, where cyber-safety for young children aged birth to 5 years remains under-researched and limited in practice. Prior to COVID-19 there were increasing calls for cyber-safety education to be provided in early years settings (Sprung et al., 2020), with these calls stemming from the ubiquity of digital networking in the daily lives of young children and their adults. This ubiquity includes children using the internet for digital play, communication and entertainment (Livingstone and Bulger, 2014); families using the internet for work and life administration (Plowman, 2016); and educators using networked devices for planning and documenting young children’s learning (Lindgren, 2012). Such internet use by young children and their adults exposes children to what are known as conduct, contact and content risks online (Beach, 2010). Typically, such risks are approached via risk mitigation strategies, such as active supervision of children online, or the use of filters on devices accessed by young children (Heider, 2015; Zaman and Nouwen, 2016).

During COVID-19 a shift in internet use amongst young children and their families occurred, with networked technologies being used for communication, recreation, entertainment, work, telehealth, education and play. This increase occurred in the absence of detailed knowledge about how best to keep young children safe online, beyond a focus on risk mitigation. For example, anecdotal evidence suggested not all young children were actively supervised online during periods of enforced home learning when parents and/or family members were otherwise occupied with work or caring duties. In Australia, such evidence promoted the Office of eSafety to warn parents of the need for continued monitoring of internet-based activities by young children following stay-at home orders (Office of eSafety Commisioner, 2020a). However, as the COVID-19 situation suggests, demands on families mean that mitigation alone may not suffice. A comprehensive research agenda regarding cyber-safety in the early years attending to the internet as more than a unitary technology is arguably necessary to enable a technological, contextualised and policy-situated response to the online safety needs of young children. Such an agenda recognises that young children have been involved in using the internet for some time (Marsh et al., 2005; Rideout et al., 2003) whilst also promoting the requirement for research to advance knowledge concerning cyber-safety for young children during COVID-19.

This paper therefore theorises the internet using critical constructivism (Feenberg, 2002) to highlight the role of human values in technological innovation and usage, integrating this perspective with thinking from the field of internet studies (Wellman, 2004) to propose three main objects of study concerning cyber-safety in the early years, these being, technologies, context and policy. Each of these objects are discussed in turn, with a series of questions for each comprising a proposed research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years. The paper begins with a brief overview of the literature regarding young children, the internet and cyber-safety education in the early years.

Young children and the internet

Young children are amongst the highest growing group of internet users in the world (Livingstone et al., 2016). This was not always the case. When the internet was first invented it relied primarily on desktop computing, using the mouse and keyboard as input devices. These devices were beyond the hand-eye coordination and literacy expertise of young children (Geist, 2012), forming a physical barrier between young children and the internet. In effect, this barrier helped to keep children safe from online risks. This barrier no longer exists, with touchscreen technologies, wearables, Internet of Toys and voice-activation enabling young children’s active engagement with the internet, both on their own, and in collaboration with adults (see Arnott et al., 2018). In addition, the adults in young children’s lives frequently use the internet on behalf of young children, sharing details of their lives via social media (Marasli et al., 2016), and recording details of their learning and development on purpose-designed education-based apps (Lindgren, 2012).

Both child and adult-based interaction with the internet exposes young children to online risks – known in the literature as content, contact and conduct risks (Beach, 2010). Content risks include young children playing with games or apps that promote later gambling behaviours, being exposed to advertising for unhealthy food products, and/or viewing gendered, sexualised or violent material online. Contact risks involve children interacting with unknown people online, and/or the unauthorised harvesting of their personal data. Finally, conduct risks occur when young children accidently download malware/viruses, or engage with games and apps that promote later gambling behaviours. Children are also at risks of privacy breaches when adults use social media or educational apps to document details of their lives (Edwards et al., 2018).

Research regarding young children and the internet focuses more on what and how children use the internet than it does on cyber-safety risks and how best to engage young children, families and educators in online safety. Amongst earliest reported research about young children and the internet, was the Marsh et al. (2005) Digital Beginnings report; the Rideout et al., Zero to Eight: Electronic media in the lives of infants, toddlers and preschools report; and the now well-cited Zero-to-Eight Young Children and their Internet Use report (Holloway et al., 2013). Published only 3 years after the 2010 release of the iPad, the Holloway et al., report identified touchscreen technologies as a highly enabling factor in increased internet usage by young children. By the mid-2010s research evidenced internet amongst young children in the global south and north, with socio-economic status associated with different patterns of use rather than access per se (Livingstone and Bulger, 2014). Children from advantaged families appear more likely to use the internet to access information, produce content and communicate with others, than do children from more vulnerable families, where content consumption is more frequent (Harris et al., 2017). The influence of socio-economic status on young children’s internet access and usage during COVID-19 is yet be established, particularly in terms of educational outcomes, although early media reports suggest not all families were able to access online learning, and some families needed to share one device amongst two or more children (Duffy, 2020).

In educational settings, research about young children and the internet has established insight into young children’s internet search strategies (Spink et al., 2010); while significant attention has been directed towards understanding the notion of digital play, including young children’s interactions with apps (Marsh et al., 2016), digital media informed pretend play (Wohlwend, 2017) and participation in virtual worlds (Marsh, 2010). Current efforts centre on the Internet of Toys, raising new questions about young children’s online privacy during internet-based play and ethical considerations associated with the massification of play data as a commercial venture (Holloway and Green, 2016).

Cyber-safety education in the early years

Cyber-safety education in the early years is under-researched, and insufficiently provided for in practice (Sprung et al., 2020). This situation persists despite policy initiatives describing cyber-safety education for young children as urgently needed (Children’s Commissioner for England, 2017; Office of eSafety Commissioner, 2020a; Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017; United Nations Committee on the Rights of Children, 2019). What is available tends towards risk mitigation, advising adults to supervise children’s internet use, and/or to use filters on devices commonly accessed by young children (see Grey, 2011; Heider, 2015). While well-intentioned, these strategies are no longer sustainable in a world characterised by networked technology use, by both young children and the adults in their lives. A significant limitation in research exists, particularly regarding the understandings children and adults hold about the internet as a basis for cyber-safety.

The internet may be defined according to its technical and social dimensions (Tsatsou, 2014). The technical dimension involves the networking of technologies for generating, storing and communicating data amongst people and objects (e.g. the Internet of Things). The social dimension encompasses the human use of such data via the network by people for a variety of purposes. While understanding the internet is considered important for safe and productive participation in a digitally-networked society (Danovitch, 2019), few studies have investigated what pre-school aged children think about the internet. Mertala (2019) identifies only three studies in this area (e.g. Edwards et al., 2018; Oliemat et al., 2018; Yan, 2005), suggesting that young children understand the social dimension of the internet (e.g. explaining the internet as used for email, parental work, online shopping or playing games), but are not necessarily able to describe the internet in technical terms.

This limitation is important because research shows that conceptual understanding is a precursor to agentic action (Gelman and Kalish, 2006). If children do not understand that the internet comprises networked technologies used by people from anywhere, for any purpose, the rationale for following cyber-safety rules (e.g. avoiding unknown people online or not clicking on pop-ups) remains opaque. Added to this problem is a lack of research regarding what adults in children’s lives understand about the social and technical dimensions of the internet, meaning opportunities for co-learning about networked technologies between children and adults may be being missed in-situ. It is also not yet clear if pre-school aged children do not understand the technical dimension of the internet because digital networking is too challenging a concept for children of this age (e.g. Edwards et al., 2018); or because learning about the internet is not yet a mainstream curriculum area in the early years. A further problem concerning cyber-safety research is the under-theorisation of the internet as a technology used by people, as opposed to a technological risk faced by children. This paper draws on two perspectives to address this problem in the formation of a research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years. These are critical constructivism (Feenberg, 2002) and internet studies (Wellman, 2004).

Critical constructivism

Critical constructivism is a branch of thinking concerned with the relationship between people, technologies and society within the broader remit of philosophy of technology (Gibbons, 2010). Critical constructivism is different to critical pedagogy and constructivism as historically understood in educational terms. In education, critical pedagogy orientates towards the emancipation of the individual from social and cultural constraints through learning (McLaren and Jenifer, 2010), while constructivism concerns the cognitive construction of knowledge by learners in relationship with the experienced world (Wood and Bennett, 1998). In contrast, critical constructivism centres on understanding how human values mediate technological innovation over time.

Feenberg (1991), a leading philosopher of technology, developed critical constructivism as an outcome of his earlier work known as a ‘critical theory of technology’. Feenberg (1991) developed critical theory of technology in response to existing limitations in thinking about technologies, predominately those of technological determinism and substantivism. Feenberg (2002) argued that human values associated with the agentic use of technologies by people were not sufficiently evident in either technological determinist or substantive explanations. To understand this claim, it is helpful to have some familiarity with the central arguments made by technological determinism and substantivism.

Technological determinism is a perspective in which technologies are viewed as socially causative, that is, as generating change in human behaviour (Dafoe, 2015). Within the early childhood literature, technological determinism often works as a default orientation for research investigating the ‘impact’ of technologies on young children. The impact may be positive, such as using wearables to increase children’s physical activity (Byun et al., 2018); or for the worse, such as arguing that technologies curb imaginative play (Singer and Singer, 2009). Technological determinist thinking can become problematic when it centres attention on the social consequences of technology. When this occurs, people try to manage the technology to change the social outcome. This evident in the notion of ‘screen time’ whereby adults are advised to limit children’s time spent with technologies (American Academy Pediatrics, 2016). Here attention is directed towards minimising time spent with the technology, rather than understanding the value (or otherwise) associated with participation in technologically-situated activity.

Substantivism draws principally on the thinking of Heidegger (1954). This perspective holds that technologies transform the relationship between people and their subjective experience of the world. Unlike technological determinism in which technologies are viewed as socially causative, substantivism suggests that technologies are used by people because they add value to their lives. For example, mobile phones are useful for communicating with other people and therefore carry with them a high efficiency value. As people use technologies more and more often, their initial value merges with the technology itself, reshaping or ‘substantially’ changing what people do in practice, and by extension, how people experience the world. One example of this idea in practice is that of the ‘pass-back effect’ (Chiong and Shuler, 2010) whereby parents share their mobile phones with children. Mobile devices have a high efficiency value for parents. They help parents communicate with others and enable access to information. However, perhaps most significantly, mobile phones provide an accessible form of entertainment for young children. Thus, parents are likely to ‘pass-back’ devices to their offspring when children are required to be still, quiet or patient, such as on long journeys, in waiting rooms, while grocery shopping or even waiting out a pandemic at home (e.g. Levine et al., 2019). The benefit of keeping children entertained manifests in technology use itself, serving to shape young children’s experience with the internet via mobile-connected devices.

Critical constructivism holds that technologies, including the internet, are always generated and used by people according to social values (Flanagin et al., 2010). Using technologies is not a deterministic application, nor a technological shaping of the world, but a process whereby human values inform the range of epistemological ideas drawn upon in the construction and use of technologies over time. In critical constructivism, values relative to knowledge represents what is known as a technical code (Feenberg, 2002). Because a technical code centralises human values and knowledge in the design and use of technologies it operates as a ‘criterion that selects between alternative feasible technical designs in terms of a social goal’ (Feenberg, 2010: 68). Feasibility refers to what is technically-workable, while social goals are defined according to what is more or less ethically permitted and socially desirable.

In terms of the internet, feasibility encompasses the historical development of networked technologies as a multi-point rather than point-to-point method of communication. Predicated on packet switching, multi-point communication sends parcels or ‘packets’ of information to their desired end-point using networked rather than singular technologies (Baran, 1962). Historical accounts of the internet suggest multi-point communication was a military response to the risk incurred during the Cold War of existing point-to-point communication (primarily telephone) being wiped out and thus rendering a response to any possible threat difficult to coordinate through a lack of communicative capacity (see Rosenzweig, 1998). Like all historical accounts, this view of the internet is open to debate. For example, Leiner et al. (2009: 776) suggest this military claim is a ‘false rumour’. However, regardless of derivative history, using networked technologies means that damage to one part of the system does not preclude delivery of information to another because packets can be redirected to other parts of the network and reassembled at point of delivery. The essential value placed on communication therefore informed the design of the internet as a distributed and decentralised technology. A relatively open technological infrastructure, the internet therefore enables personalised communication and information sharing amongst people because anyone, anywhere can potentially use the network.

Social goals facilitate the technical malleability of the internet, ensuring its continued design and application over time according to the values informing its use by people. Feenberg (2017) argues that the internet is an unfinished technology because the social goals comprising its use have not yet been settled. He identifies two models of internet use derived from competing social goals: consumption and community. Consumption reflects the commercial co-option of the internet by companies and/or individuals seeking to sell material goods, products, services or digital content. Such co-option is made possible because in its decentralised form the internet enables ‘a fundamental expansion of individual consumer access’ (Laing et al., 2009: 228) to anything an individual, located anywhere, at any time, may wish to purchase. According to the consumption model, the primary purpose of the internet is the large-scale realisation of commercial interests characterised by individual consumer choice.

In contrast, the community model is based on using the internet for ground-up advocacy and participation in public life. The same decentralisation that makes consumption via the internet possible also enables people to connect with like-minded others, in the pursuit of their needs – in whatever form these may take, such as health, politics, recreation, education or even parenting. The explosion of social media amongst parents sharing ideas, tips and online resources for home-educating young children during COVID-19 is a case in point. Here, the internet enables collective action, helping to connect people from diverse situations in the achievement of their shared needs (Theocharis et al., 2017).

According to Feenberg (2017) the ‘coexistence of the community model with the consumption model creates a hybrid system (e.g. internet) of uncertain character and future’ (p. 107). While the ideological value associated with both consumption (e.g. market freedom) and community (e.g. freedom of connection) are well-recognised, the contest between them means the ‘internet is thus a terrain of struggle rather than a definite “thing” with a singular essence’ (Feenberg, 2017: 101). Young children and their adults typically engage with both models of the internet interchangeably, sometimes using the internet to consume products and services, and at other times using the network to communicate with others and/or sharing details about local events or more global trends. For example, the physically-distant and yet collaborative activity inspired by #goingonabearhunt during COVID-19. Such interchangeability means that the specific internet with which young children, their families and educators engage is beyond categorical definition. Livingstone (2005: 3) identified this problem over a decade ago:

The singularity of ‘the internet’ is particularly problematic, for it refers to a diverse collection of technologies, forms and services bundled together (notably, the world wide web, email, multi-player gaming, ecommerce, newsgroups, peer-to-peer file-sharing, etc.). Yet ‘it’ (i.e. ‘the internet’) is often treated, misleadingly, as unitary in academic, public and policy discourses.

Moving from a singular to diverse perspective of the internet helps to account for the competing models of the internet identified by Feenberg (2017). This movement is an important first step in researching cyber-safety in the early years beyond a focus on risk mitigation strategies contingent on the range of content, conduct and contact issues faced by young children online. While these risks remain paramount, an expanded research agenda is required because the notion of risk itself derives from a unitary concept of the internet. This position is unsustainable over the coming decades with predicted advances in digital networking already encompassing augmented reality, automation, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, 3D-internet and facial recognition; none of which will be responsive to risk mitigation alone. This being the case, how else might the internet be conceived for an informed cyber-safety research agenda in the early years? The field of internet studies is now drawn upon to address this question.

Internet studies

Internet studies is a catch-all field of study encompassing multiple disciplines for the conduct of research about the internet (Silver, 2004). Disciplines of note within the field include political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, social psychology, information sciences, engineering and computing sciences (Dutton, 2013). A feature of internet studies is the shared recognition held amongst these disciplines that no one internet exists per se. Accordingly, the field commits to using diverse epistemologies and methodologies in research of any type (e.g. telehealth, teen social media use, online shopping) concerning the internet. In the absence of a centralised definition of the internet, internet studies orientates towards three related objects of study as a framework for the conduct of internet-based research. These objects are: technologies, context and policy.

Technologies

Technologies considers the design of digital artefacts in human-to-human and object-to-human communication (Tsattou, 2014). From a cyber-safety perspective, technologies as an object of study directs attention towards how networked technologies are designed to ensure online safety for young children as active users of the internet. This is an important consideration because the internet was never intended to be used by young children. Thus, it has an historically adult-centric design that remains today even though even though children are amongst the most rapidly growing group of internet users in the world (Livingstone et al., 2016). Such adult-centricity remains evident in recent internet innovations, such as the Social Internet of Things and even the Internet of Toys. For the Social Internet of Things, the capacity to network objects for the exchange of digital data (see Atzori et al., 2012) tends to override the requirement for inbuilt design decisions orientated towards ensuring the protection of children’s data. This problem is also evident in the Internet of Toys (nominally intended for children) – an emerging industry characterised by design oversights in which children’s data is readily accessible to third parties; or via which unknown people may make direct contact with children with the intention of grooming them for sexualised activity (McReynolds et al., 2017). As an object of study, technologies are necessary in a cyber-safety research agenda in the early years, considering the design of networked devices and objects from an historical perspective, and in the application of the internet in the daily lives of young children today.

Context

Context considers the role of the internet in people’s lives (Dutton, 2013). Significant research attention has been directed towards understanding how children, families and educators use the internet and for what purposes. For example, communicating with friends and family, information searching, digital content consumption, game play, documenting children’s learning and sharenting via social media (Lindgren, 2012; Marasli et al., 2016; Spink et al., 2010). While this body of work effectively describes internet use in the early years, the more compelling task of interpreting the fluctuating centrality of the internet in the lives of children and their adults, as a means of participating in digital society with consequent implications for their cyber-safety has not yet been established. For example, Australian research shows that 50% of children aged 5 years and under use the internet at home without adult supervision (National Child Health Poll, 2017). However, research also shows that not all early childhood educators consider technologies pedagogically appropriate for young learners (Zabatiero et al., 2018). Where these beliefs are held, educators are unlikely to provide children with access to networked technologies in the educational setting. This lack of provision creates a disjunction between home and centre use, further compounding the capacity of educators to recognise young children as independent users of the internet requiring access to cyber-safety education. As this disjunction occurs, little knowledge is generated about how and why to teach young children about cyber-safety, incurring a cyclical pattern of justified non-technology provision, and consequent lack of cyber-safety education in the early years.

Recently, COVID-19 challenged the idea that technologies are inappropriate for young children. Enforced periods of social shutdown witnessed families and educators turning to the internet for advice, communication and support about how best to care for and educate young children at home. Networked technologies, rather than a stable state of play in the lives of young children open to rejection by educators suddenly became an important source of social interaction and learning (Muñoz et al., 2020). Thus, the centrality of the internet in the lives of young children and their adults necessitates knowledge about how best to keep young children safe online. Yet, in the immediacy of COVID-19 such knowledge remained limited, while children themselves had little in the way of cyber-safety education prior to COVID-19 to keep themselves safe during enforced home learning. Context is necessary in a research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years because it encompasses the social requirement for online safety above and beyond beliefs that educators may hold about the pedagogical appropriateness (or otherwise) of using networked technologies with young children in early childhood settings.

Policy

Policy focuses on internet governance, including internet protocols (e.g. Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and processes (Dutton, 2013). Protocols enable the digital exchange of data, while processes seek to manage the benefits and risks of internet use by people. Policy relative to cyber-safety centres primarily on processes in the form of legislation, regulations, recommendations and/or government-supported practices. The most significant of these is the USA Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) established in 1998 (GovTrack.us., 2020). COPPA was brought into law to protect the online privacy and/or collection of personal data about children using the internet. This included mitigation against the targeted use of child data advertising directly to children. The most compelling impact of COPPA in terms of cyber-safety is that a child is defined as a person aged 13-years and under. Parental consent must be obtained from internet services wishing to interact with children below this age. This definition resulted in 13-years becoming the default ‘age of consent’ for any individual holding a social media account. In 2019, Google and YouTube were fined $170 million for breaching COPPA by using cookies to direct targeted advertising to children without parental consent. YouTube thus introduced new rules for channels owners, requiring content to be identified as intended for children, with consequent restrictions limiting personalised advertising, comments, monetisation features, live chat, playlists and notifications to young users.

Elsewhere, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, 2018) details provisions that must be met in the collection of personal data by people using the internet. This includes children under 13-years of age, necessitating parent/guardian consent for the collection of personal information, and the right to erasure, with any images and/or other data of children collected during their childhood years open to later removal upon their request. In Australia, the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015 (amended, 2017) witnessed the establishment of the Office of eSafety Commissioner (2020b) with Statutory authority for dealing with both internet service providers and end-users in cyber-bullying and non-consensual sharing of intimate images. Most recently, the Office of eSafety Commissioner (2020b) initiated an Early Years Online Safety Program for children aged birth to 5 years. This initiative followed the work of NetSafe in Aotearoa New Zealand, a nationally recognised not-for-profit provider of cyber-safety education developing a program specifically for the early years. The NetSafe program focussed on the development of cyber-safety policies within early years services, promoted the use of filters and advised educators against using home-computer systems for completing service-based work, such as digitally documenting children’s learning (Beach, 2010).

Beyond legislation, calls are now being made with increasing urgency for cyber-safety education to be conducted with young children in their early education settings (see Children’s Commissioner for England, 2017; Office of eSafety Commissioner, 2020a; Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017; United Nations Committee on the Rights of Children, 2019). Such education includes helping children to understand the nature of digital networking as a basis for engaging with cyber-safety strategies, such as not sharing private information, avoiding contact with unknown people online, and co-viewing digital content with adults. However, while these suggestions are now in place, they are not yet articulated within educational policy and/or early years curriculum frameworks such that cyber-safety education is neither mandated, nor enabled in practice. Policy is therefore a critical consideration in a research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years, particularly in terms of integrating legislation governing internet activities by providers and consumers of internet services with that associated with the provision of online safety for young children within the early years curriculum.

Critical constructivism and internet studies: A research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years

This paper proposes the integration of critical constructivism with internet studies for a research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years. This integration occurs whereby the ‘hybrid system’ (Feenberg 2017: 107) characterising the internet from a critical constructivist perspective (including both the consumption and communication models) are investigated drawing upon a multidisciplinary perspective as per internet studies to generate new knowledge about technologies, context and policy as either separate and/or related objects of study pertaining to the use of networked technologies by young children, their families and educators in digital society (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Integration of critical constructivism and internet studies for researching networked technologies by young children, their families and educators in digital society.

While internet studies draws upon a diverse body of disciplines, early childhood education has not yet featured as a sub-set discipline contributing specifically to these three objects of study. Given early childhood education is a long-standing field of practice, with specific research expertise in curriculum, pedagogy, child-adult relationships, policy design and digital play, it is appropriate that the field itself also be drawn upon to inform research about cyber-safety in the early years. Early childhood education from this perspective has the potential to work productively with diverse disciplines. For example, engineering informing the safe design of networked technologies for young children; cultural studies and/or social psychology to better understand the unique social role of the internet in the lives of young children and their adults; and political science, and/or sociology in the specific design of international, national and local level policy initiatives directed towards increased alignment of internet management with cyber-safety in early childhood curricula. Thus, this paper also proposes the inclusion of early childhood education as a specific field of value within that of internet studies (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Early childhood education as a discipline of value within the field of internet studies.

The integration of critical constructivism and internet studies (including early childhood education) enables specific questions regarding technologies, context and/or policy to be identified. These questions comprise the beginnings of a research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years, for example:

Technologies

How is end-user safety in terms of privacy/data protection embedded in the design and production of networked technologies intended for use by young children, and/or for use in shared family-situations, such as voice-activated devices?

How does the adult-centric history of the internet influence or otherwise define accepted conventions and protocols concerning innovation in internet-enabled technologies and objects?

Are standard protocols in the design and production of internet-enabled technologies and objects used by children, families and educators required to advance a more child-friendly internet? And to what extent would these protocols serve to shape internet innovation in favour of a consumption and/or community model of internet use?

Context

How do young children, their families and educators interpret the role, value and potential risks associated with internet use in their daily lives; prior to, during and post COVID-19?

What are the social and technical concepts of the internet held by young children and their adults; and how do these concepts operate as a precursor for agentic action concerning their own online safety?

To what extent do educators’ beliefs about young children and technologies predicate the capacity of the sector to generate newly required knowledge about cyber-safety for young children in a manner responsive to socially incurred change (e.g. COVID-19)?

Policy

Which disciplines are currently drawn upon to inform the design and implementation of processes (e.g. legislation, regulations, recommendations and/or government-supported practices) regarding internet usage in the best interests of young children, their families and educators?

How can cyber-safety education be represented in early childhood curriculum frameworks for the realisation of new recommendations concerning its provision in early childhood education settings?

What is the likely downward impact on legislated cyber-safety requirements for young children internationally, nationally and locally in terms of the in-situ provision and enactment of online safety education, practices and centre-level policy in early childhood education settings?

Given these proposed questions spring from a multidisciplinary perspective they assume collaboration amongst multiple stakeholders in the early years, from government, non-government organisations, the early years sector; and amongst young children, their families and educators themselves. However, such an approach is necessary if the internet is to be defined in terms of a competing terrain rather than unitary technology. As a unitary technology, framing cyber-safety in the early years is possible by responding to conduct, content and contact risks. However, while these risks will always be significant, the internet in 21st century life is no longer unitary in its provision and usage; incurring multiple values, points of accessibility and significance in the lives of children, their families and educators before, during, and likely post COVID-19. Thus, a research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years comprising multiple questions and stakeholder perspectives is necessary to facilitate the safe and productive engagement of young children and their adults with the internet, now and into the future.

Conclusion

This paper proposes a research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years predicated on a critical constructivist reading of the internet and directed towards three consequent objects of study from within the field of internet studies, including: technologies, context and policy. Such a framework has not previously been developed to guide research in this area, with cyber-safety in the early years little developed as an area of research; and of what is available typically focussing on risk mitigation in practice. The internet is now broadly centralised in social activity, even during periods of global change as marked by increased internet usage amongst young children and their adults during COVID-19. A research agenda for cyber-safety in the early years is therefore timely; moving beyond concepts of risks, towards an understanding of the human values invested in the design and use of the internet by people over time, including for the very youngest of users.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Statement on ethics

This paper did not require ethical approval from a Human Research Ethics Committee.

ORCID iD

Susan Edwards

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