Plan & Play: Supporting Intentional Media Use in Early Childhood

Parental controls allow parents to set limits on children’s use of technology, but prior work suggests that controlling children alone is unlikely to foster the development of healthy media habits. We took elements from evidence-based preschool curricula that teach self-regulation and translated them to the digital space by creating a tool for preschoolers and parents to plan their device-based play-time. In an observational lab study with 11 parent-child dyads and follow-up interviews with 14 parents, we found that children demonstrated intentionality and made goal-directed choices as they planned, the mediating factor in developing self-regulation. We observed that parents prompted their child to be intentional and solicited chil-dren’s input. When children played through their plan, they transitioned to the next activity without intervention 93% of the time. Our results suggest that evidence-based practices for teaching self-regulation in a non-digital context can be applied productively to children’s use of technology. As parents supported children in trying the tool for the first time, a further contribution of this work is a hierarchical model of parents’ approaches to scaffolding children’s use of a novel technology.