More than minutes: Using video analysis to rethink children’s sedentary screentime as quality digital play

Children’s screentime is commonly viewed as passive and problematic. Current focus on reducing the time children spend using digital technologies has meant screentime is quantified often at the expense of considering the quality of children’s digital interactions. These ‘clocking’ practices tend to overlook the potential for children’s digital play to foster movement and relationships with others. Building upon childhood scholarship that has suggested children’s experiences of time are not always linear, nor in line with adults’ expectations, we consider alternative temporalities in relation to children’s screentime. We explore video data from weekly digital playgroups in the Children’s Technology Play Space (CTPS), a living lab for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, focused on movement to highlight that children’s play can intersperse between the digital and the physical, and at times can concurrently be both. As such, we challenge the assumption that screentime is always sedentary. Considering how interactions between children, adults, nonhuman things, and digital technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) enabled varied movement and imagination, we invite conceptions of children’s sedentary screentime to be re-thought.