M.01. Beyond the Screen: Educational Mediation, Children’s Rights, and Digital Citizenship in Early Childhood

The expansion of digital technologies and algorithmic infrastructures is reshaping children’s life, anticipating their entry into the "platform society", influencing early practices of socialization, exploration, and meaning-making. Children’s digital biographies now begin before preschool, as touch-responsive interfaces and data-driven platforms lower access barriers and embed algorithmic logics into intimate family routines (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2025; Mascheroni & Siibak, 2021). These transformations often produce polarized reactions: prohibitionist approaches that remove digital opportunities to prevent cognitive or socio-emotional risks, and, conversely, an uncritical reliance on the “babysitting screen,” which turns devices into passive entertainment tools and delegates care and regulation to technology. Both stances appear reductive when compared with empirical evidence documenting the complex effects of early screen use and with children's rights to participation, expression, and play affirmed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Educational mediation emerges as an intentional practice that protects children from premature datafication and profiling while nurturing their agency, exploratory attitudes, and symbolic capacities within increasingly complex digital ecosystems (Cappello & Ranieri, 2025). This panel invites sociological, pedagogical, and interdisciplinary contributions that examine the tensions, opportunities, and responsibilities generated by young children’s early encounters with digital technologies. We aim to discuss models of educational guidance that foster autonomy, critical awareness, social justice, and equitable digital environments for early childhood.

We welcome empirical research proposals investigating young children’s digital practices, educators’ and families’ mediation strategies, governance and datafication dynamics, and theoretical or methodological contributions that advance critical, justice-oriented approaches to early childhood digital environments.