Update Jan 2026: This article is 5 years old as I am publishing it, and since it was written I feel I have come a long way in my understanding of the topic. It is, however, an important precursor to my doctoral thesis, the North East Environments of Childhood Project, and as such I think it is worth preserving.
We could never have loved the earth so well,
if we had had no childhood in it.
– George Eliot, ‘The Mill on the Floss’.
INTRODUCTION
Play Across Time
Across cultures and continents our archaeological records teach us of children at play. In 2017 in southern Siberia archaeologists uncovered a rare collection of dolls and figurines dated to c. 2,500BCE, buried in graves alongside their childhood owners. In 1,000BCE, Ancient Egyptian children played with spinning tops, bouncy balls, and dice. In 200CE, Mesoamerican children played with wheeled toys, especially noteworthy as the wheel was only ever designed for the purposes of play in in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies, never transport. Alongside and earlier than any of these, natural playthings such as sticks, stones, streams, and bones are tools of play with which almost any child in history will be familiar, and indeed other creatures such as dolphins and chimpanzees have also been observed to toy with such objects. In your own youth you will undoubtedly have played with objects like these, and took part in other ancient pastimes such as hide and seek, tag, hopscotch, and leapfrog, games passed down the centuries by childhood oral traditions. In the 21st century, however, there is growing debate and concern surrounding the survivability of these millennia-old entertainments, the very concept of childhood itself has been said to be under threat. Calls arise for a ‘much needed child-saving movement’, but from where have they sprung? What threatens these time-honoured traditions?
‘kids used to play all day outside, ride bicycles, play sports, and build forts’, so affirms the opening lines of Digital Childhood: The Impact of Using Digital Technology on Children’s Health, a 2019 report written for the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research & Allied Science (IJPRAS). The idea of what kids ‘used’ to do is operative in this context, a framing that places all young people under the roof of the same broad church. Another article for an educational advice group, Consequences of the New Digital Childhood, reads: ‘Think back on your childhood, and you probably remember hours spent in active, imaginative, and outdoor play. It’s likely that you rough-housed with friends or neighbours, engaged with nature, and built entire worlds from sheer imagination’. Sentiments such as these are frequently expressed in both contemporary academic and journalistic writing, often accompanied with an argument that “kids these days”, as Pamela Riney-Kehrberg’s The Nature of Childhood asserts, waste their energy ‘watching television, or looking at their computers, cell phones and video games’. ‘Whatever happened to ‘go outside and play’?’, decries a 2017 CNN article. In reading contemporary writing on children and their environments there is one inescapable and united conclusion, that today’s young spend too much time in the digital world and too little time outdoors engaging with nature and physical play. However, division quickly surfaces when it comes to questions about the origins of this situation, and how it is best addressed.
Applying predominantly to what can loosely be called “western childhoods” several academics have sought to put a name to this phenomenon. Ian Rotherham called it ‘Cultural Severance’, the sectioning of an essential natural element of humanity, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler coined ‘Plant Blindness’, however it has been Richard Louv’s ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ (NDD) that has proved the commonly adopted term. Though not recognised as an official psychological ‘disorder’, NDD has gained traction with a wide variety of UK groups such as The National Trust and The Council For Learning Outside the Classroom as well as being a foundational principle behind The Children and Nature Network. During the 2010s it was also picked up by the majority of the country’s major news distributors from across the political spectrum including the BBC, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and The Sunday Times. NDD has been associated with increases in ‘obesity, diabetes, autism, coordination disorder, developmental abnormalities, speech, learning difficulties, sensory disorder, anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders’ as well as ‘risky sexual behaviours, drug use, poor academic performance, and aggression’. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows takes an even more serious view, arguing that prolonged time spent in the digital world, particularly for youthful minds, is degrading the very quality of human thought itself. As Carr puts it: ‘What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization… we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting’. The issue unsurprisingly plays into common parental fears over safety, health, and freedom and its resolution is regarded by many not only as a practical but moral imperative; the solution of course being, as Louv defined it, for children to be ‘reunited with the rest of nature’.
Figure 1. A satirical cartoon illustrating parental fears over NDD.
In Britain, as digital technologies continue to pervade aspects of childhood from the classroom to the living room, so too has scepticism and criticism arisen of the ways in which these new virtual environments are influencing the culture and quality of youth. Across the press, academia, and popular non-fiction writing there is a growing literature, some of it more declarative than others, that warns of digital dangers, particularly for the ‘malleable’ minds of children. From historical, educational, biological, psychological, geographical, and anthropological perspectives such works are making parents and educators more aware than they have ever been of the relationship between environmental factors and the happiness and healthiness of their children. However, popular conceptions of where digital cultures of childhood originated, what they constitute of as virtual environments, and how they have evolved over time, are generally dualistic notions that portray childhood as a “now versus then” phenomenon. Far too often a conclusion is reached that only reflects one aspect of the reality behind the development of late-20th and early-21st century childhoods in Britain in the search for something to blame as the cause of NDD, cultural severance, plant blindness, or whichever term is favoured for the separation of Britain’s children from its landscapes.
Technology itself is often assigned the blame for cajoling children away from nature, designed to be addictive and to constantly require attention;the finger is also pointed at unnecessarily protective parents who confine their children indoors, and at children themselves who choose the virtual over the physical. On the opposite end of the scale a form of technocratic utopianism, the ‘silicon valley way’, is a less common but still influentially adopted stance that hails a digital panacea for childhood’s ills; this approach conceptualises of a problem like NDD as ‘merely a physical Earth problem, and not an ethical one’. Either way, both perspectives take the view that modern childhood needs a “fix”. As David Buckingham observed in 2015, the discussion has become ‘marked by a kind of schizophrenia that often accompanies the advent of new cultural forms. If we look back to the early days of the cinema, or indeed to the invention of the printing press, it is possible to identify a similar mixture of hopes and fears’. Indeed looking much further back, as Carr notes, Socrates voiced fears that reliance on the written word as a substitute for personal memory would reduce the ability of the human mind. Anti-digital rhetoric often leans toward the nostalgic and romantic, with quotes such as Roald Dahl’s plea from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory still adorning many a café-bookshop wall:
‘So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.’
Discussions and analysis of the ways in which the technological advances of the modern era have impacted children in Britain are certainly valuable, but the present discourse in large part lacks a nuance founded on a complex understanding of the multiplicity of childhoods, children as ‘dynamically configured, diverse and entangled assemblages of natural, cultural and technological elements’.28 The digital world does not stand apart from factors of gender, race, class, region, and ability; when we speak of what children “used” to do, should we not be asking which children? Furthermore, virtual environments themselves must be understood in multiplicity and analysed for their specific qualities, not only as general “devices” and “screens” so often explored only in concept, merely antitheses to popular conceptions of what constituted pre-digital childhoods.
Methodology and Historiography
The focus of this study is consequently upon the transitionary period during which digital technologies became adopted and then prevalent facets of childhood in Britain, beginning its analysis in 1977CE, with the widespread availability of personal computers, and finishing in 2010CE, with the introduction of the Digital Economy Act. The primary route of analysis will be through documents produced throughout this period from academic and government sources that undertook to study and report upon childhood and the digital environment. From an environmental and child-focussed perspective these sources will be used to explore the changing face of childhoods during this period as well as to study how those changes were implemented and interpreted by wider British society in a rapidly evolving environment. Part 1 will contextualise the discussion and explain the already contentious debates that were surrounding the nature of children’s play and education before the introduction of technological factors. Part 2 will continue chronologically, assessing the environments surrounding British childhoods in the late 20th and early 21st centuries that pushed them towards digitisation, and how those technologies both facilitated and impeded that transition. Finally, this study will conclude that the stereotype of children choosing to spend their time indoors, inveigled by flashing screens, does not take into account wider structural and societal changes taking place in Britain at the time and characterises a very diverse category of people as a monolith. Even more so than their elders, a child’s individual life is subject to a set of intricate, interconnected systems of economy, culture, and environment over which they have little influence. Particular attention will be paid therefore to conceptualising the digital development of childhoods as a continuum in which there are no straightforward states of “before” and “after”.
This study provides an alternative narrative to many of the existing histories of childhood and the digital environment during this period which predominantly fall into two categories, histories of childhood than do not consider the digital, and digital histories that do not consider children. Nerds 2.0.1, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, On the Way to the Web, and Spam are all examples of prominent cyber histories in which childhood presence and influence is affectively considered naught, their furthest mention in relation to the development of technologies that can help children with disabilities or illness. That is not to say that these are not good publications which competently examine many aspects of digital history, and all were certainly useful in the writing of this study, but it must also be said that they neglect to consider children as the prominent users of new technologies which they are.
From within the existing historiography on the history of childhood there have been a number of works that have examined children’s lives during this period such as Children and Their Urban Environment: Changing Worlds, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, and Children in the Anthropocene. These texts offer some excellent insights into many of the contemporary factors behind the movement of children indoors and some of the consequences of that movement. Particularly beneficial for this study has been the multitude of research projects on youth undertaken throughout the period that they point to and evaluate, offering valuable insight into the changing nature and aims of these studies over time. However, a general omission in these texts is the digital space. And one dangerous pitfall that much of this writing falls into is the vagueness so often applied in arguments that evoke the “before times”, construed as periods of de facto childhood liberty, happiness, and quality without being critically engaged with. These declensionist narratives of degradation and corruption are particularly prevalent when authors in the existing historiography frame their assessments around experiences of their own childhoods and ‘the freedom we had as kids’. Louv’s Last Child in the Woods puts that ‘baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems… like a quaint artifact’. Analysis directs itself towards the processes of change with the implicit understanding that this change is moving away from something that was previously good and little attention is paid towards identifying children as a diverse group whose lives have differed greatly across this period based on factors such as class, gender, and region. Furthermore, this contrivance assumes a past intimacy with nature that runs counter to ‘a long history of environmental degradation and disconnectedness’ starting well before the childhood of anybody alive today.
The question must be asked: to what extent are our historical conceptions of childhood moulded by the experiences of middle-class academics whose criticisms of modern childhoods fall most pertinently on working class households who historically and contemporarily have had more obstacles between themselves and access to nature? Such a comment may appear wantonly critical but is only to ask us to deepen our conceptions of what digital childhoods can mean. Indeed, as Jennifer Ladino identifies, we cannot miss that the forms of eco-nostalgia presented in many texts are intentionally designed to be a ‘mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice’. The intersection between digital environments and digital environmentalism. Whilst it is undoubtable that concerns should be raised over the changing nature of youth in Britain since the emergence of digital childhoods, and indeed this study raises many, it is also important to recognise and challenge arguments that present common notions of a timeless “golden” period of early life which only in the 21st century has come under threat. This is a trend also common outside of academia, what Peter Kahn named ‘environmental generational amnesia’.
As William Neuman identified in 1991, research in this field must tread a fine line between a technologically determinist narratives that disregard social and cultural change and construct such ‘mythical objects of anxiety as the computer addict, the screen-zombie… the Nintendo-generation, the violent video fan, etc.’ and culturally determinist narratives that romantically assume, at least implicitly, that “our” children are too intelligent to be duped by the messaging of ‘consumer-culture capitalist economies’. A multiplicity of childhoods approach is a good method to avoid falling into either of these traps as it does not assume any individual outside force to be deterministic over a category of people’s lives. In future research however, it will be useful to employ new interdisciplinary methods that engage with the computational social sciences as well as explore emerging fields such as digital ethnography and other forms of digital social research. This will allow scholars to better interrogate relationships between children and the specificities of the programmed architectures of digital devices and environments.
Two foundational texts on which this study has been built and seeks to build on are Matthew Thomson’s Lost Freedomand Sian Edwards’ Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside, both of which are important historical studies of the relationship between child and environment. Susan Danby’s Digital Childhoods: Technologies and Children’s Everyday Lives and Sonia Livingstone’s Young People and New Media have also been instrumental texts from outside of the historical field in their examinations of cyberspace on its own terms and their attempts to look beyond, as Danby says, ‘simplistic descriptions of digital technology somehow having inherent ‘effects’ or ‘impacts’’. Affrica Taylor’s article “Reconceptualising the ‘nature’ of childhood” was also very helpful in warning against portraying an ‘essentialised’ view of children and environment that has been used in the past as a means to oppress or exclude certain children from a society by branding them as “natural” creatures, apart from the rest of humanity. Still however, these texts offer little consideration of digital factors as a part of the ecosystems of children’s environments. Not all digital histories can or should take child-focussed or environmental approaches, and not all histories of childhood environments must consider the digital, but the extent to which the history of childhood cyberspace has been overlooked in favour of physical space, to this day, is surprising.
As the history of the relationships between children, their environments, and the way the adult world has sought to shape them in Britain receives increasing attention as contemporary cultures struggle to come to terms with new digital normalities, ideas of a golden past are invoked frequently as models to which Britain should be returning. However, there are also strong arguments made to the contrary, as Lloyd DeMause provocatively wrote in 1974: ‘The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused’. Is a loss of nature and freedom in childhood a necessary cost of increased protection and quality of life? Contemporary debates surrounding these issues are not inventions of the modern world and indeed are surprisingly reflective of far more pedigreed discussions; their development is the most recent stage in a long historical tradition of interrogating the relationship between environment and childhood. It is crucial, and interesting, therefore that we appreciate the longer view of the pre-digital history of British childhoods as both comparison and context within which to assess the changes they would start to face in the late 20th century which so fundamentally shifted the environmental landscape.
Part 1
KIDS THOSE DAYS
The Longue Durée of Work and Play
The British and wider European tradition of play and education is commonly traced to Classical Greece which produced a number of foundational theories on the relationship between these two activities. Plato wrote extensively on the topic of childhood pursuits, both in regard to advising parents on practical advice for child rearing, and in pushing for legislative changes surrounding children’s games. Plato taught that child’s play could moulded and diverted into ‘productive channels’, where games and toys could be used to identify in which skills children were most apt and then to prepare them for an adult occupation that utilised those skills. A child who played with blocks, for example, would be encouraged to become a builder and another who played with dolls to become a teacher. Aristotle also believed that what a child did in play was important to their growth, and that a person would become lazy and unproductive if they did not have an active childhood. Indeed, he argued that children should receive no formal education until they were at least 5 years old, as inhibiting play during early years would be detrimental their development. Many Greek children’s games are still recognisable today such as Heads or Tails, Blind Man’s Buff, and Kiss in the Ring. Quintilian, a famed Roman educator, continued this legacy, insisting that it was essential for parents and teachers to observe pupils’ play in order to recognize individuality in their temperaments and intellects.
Study of medieval children has been characterised since 1962 by the French historian Philippe Ariès’ now infamous work Centuries of Childhood which studied paintings and diaries of the period across a span of 400 years. Controversially, Ariès concluded that during the medieval era in Europe the category of “child” did not exist as could be understood for periods prior and hence, youngsters being seen as ‘small-scale adults’. He argued that parents lost too many children to attach any form of unique significance to them and furthermore that they raised their children to believe that play led to idleness, truancy, and inattentiveness. However, several scholars have since criticised this approach, with the research of Nicholas Orme, Shulamith Shahar, and Sally Crawford rebuking the majority of Ariès’ arguments. Orme demonstrated evidence of adults providing tailored items of culture for their children such as toys, games, and books, also noting children’s tendency to rebel and spend time by themselves away from adult supervision creating their own games and cultures. Shahar pointed out that the medieval and renaissance periods equally enjoyed a proliferation of play with small objects such as marbles, balls, and dice and references to equipment to help with jumping, swinging, and balancing known as “merry totters” being not uncommon. Crawford, mirroring Plato, explained how girls and boys ‘extended their skills’ through play in relation to tasks they would later be required to perform when they were older; girls learning household tasks and boys the trades of their elders.
In the 16th century Martin Luther espoused extensively for the reformation of education as well as religion, describing schools as ‘a hell and purgatory… in which with much flogging, trembling, anguish, and wretchedness, they learn nothing’. He proposed a universal state school system that would be compulsory for every child but would also be part of a wider education structure that would also include time for work at home, learning trades, and, of course, play. A century later the Czech theologian John Amos Comenius built upon Luther’s work and proposed the idea of the educational ladder for both boys and girls, a staged set of schools to cater for children as they grew, beginning with a ‘mother school’ (or nursery) for young children and progressing all the way through to university. He also advocated for using outdoor play as a technique for fostering the healthy development of mind and body, saying that ‘it is necessary to put the body in motion and allow the mind to rest’. Comenius’ teachings were exemplary of a strange consistency across the history of childhood theory and philosophy throughout the European tradition where there has been a tension between intellectuals arguing for greater emphasis to be placed on outdoor activity and play against educational systems that leant toward more sedentary pursuits. It was with the enlightenment however, particularly in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, that many of the specific educational dichotomies that are characteristic of contemporary discussion over digital childhoods today came into being.
Figure 2. Ancient Greek statuette of girls playing knucklebones.
Enlightenment Thought
Rationalism and romanticism were two intellectual movements of the enlightenment that had a significant impact upon the development of approaches to children and environment. The rationalist perspective, characterised by the works of thinkers such as René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke, is still very much influential on the official structures and regulations of modern British childhood. This stance framed the natural world as a force of reason, in some ways the very foundation of order and reason. On this basis, rationalists understood nature as fundamentally logical, and as such could be understood and controlled with the application of appropriate reason. This same approach was adopted towards children who, as natural creatures, were seen to be intrinsically governable. John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is famous and exemplary in this regard as he describes the child as being ‘tabula rasa’, a “blank slate” which need only be impressed upon. Locke’s observations of children at play led him to the concept of ‘educative play’, using playtime as a space for semi-structured tuition. He described how, in his experience, the children of wealthy families were done great harm by being showered with toys and gifts which only taught them ‘pride, vanity, and covetousness’; they did not learn to value what they had. In Locke’s view a child was much like any other natural organism in that they had to be carefully managed otherwise they would become wild. With the correct instruction, however, they could be formed into an instrument of reason.
Where rationalists such as Locke sought to control a nature that was logical, romanticists sought to learn from a nature they saw as inscrutable. In large part the romantic phenomenon arose in response to the increasingly rationalist-informed industrialised landscapes of Europe that authors such as William Blake, Mary Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau found themselves surrounded by. Predominantly an artistic movement, romanticists forwarded emotional countercultural arguments in which children and the natural world were often construed as intertwined joint symbols of innocence and purity. Children were a part of the natural world in a way that adults were not and could not be. As Rousseau argued in On Education (1763), childhood should be defined by teaching that is ‘beyond our control’ and follows ‘the goal of nature’. Indeed, Rousseau saw no distinction between work and play for children. Games were the work of the young, and in them ‘the child brings everything: the cheerful interest, the charm of freedom, the bent of his mind, the extent of his knowledge’. He saw the work of rationalist tutors such as Locke as pedantic and damaging, filling children’s head with facts rather than skills.
This romanticist connection is well demonstrated in the lines William Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up”, published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807.Therein Wordsworth marvels at the beauty of a rainbow, considering how it takes him back to a state of child-like joy, before concluding with this reflection:
‘The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety’
Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Fröbel were heavily influenced by Rousseau’s writings and built much of his theoretical work into their practices. Like Rousseau, the core concept of their position was that the key to a good childhood education was in creating an environment, both physical and social, that fostered creativity and development. Pestalozzi also emphasized an aspect of Comenius’ teachings which said that true learning must take place through actions; that you ‘thought by thinking, not by appropriating the thoughts of others’. Fröbel, creator of the kindergarten, believed that educative programs should be moulded around the natural interests of the child and, once again, that constructive, enjoyable play was the best method by which to determine what an individual was intuitively inclined towards. He highlighted the keeping and cultivation of allotments and gardens as a particularly helpful pursuit, as these were spaces in which children could watch the fruits of their labour develop over time, and eventually harvest a reward that would be appropriate to the quality of their efforts. This idea that young children learn most effectively from being able to interact with and actively manipulate the materials of their environments was explored further in the 20th century with the works of Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget.
As with rationalism, romanticist ideas still inform greatly on contemporary British childhoods, although in a less structural format. Aside for children of kindergarten age where it can be reasonably argued that romanticism is a guiding structural principle, romantic notions of childhood exist outside of official practices and educative systems and more in the realm of popular conceptions and representations of childhood; in children’s books, television, and in the kinds of outdoor activities parents are encouraged to nurture their children with. However, whilst the two philosophies can appear at first blush to be opposed in a “nature versus nurture” form, they are ultimately two sides of the same coin. Both emerged during a period of European history where confidence in the traditional role of religion to act as a moral compass, spiritual guide, and force of reason, was being eroded. The natural world, and the child by association, was able to act as a unifying, present force that both movements drew upon as motivation and justification for their actions and beliefs. As Sara Maitland writes in Gossip from the Forest: ‘wilderness finds its complement and counterpart either in conceptions of childhood moral innocence or the child as tabula rasa’. Indeed, the founding theoretical framework at the heart of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century child saving movement was a fusion of both philosophies.
Play Manufactured
‘Life without play is a grinding, mechanical existence organized around doing the things necessary for survival’.
In 1859 the very first purpose-built playground in the world was opened in Manchester, a prototype for a model that would see mass adoption in Britain in years to come. The rise of the motor car in the early 20th century accelerated this trend as city streets shifted in purpose away from acting as areas of public domain and towards avenues of mass transport. The provision of specialist playground environments and equipment for children was an urban creation, a key point of principle being to move children out of the streets (and other public areas) and into specialised environments of safety. During this same period Britain saw a boom in the commercial mass production of toys, and the birth of the toy shop as a common feature on British high streets. Where previously crafted toys had been the provision of the upper and middle classes, over the century they steadily “democratised”, becoming available to working class households, but also becoming more standardised and controlled. In majority and increasingly toys of the democratised market were designed for yard and indoor play. This would lead to the phenomenon of toy “trends”, and an ever-expanding library of choice for children and parents. However, as Natalie Canning explains in Play and Practice in the Early Years Foundation Stage, and as this study will go on to further demonstrate, there are many developmental benefits that unpredictable, unstructured, informal environments of play can offer a child over domesticated ones.
This shift towards pushing British youth towards more “guarded” forms of play was campaigned for by a number of organisations, namely the various Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCCs) that were set up throughout the country’s cities during this period, the first being in Liverpool in 1883 before the national organisation coalesced in 1889. This was the birth of the child saving movement, primarily designed as Anthony Platt describes, as a romanticist conservativemovementthat cherished children but also controlled them. It was during this period that aspects of youth that had previously been dealt with informally became categorised and increasingly thought of as distinct identifiable phenomena; phenomena that could be addressed, controlled, and even eliminated. To name something is to ascribe it identifiable characteristics and members of the child saving movement were, in a sense, in the business of “inventing” new categories of youth behaviour, particularly misbehaviour, as exemplified with the creation of the juvenile court system during this time.
Figure 3. Print of an early 20thcentury toy shop.
This increased attention paid to children and childhood came with substantial benefits for many young people who previously had been overlooked by powers of authority. Those neglected, bullied, and beaten, those with dependencies, and those considered “delinquent” were now more likely to receive official support. In America, where the child saving movement was developing roughly in parallel with Britain, Baronet Charles Chute called the juvenile court system ‘one of the greatest advances in child welfare that has ever occurred’. At the same time however, the same system necessarily resulted in expanded restrictions surrounding where all children were allowed or supposed to go and what they should do as safety became a mainstream political concern. Exemplary of this new attitude sweeping Europe and North America was a precedent-setting 1915 legal case in Tacoma City, Washington where the parents of a boy who was injured falling from a swing successfully sued the school board for financial compensation. Following that lawsuit, playgrounds across Washington state and indeed America were taken down in fear of prosecution.
After the first world war there was a brief flourishing of progressivist, even utopian, writing that argued for increased freedoms for children, particularly in Britain; the collective trauma of that conflict bolstered new approaches to childhood, alongside the changing court system and a falling birth rate. However, after the second world war utopian freedom-oriented thought reverted to a ‘child-centred’ pedagogy which placed more emphasis on protecting children, creating purpose-built environments for them separate from the adult world. In A Progressive Education? Laura Tidsall sums up the logic of child-centred education and parenting as seeing children as ‘fundamentally separate from adults, distinguished by their developmental immaturity’. Tidsall argues that this pedagogy took a half-hold over Britain and that it still exists today in tension with movements that want to do away with specially manufactured environments and supervision in favour of more informal methods of childhood management. When technology entered the scene it was not doing so to a previously stable understanding of childhood; the social upheavals of the 20th century had already created a volatile environment wherein the older generation was bringing up the younger in a significantly different world to the one they themselves had been raised.
Part 2
KIDS THESE DAYS
‘This is an era when ultrasound scans are routinely shared on social media by expectant parents… Thus, the cliché of millennial children being ‘born digital’ might perhaps be updated to ‘preborn digital’’.
The Modern Child
After 1977, as home computers, games consoles, and later mobile phones in the 1990s became available, British children were among their most early adopters. In Young People and New Media Sonia Livingstone forwards that these children were ‘a distinctive and significant cultural grouping’ which pioneered the use of new technologies, due to existing in a stage of life characterised by learning and experimentation. ‘Cyber playgrounds’ were an environment of play unlike any that had come before them. However, whilst “children” may have been prominent adopters of new technologies in 20th century Britain, that conclusion does not satisfy the need to consider a multiplicity of childhoods. Multiple studies have demonstrated that ‘boys, older children and middle class children all benefited from more and better quality access’ to digital devices and then later the internet than girls, working class, and younger children. Helsper and Livingstone describe this in terms of ‘digital opportunity’, whilst a child may have access to a computer, they may also have poor quality hardware, connection, or be ill equipped with the knowledge and skills required to fully utilise the tool. The largest determining factor as to whether someone is an active web user has been found to be confidence, not age. In Olin-Scheller and Roos’ 2015 study they found that rural Swedish children only peripherally engaged with digital activities at both school and home, problematising the view that young people were ever a ‘homogeneous group of digital natives’. Indeed, today’s children generally, even those of privileged backgrounds, have been found to spend the vast majority of their time online on only a few websites, their lack of “travel” mirroring those with low opportunity in the physical world.
Existing research such as that of Kidron and Rudkin has thus shown that young people, being ‘firmly on the lowest rung of the digital opportunity ladder’, are advocates for more management and control of digital environments. The authors of a 2017 report, The Internet on Our Own Terms, also found that British children wanted more regulation of online content and more control they could exert themselves over what they encountered online. In some respects these reports fly in the face of popular conceptions of children as natural-born inhabitants of the digital wilderness. To be clear however, these reports did not conclude children to favour restriction to freedom, but rather a greater balance between the two. Childhood is a process of development, a key element of which is moving from a state of high dependency during your first 5 years of life, through a state of semi-independence and self-care from 6 to 11, and towards increasing autonomy and growing reliance on peers over carers from 12 to 18. Therefore, children prefer an environment that can evolve with them, and be flexible in terms of the degrees of independence it allows.
The 1970s and 1980s
It is well known that play is among the most fundamental behaviours human beings engage in, and indeed is a signifier of intelligence in multiple species. Important to play itself is the environment it takes place in, as different environments allow for different kinds of play, and furthermore different people experience those spaces in different ways. Digital environments such as computers and games consoles, for example, can allow for a great deal of intellectual and social play, but evidently less physical sporting play. Since the late 1970s a loss of physical play for children was an area of keen interest to educators, commentators, and academics who feared a loss of tactility and healthy activity in play alongside a sense of a ‘centuries-old freedom’ being eroded. Indeed, these fears were not unfounded, a National Trust survey in 2016 found that today’s children spend half as much time outdoors as their parents did in 1970s and 1980s. A lack of outdoor play has been linked to a number of physical and emotional illnesses, depression, low educational achievement, and social abnormalities, so establishing the role of digital childhoods within this trend is important.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s home-computing became accessible to an increasingly expanding audience with the release of models such as the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, and Commodore 64. During this period however, whilst research into environments of childhood was prevalent, little was made of the role that digital technologies might be playing. Instead, the dominant theme of the literature was the urban child, and the ways in which the modern world restricted childhood freedoms more structurally, in both the sense of physical and social structures. Studies increasingly focussed on the positive effects of “getting out into nature” for city kids, with a particular interest in those living with poverty or learning disabilities. A 1973 report for the Department of Environment found that 75% of children, when asked to describe their favourite places, talked about spaces where they could play outdoors. However Peter Townsend’s Poverty In the United Kingdom (1979) found that working class children were four times less likely to have access to an outdoor space of size or quality enough sit outside in than middle class children. Rachel Kaplan’s Patterns of Environmental Preference (1977) focussed on longitudinal measures and found that her suburban-child participants reported beneficial outcomes up to several years after being sent on an extended nature-camp expedition. Similarly Behar and Stevens’ Wilderness Camping (1978) placed city children on a ‘residential treatment programme’ centred around outdoor activities, and found that the majority of their subjects demonstrated ‘improved interpersonal skills and school performance’ after the activity. Both of these reports chose children with learning disabilities and conditions such as ADD (today called ADHD) to study.
Figure 4. A Prize Gold-Plated BBC Micro for the accompanying magazine, 1985.
Kevin Lynch’s Growing up in cities (1977), funded by UNESCO, was also concerned with rising urbanism around the world, particularly the ways cities were designed to cater increasingly for adults in cars rather than children on foot. This affected all children but was acutely felt by girls who, being seen as more vulnerable to such dangers, were more likely to be restricted from street activity. Howard Gadlin’s Child Discipline and the Pursuit of Self (1978) connected urban environments to a new ‘modern ideology… in which the goal of individual self-realisation overshadows community solidarity and stability’. Gadlin argued that the enclosed environments of the city both mirrored and encouraged enclosed internal cultures that were based on a desire to ‘control the personality of children’. Colin Ward’s The Child in the City (1978) was a popular text of the period that similarly challenged the adult centric-ness of the city environment, arguing for ‘a city where children live in the same world as I do’. Ward highlighted “micro-places” such as footpaths, greens, and kerbsides that were important spaces of play and refuge for children. Matthews and Limb’s later study Defining an agenda for the geography of children (1999) also found that small informal spaces which could be manipulated by children were the most valued; these included trees, ponds, dens, lanes, and climbing and hiding spaces generally.
The Child in the City, alongside texts like Urie Bronfenbrenner’s The Ecology of Human Development (1979) attempted to adopt an ‘ecologically valid psychology of development’, looking to study children in their “natural” environments as a direct response to the perception that children were losing them. During this period it is certainly true that city planners held simplistic notions of children characterized by a concept of a “universal child” which of course excluded lower-income, non-white, and female childhoods that typically had less access to the cars and technologies that facilitated their concepts of late 20th century life. The overwhelming academic cause of the period was an attempt to understand how cities could be designed differently to better accommodate young people, however this too skewed towards the types of childhoods that the academics writing the studies had had.
One contrary voice of the period however was Alasdair Roberts, whose Out to Play: The Middle Years of Childhood (1980) argued that childhood games and play were just as lively as they had ever been in Britain. He popularised the idea of the “middle childhood”, from ages 8 to 13, as a time he had observed during the 1970s as one ‘of secret societies and clubs with many rules… the age of collecting (sea-shells, football cards, stamps), of jokes and riddles and odd customs’. Roberts’ research was specifically focussed upon Aberdeen however, so his conclusions drawn across the whole country stretch thin, but his work is a strong piece of evidence to support regional differences in childhood trends. In provincial cities such as Aberdeen, it is logical that urbanism was less pronounced. Digital environments were thus not considered drivers of the “decline” of childhood during this period that so many publications lamented, instead the city and adjacent factors such as cars and insularism were singled out. Cars in particular were a force that enhanced social polarization, as those children who did not have access to a car or a parent available to drive them had less access to activities and nature. Busy roads and pollution also tended to centre around poorer areas, reducing independent mobility. As can be seen in Newson and Newson’s Seven Years Old in the Home Environment (1976) however, whilst the language of the time always discussed a loss of “childhood” play, in majority the play that was under threat was boys’ play, as girls were already more restricted to indoor activities by the expectations of parents and society at large.
During the 1980sthe field of research began to widen to include children more generally, as supposed to just those living in poverty or with learning disabilities, and indeed adults were increasingly included in studies looking at the negative impacts of urban environments. Gary Evans’ Environmental Stress (1982) pulled together much of the disparate research of the 1970s into one volume that attempted to systematically explain the impacts of ‘noise, heat, air pollution, crowding, and architectural dysfunction’ on city dwellers generally. Similar studies were those such as Altman and Wohlwill’s Behaviour and the Natural Environment (1983)and Roger Ulrich’s Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment (1983). Research projects into the positive impacts of nature on children continued with broader bases of participants, like Kaplan and Talbot’s Psychological benefits of a wilderness experience (1983) that found time in “wilderness” to give children ‘self-confidence and an improved sense of self-identity’. The founding of the Children, Youth and Environments academic journal in 1984 was proof that research interest in this field had become substantial, however one of the central concerns that had given rise this interest was proving to be only a concern. Robin Moore’s Childhood’s domain (1986) reported that 96% of urban children (aged 9 to 12) told researchers that outdoor places were their favourite places, children were not abandoning the outdoors. Moore coined the term ‘terra ludens’, the idea of a child’s personal play spaces being a crucial developmental support mechanism that gave them an ‘intuitive sense of how the world is by playing with it’. This was a recognition that environments are the necessary nexus where concepts of place and society converge in a child’s life.
Whilst research proved over and over again the benefits of outdoor natural activity for young people and adults, (see: Mary Ann Kirkby’s Nature as refuge in children’s environment, Rachel Kaplan’s The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective) and that urban children, particularly the working class had diminishing access to it, there was no indication that children were “going off” the outdoors, even though this was a fear that prompted much of the research to begin with. What the concerned academics of the 1970s and 1980s revealed and detailed were the forces of the period that were pushing children towards the indoors and digital environments such as newly released games consoles like the NES and Atari 7800. The losses of childhood freedoms in the real world left a slack that digital freedoms could pick up.
The 1990s
The theme of “children and the city” continued in the 1990s literature, this time in extensive monographs that utilised all the research of the previous two decades. This included Boyden and Holden’s Children of the Cities, Lave and Wenger’s Communities of Practice, and Sheridan Bartlett et al.’s Cities for Children. This was now well understood and accepted theory, but new areas of academic interest were arising, most significantly around the role of digital devices in children’s lives, the fragmentation of traditional family and community structures, and the idea of a person’s “independent mobility”. Mayer Hillman et al.’s One False Move (1990) found that whereas in the 1970s nearly all British 9-year olds were allowed to cross the street independently, now only half were.
Nikolas Rose’s Governing the soul (1990) suggested that childhood was undergoing a ‘process of bureaucratisation’, by this meaning that their participation in public spaces and activities was being constrained as focus increasingly rested on ideas of forwarding individual identity and agency in children. Ulrich Beck in Risk Society (1992) put that technology, by facilitating increasingly diverse individualised ways to consume media, was accelerating a ‘western trend towards individualisation’. Communal spaces such as parks, streets, and plazas which catered to a generalist user base were falling out of favour compared to individualised places such as private gardens and living rooms. Family formations had also been changing throughout this period as children increasingly moved away from their hometowns once reaching adulthood, isolating their own children from traditional familial networks such as cousins and grandparents. This left a time vacuum in children’s lives that technology was able to fill, home and mobile phones picking up the slack of a lost physical connection and enabling children to keep in contact with distant family and friends.
Thinking solidified around theories of the restorative qualities of natural environments to city dwellers, as both social science and medical studies continually affirmed the concept to be true. A 1997 study even found that a chronic lack of play and physical touch during childhood could result in developing a brain ‘20 percent to 30 percent smaller than normal’. Linked to this, academics, educators, and commentators turned their eye upon home technologies like televisions, mobile phones, games consoles, and personal computers as they continued to increase in prevalence, and upon the world wide web after it launched in Britain in 1991. Ray Lorenzo’s Too Little Time and Space for Childhood (1992) and Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1994) both identified the television in particular as part of a wider problem of “lost childhoods”, Postman writing that ‘children today are captive in their homes… They are institutionalized, over programmed, information stuffed, TV dependent, ‘zoned in’ and age segregated’. It was during this period of writing that attitudes started to shift on technology, which previously had not been considered an influential factor over children’s lives of learning and play, and was now starting to be seriously considered.
Not all interest in technology for children was pessimistic however, indeed there was a great deal of optimism during the 1990s over the role that technology would play in children’s lives in the present and close future. The creation of the internet in particular brought with it a wave of utopian ideals, one such being that online, all users were equal. The idea of a connected, intelligent, globalised world resurrected some of the visions of the inter-war years. Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word (1993) argued that digital technologies, with the particular aid of the internet, would enable a mass form of democratic literacy that would allow countries to ‘enfranchise the public imagination in genuinely new ways’. Likewise Jon Katz in Media Rants: Post Politics in the Digital Nation (1997) saw the digital as a means of children’s liberation from the increasingly restrictive adult physical world. The online space, seemingly an infinite space of possibility, tempted grand claims of hope or despair on the behalf of commentators of the time. However, because the internet was designed as a universal tool this necessarily meant that no special concessions were made to make it an accessible tool for certain groups. As Kidron and Rudkin point out in their Digital Childhood report, in the early days there were ‘not any design concessions for child users’, and that legacy continues today despite the fact that children make up over a third of the internet’s 3 billion users. A study in the Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood journal in 2003 concluded that children found the internet a more interesting and useful tool when presented with a ‘child-friendly interface’. At the time the New York Times disagreed with Jon Katz’s assessment of technology as “liberating”, writing that ‘The computer teaches a child to expect to be entertained; the lump of clay teaches the child to entertain herself’.
Figure 5. A child watches TV in a TV Shop, 1993.
Peter Buchner’s Growing up in Three European Regions (1995) explained how the rapid development of technologies had invalidated many parents’ frames of reference for childhood and as such they were forced to become ‘involved in a process of negotiation with their children over mutual identities, rights and responsibilities’. The 1950s model of the nuclear family was giving way at the end of the century to what Sonia Livingstone called the ‘democratic family’, wherein traditional parental and child roles of the authority and the subordinate were replaced by a mutual expectation of love, respect, and intimacy. This was also linked to ‘explicit discourses of identity construction’ in a neoliberal individualist society where children were encouraged to develop identities based on personal preferences over a sense of belonging to a particular community.
The long-term implications of technologically saturated childhoods were as of yet unknown, giving rise to many hopes and fears but also contributing to individualist perspectives on childhood that favoured the use of home technologies. Marco Hüttenmoser’s Children and their living surroundings (1995) showed the downward spiral a neighbourhood enters in to when children are restricted from outside play, deteriorating social cohesion and a ‘society capable of mutual help’, thus making it less likely for children to be allowed out. Rebekah Coley et al.’s findings in Where Does Community Grow? (1997)supported this thesis and furthered that natural spaces in an area which allowed child’s play were particularly beneficial to fostering communities. Representations of nature via technology were tackled by Edward Reed in Encountering the World (1996), finding that television and computer screens could contribute to learning processes, but were poor replacements for direct experiences that facilitated a ‘dynamic, dense, multisensory flow of diversely structured information’.
Linking broader social issues to discussions of childhood environments became increasingly popular in the late 1990s, particularly criticism of neoliberal ideology that had already come under significant attack from the field in the form of criticisms of “individualism”. The dawn of the personal computer ‘coincided with the widespread deregulation of the financial services industries in the United States and UK’ and the computing industry was moulded by that environmental context in its early years. Wheway and Millward’s Facilitating play on housing estates (1997) criticised the practice of putting children’s spaces such as playgrounds and skateparks “out of the way” behind buildings and on unwanted bits of land because it cut children off from the rest of society when ‘they want to be where it’s at, to see what is going on, to engage with the world beyond’. Children’s access to transport, social spaces, and shops was framed as key to maintaining them as integral participants of society. Access to natural spaces was again identified as beneficial in giving children an ‘increased sense of personal autonomy, improved self-concept, a greater capacity for taking action and being decisive’. Digital environments were thus eschewed as pale imitations of “the real thing” when it came to education and play, Lieberman and Hoody’s Closing the Achievement Gap advocating for outdoor classroom environments physically separated from digital devices as the best way to improve academic achievement. Likewise Sorrayut Ratanapojnard’s Community-Oriented Biodiversity Environmental Education (2001) also demonstrated that children learnt more in ‘hands-on’ outdoor classrooms than on a standard indoor curriculum.
Sandra Calvert’s Children’s Journeys through the Information Age (1999), encapsulated many of the arguments that would follow in the first decade of the 21st century, construingchildren as innocent participants in a process of their own decline, pushed towards embracing a technological ‘media environment’ that was damaging for their healthy development. Kirsten Drotner’s Dangerous Media? (1999) similarly described mass media as a ‘moral threat’ to young people. Somewhat ironically, the media of the period’s obsession with the dangers of street play encouraged parents to instruct their children to stay indoors, and thus set off a new paranoia about the media itself. Whilst technology like mobile phones meant some parents gave their children more time and space to play this did not necessarily translate into more “freedom” because, as Freeman and Tranter contend, whilst children may have been physically alone they were still within the parental ‘gaze’, always on call. This was a trend that would only continue in the following years as the advent of smart phones and GPS tracking allowed parents even greater remote control over their children, what Lenore Skenazy in Free Range Kids (2009) called ‘anxiety on speed dial’.
In the absence of time and space for “free play”, British children’s activities became increasingly structured, scheduled, and organized during the 1990s, centred around pre-booked sessions of sports, hobbies, and lessons. This came hand-in-hand with an increased commercialisation of play whereby opportunities for free play, in both senses of the word, were reduced and considered lower status than those with an associated cost. This disadvantaged poorer families who could not afford to take their children on as many activities, and as such were pushed more towards the use of digital play. Furthermore, the cars being used to take children to these activities contributed to the problem of unsafe outdoor space for free play in working class neighbourhoods. Timetabled physical activities, whilst being physically healthy, have also been proven not to provide the same mental benefits for children as self-directed play, including a comparative lack of stimulation of cognitive development, social and language development, independent learning, and ability to cope with stress and trauma. The loss of children’s independent mobility to adult-dependent mobility was beginning to be linked to rising problems of ‘obesity, diabetes and other diseases associated with more sedentary lifestyles’. The literature’s narratives over the role of digital devices in this process, however, was ambivalent in a technological environment that was evolving faster than academic studies and research.
The 2000s
‘Children will always be children and will always find a way to play’.
The first decade of the 21st century saw the real emergence of what became a defining argument surrounding the role of technology in children’s lives, a declensionist narrative of childhood degradation based around the rise a ‘media-saturated environment’ and the fall of “natural” outdoor activity. As is evident from looking at research from the previous three decades however, Britain’s ‘screen entertainment culture’ was more of a symptom than a cause of the loss of childhood freedoms, and children particularly of disadvantaged backgrounds were pushed towards technology by outside factors. Exemplary of this, Wigley and Clark’s survey Kids.net (2000) found that working class children were significantly more likely to have a television, games console, or video recorder in their rooms than middle class children. Digital spaces offered play and freedoms to children that they could no longer enjoy as easily outside, but as the Digital Education Act of 2003 proved, the digital world too was becoming a more highly regulated and less “wild” place.
Figure 6. A child recharges their mobile phone credit on a street machine, 2009.
Academic research increasingly reflected the domesticity of British children’s lives, Nancy Wells’ At Home with Nature (2000) looking at children who moved house to an area with greener views out the window and finding marked improvements in peacefulness and ability to concentrate. Similarly Wells and Evans’ Nearby Nature (2003) found that children with more natural space near home were less prone to anxiety, depression, and behavioural problems; the same children also rated themselves higher than their peers on measures of self-worth. Andrea Faber Taylor et al.’s Views of nature and self-discipline (2002) randomly assigned a group of girls to architecturally identical apartments in the same building and discovered that the greener a girl’s view from her window, the higher she scored on concentration tests. The “child in the city” literature such as Louise Chawla’s Growing Up in an Urbanizing World (2002) and David Driskell’s Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth (2002) took on a more reformist bent, lamenting the decline of ‘street culture’ and even the shift from family television time to ‘bedroom culture’. Such works moved from simply the study of the issues of urban childhoods to advocacy for ways in which change could be enacted. Freeman and Aitken-Rose’s Future Shapers (2005) cross-examined urban planners to find that children were only considered in the planning of ‘recreation spaces’, but ignored in the planning streets, houses, shops, leisure facilities, and infrastructure.
Technology became a key facilitator of childhood sociability in 21st century Britain. A study from the Journal of Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (2002) found that British children who did not own a mobile phone, those of working class backgrounds in majority, were especially vulnerable to social isolation, as the phone had become a key device around which friendships and communities were built. The digital divide also exacerbated pre-existing social divergences as highly social children more readily adopted digital devices as a means for deepening and expanding relations whereas less social children showed the opposite pattern. These children were thus not just socially excluded, but also denied an opportunity to develop digital skills. Those children who did have mobiles were also more likely to be able to cross ‘hitherto distinct social boundaries’. The problem was not always access to devices like mobile phones however, but also the skills necessary to operate them as Dominique Pasquier highlighted in Media at home (2002); both girls and working class households demonstrated a ‘problematic skills gap’ in the use of digital devices, as providing an opportunity for access to technology was easier than providing knowledge for use.
Digital devices that allowed young people to “travel”, either physically or online, had mixed impacts upon their freedoms. One the one hand as Williams and Williams’ article Space Invaders (2005) suggested, the expectation of parents to be able to communicate with their children at all times, and the children’s constant awareness of being under surveillance, created an environment where children felt they had no private space which can be damaging to mental health. On the other hand Marilyn Campbell’s The Impact of the Mobile Phone on Young People’s Social Life (2005) demonstrated the negotiating power that a mobile phone could grant children when discussing curfews and boundaries for roaming with their parents, allowing more freedom than peers who did not have phones. On a more structural level familiarity with technology was rightly assumed to be a key skill for children in a future that would see a job market progressively more reliant on digital literacy; so whilst many areas of adult society and much of the academic literature encouraged children to get outdoors, Britain at large was forging an environment where the skills associated with outdoor activity were less valued than those of the digital and indoors. Todd Oppenheimer’sThe Flickering Mind (2003) reflected this duality of the moment, whereby children were on a boundary, as he saw it, between sensibly harnessing technology to help them become ‘creative problem solvers’ or falling victim to ‘computerisation and commercialization careening out of control’.
Contrarily, whilst time spent in digital environments was often framed as a detracting from time spent in physical outdoor play, Holloway and Valentines’ study Cyberkids (2003) found the opposite. Echoing earlier studies such as the Department of Environment’s 1973 report and Robin Moore’s Childhood’s domain (1986), they found that children overwhelmingly preferred to be outside if the weather and light allowed. Time spent in front of a TV, phone, or monitor tended to replace ‘doing nothing’ time where they weren’t allowed outside or their peers weren’t. Later studies have also shown technology use to promote social interaction and allow children of differing abilities to become a part of everyday social practice. Furthermore, their research highlighted how computer use was highly controlled and negotiated in homes, and that parents were not at all powerless to prevent children being “drawn in” to screen-use if they wanted to stop them. The crux of the problem lay neither with children, parents, or the technology, but with the reality, or the perception of the reality, of a dangerous outside domain.
Building on a now well-established literature of the benefits of nature, an increasing body of work was produced in the 2000s focussing simply on the benefits of play itself, under a fear of regimented children’s’ lives leading to depression and stress. Garry Landreth’s Play Therapy (2002), Joe Frost’s The Developmental Benefits of Playgrounds (2004), and Louise Chawla’s Growing Up in an Urbanizing World (2002) all advocated for the therapeutic powers of play that yielded ‘positions of cognitive clarity, power, and primacy to the player’. Chawla and Malone’s Neighbourhood Quality from Children’s Eyes (2003) gave insight into the ways play in natural environments created confidence in children as they were more able to physically affect them, conversely urban environments over which children could exert little control often instilled feelings of powerlessness. As Karen Malone pithily identified in her study of children in suburban Sydney: ‘places shape children and children shape places’. The safety of play in the digital world was also coming under question, Rachel Pain’s Paranoid Parenting? (2006) describing online bullying and harassment as ‘far from a parental bogeyman’. David Cohen’s The Development of Play (2006) saw the play crisis as one that also included the adult world, asking: ‘If the purpose of play is to prepare the child in various ways for adult life, what is the motive for adult play?’. As Cohen and many other academics and commentators saw it, the child was a useful tool through which to understand and criticise wider society, as children were seen as some of that society’s most vulnerable members.
A particularly prevalent criticism of the period was popularly put by the influential British sociologist Frank Furedi in Therapy Culture (2004). Furedi was primarily concerned with the number of safety regulations being erected around children as part of what he called the ‘new security state’. This proliferation of regulation, he argued, was eliminating any possibility for learning, excitement, play, or risk, and shifting perspective away from the real dangers of modern childhood, the restrictions themselves. Marianna Papastephanou in Education, Risk and Ethics made the parallel point that western structures of education based around a ‘discourse of control’ were unhelpful in that they did not reflect the reality of risky uncertain human lives. Her observational studies led her to the conclusion that both children and adults had a ‘longing for the risks that make life meaningful’ but were being consistently denied them. The ‘billion-dollar industries’ in technology surrounding children were making increasingly enviable profits from the sale of both security and safety devices as well as indoor education and play devices.
Whether these restrictions, often bolstered by the use of technology, were even making people safer was also on the agenda, or whether as Tim Gill’s No Fear (2007) put it, the risks of play in modern city streets had been ‘blown out of all proportion’. Torin Monahan’s Questioning Surveillance and Security (2006) pointed out that whilst surveillance technologies like CCTV cameras had been shown to be effective in tracking down criminals after a crime, ‘they do not actually prevent or reduce crime in any significant way’. Cindi Katz in Power, Space and Terror (2006) wrote that in relative terms the dangers of cars or strangers were nowhere near as pressing as those of poverty and inequality between children, and that street crime had been falling since the 1970s and 1980s, meaning parents generally played in more dangerous streets than those they denied their children.
Restricting children to the indoors and digital environments created its own dangers a 2006 report for the NSPCC found, citing rising levels of obesity, diabetes, depression and other health problems that proportionally were more dangerous to children than what mostly concerned policy makers and parents. Technology’s role in this was multifaceted: through television and online media it propagated not wholly unjust fears over children’s outdoor safety, through CCTV, mobile phones, and GPS trackers it facilitated restrictions over childhood freedoms, and through computer games and television it offered an escape to children from those restrictions. A longitudinal study in 2010 found that long periods of time spent playing video games gave children difficulties with their attention spans, however a separate study from 2012 found exactly the opposite, so the health impacts of this too was ambivalent.
Idolising Children (2007) by Daniel Donahoo ascribed issues of lost childhood freedoms to a the slightly contrary problem of parents wanting too much for their children. He argued that the promise of technology helped to foster ideas of impossibly “ideal” childhoods that neither the children or the parents could realistically achieve. As such in the attempt to create perfect personalised childhoods parents, educators, and policy makers were inadvertently making them worse. This trend extended far beyond Britain or “the west”, Pergrams and Zaradic’s Is love of nature becoming love of electronic media? (2008) found a fundamental shift away from ‘nature-based recreation’ globally over a period of 50 years by looking at visits to national parks. Along similar lines Dorothy Singer’s Children’s pastimes and play in sixteen Nations (2009) found a universal erosion of childhood across continents due to a lack of ‘experiential learning opportunities’. Furthermore parents’ ideas around what outdoor “play” was were also beginning to change, Kelly Fischer’s article Conceptual Split? (2008) finding that unstructured play was increasingly seen as a waste of time by parents who were also more likely to regard structured activities and sports as play. This was partly due to neoliberal competitive conceptions of children centred around personal narratives of success, that “messing around” was not productive.
Physical city environments were also still changing in the 21st century in ways that disadvantaged children. Whilst roads were sometimes being built more considerately, new housing developments in particular were constructed to child-unfriendly specifications. The housing stock generally since the 1980s grew larger on the internal footprint but smaller on the external, so people’s indoor living space grew at the expense of yards and gardens. Furthermore, modern housing façades were increasingly built with smaller windows in the front, garages, and smaller front porch areas. This meant that children had less physical outdoor space to play in modern developments and also, due to the houses being built more insularly, parents and neighbours had less ability to keep a passive watch on their children in the lane. The demographics of families also changed during this period, as parents tended towards having fewer children and guarding the ones they had more carefully, thus creating the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting”. One of the promises of technologically interwoven childhoods for the adult world was the possibility of persistent monitoring and thereby controlling and safekeeping of children in what Tonya Rooney called as a ‘just in case’ model in Trusting Children (2010). However, as she warns: ‘Rather than simply “playing it safe”, parents and carers may be depriving children of the opportunity to be trusted and to learn about trusting others, and the opportunity for growing competence and capacity that can result from this’. Indeed, little evidence has been presented to show that people in the 21st century are more untrustworthy than in prior decades, but there is increasing evidence of a culture of suspicion.
By 2010 academic research was beginning to assess digital environments of childhood holistically, incorporating them into understandings of environment more generally, and as such recognising the complications that arise by thinking of digital devices as simply either “good” or “bad” for children; some were even advocating for a blended use of technology in order to help children get outdoors, advice that would have raised many academic eyebrows only a few years prior. In terms of education whilst the internet and other digital tools, providing the world at their fingertips, discouraged the use of a child’s memory for the memorising of specific facts, they encouraged an ability to scan information rapidly and efficiently. As Jim Taylor wrote in How Technology Is Changing the Way Children Think, not having to retain this sort of information in the brain allows it to ‘engage in more “higher-order” processing such as contemplation, critical thinking, and problem-solving’. Digital technologies certainly comprised an element of the story of the loss of freedom in British childhoods, but that element was more liminal than much of the literature examined individually suggests. Taken together over time, however, an image emerges of digital childhoods not as piteous sources of degradation but as an element enmeshed in a much wider diverse narrative of shifting social dynamics of power, control, and freedom in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
CONCLUSION
An apparent cultural paradox lies at the heart of British digital childhoods today, and indeed our digital lives more broadly: a culture of individualism that operates inseparably withina culture of connectivity. Technology is ever-more tailored to the individual in terms of personalised “smart delivery” of recommendations, advertisements, news, and voice-activated digital assistants, however at the same time it is also ever-more universal with the majority of this individualised content being served by a minority of companies, devices, and services. The mobile phone, television, and computer have acted as facilitators for a new spontaneity and flexibility in young people’s lives, being able to arrange and rearrange social events with the rapidity of a ‘more fluid culture of information social interaction’. However this option has been historically more open to some more privileged children than others, and at the same time technology has been a facilitator of increasing restriction upon children’s lives. Yet the spectres of the “screen zombie” and occasionally the “nature nymph” still hang over the debate, encouraging a polarisation of opinion over whether children have been “taken in” by technology or the belief that they never could be. Either way the idea that ‘children have won the battle, they are exactly where they want to be’ does not capture the complexity of the situation.
The impacts of digital technologies are not inevitabilities that form changes beyond human control or understanding, they are socially shaped elements of both childhood and adulthood. Adopting this perspective allows the reader to see these devices as within a space of continual negotiations in shifting economic, social, and political circumstances. As children’s lives become ever more digital it is important that historians begin to grapple with the digital environment and conceive of it as a “space” where children have existed, a space that both moulds children, is moulded by them and other factors, and is experienced differently by different people. Future research could pursue multiple avenues, but particularly helpful would be interdisciplinary research alongside computer scientists who could investigate specific design qualities of technologies and how they have influenced behaviours over time. Oral histories of digital childhoods would also constitute an important archival resource for the future when academics want to consider the crucial transitionary generation between the pre and post digital worlds.
Author/Publisher: Louis Lorenzo
Date of Publication: 22nd of January 2026
Dr Louis Lorenzo 