Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Early Childhood Education Journal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-021-01245-7 Digital Technology Usage of Young Children: Screen Time and Families Ahmet Sami Konca 1 Accepted: 22 July 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021 Abstract This study aimed to explore the digital environments of 3–6-year-old children within the home setting. A total of 537 chil- dren aged 3–6 years and their parents participated in the study. The results of the study revealed that the children live in digitally rich home environments. Parents usually limited the screen time of the children, or accompanied them during the use of digital technologies. The total screen time of the children was more than 3 h, whilst the parents’ total screen time was around four and a half hours. The results also indicate the infuence of family income and parents’ screen time on children’s screen time. Parents and home settings play a key role in their children’s interaction with digital technologies. Therefore, the familial context should be taken into consideration for supporting young children’s learning and development through digital technologies. Keywords Young children · Digital technology · Screen time · Parents · Early childhood Introduction Digital technologies now form one of the key components of children’s lives. Digital devices have quickly become cultural tools within the home, at school, and in the com- munity (Rideout, 2013). While only 41.5% of households in the United States had access to the internet in 2000, that fgure increased to 76.7% by 2014 (File & Ryan, 2014). As the availability of digital technologies has increased within our daily lives, the onset age of digital technology use has become lower (Chaudron, 2015; Ofcom, 2019; Rideout & Robb, 2020). Young children regularly use digital technol- ogies within the classroom as well as at home (Saracho, 2015), which makes the investigation of young children’s digital technology use a key interest in today’s educational research (Blackwell et al., 2014). As children’s interaction with digital technologies increases day-by-day, the duration of children’s technology use has become a hot topic. In par- ticular, the amount of screen time, which is the viewing or use of anything with a screen, specifcally a television, tab- let computer, smartphone, and/or laptop/desktop computer has caused signifcant interest and concern (Sweetser et al., 2012). Young children’s use of digital technologies has been documented in diferent countries by numerous researchers in recent years (Chaudron, 2015; Konca & Koksalan, 2017; Ofcom, 2015; Rideout & Robb, 2020). Although television and computers were the most commonplace technologies during the 2000s, touchscreen devices such as tablet comput- ers and smartphones have become much more widespread since 2010 (Dunn et al., 2016; Lauricella et al., 2015). As a result, children are now spending more time using mobile devices than watching television (Ofcom, 2015). Accord- ing to recent results from the United States, 97% of homes have at least one smartphone, 75% of families have a tablet computer, and 44% of young children have their own tablet computer (Rideout & Robb, 2020). Also, children’s use of tablet computers signifcantly increased from 2015–2019 in the United Kingdom (Ofcom, 2019), while in Australia, Neumann (2015) indicated that all families had one or more televisions, more than 90% of households owned a mobile phone, and 80% of families owned at least one touch screen tablet, laptop, or mobile phone. Thus, the duration of device usage per day was reported to be 80 min for tel- evision, 20 min for tablets, and 10 min for mobile phones. Importantly, in research carried out in Turkey by Merdin (2017), it is reported that for the digital media environment of children up to 6 years of age within the home context, * Ahmet Sami Konca samikonca@erciyes.edu.tr 1 Department of Elementary Education, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey