Fall 2021      Volume 49, Number 4

Exploring Screen Time in Children’s Literature: Portrayals of the Child, the Content, and the Context
By Kathleen A. Paciga and Melanie D. Koss

Document: Article

Introductory Paragraph:  Children’s books are tools commonly utilized in home, school, and community contexts to promote awareness of complex social issues at the earliest stages of development. Children and their caregivers encounter cultural models for, and may appropriate sociocultural values and norms about, the screen time dilemma through their experiences with texts that contain narratives about screens. This article explores the ways in which the screen has been portrayed in children’s literature in the past 10 years (i.e., since 2010 when the iPad was first released). It contains a critical examination of the child characters that engage with screens, the content displayed on the screens throughout the texts, and the context within which children’s activities around screens unfold in the narrative. The article concludes with commentary about how children’s relationships—with others around screens and about screens—are shaped in the pages of children’s literature offered to young children.

DOI:   https://doi.org/10.33600/IRCJ.49.4.2021.13

Page Numbers:   13-32