A critical interpretive review of digital citizenship in early childhood: a call for care and responsibility

Abstract

Digital citizenship has become a competency identified across childhood as part of education policy and practice. However, dominant discourses situate this development in formal education settings, thus marginalising birth to five from a broader ethical focus. This paper provides a critical interpretive review of literature on digital citizenship, early childhood education and digital ethics (critical to achieving SDG 4: Quality education). The review reflects a care ethics approach, and raises questions from perspectives of relationality, distributed moral responsibility, and care as active practice, that challenge the assumptions of current work and policy in relation to young children and digital life. Four interpretative themes are explored: protection as the primary paradigm of care; adult-centred moral responsibility; the construction of risk, surveillance and 'good parenting' and the absent infant citizen. The analysis revealed that current approaches to early childhood reproduced an ethics of management and containment, with children in the early years treated as objects of concern and, to a lesser extent, as relational actors with moral worth. The paper calls for a care-centred reconceptualisation of digital citizenship from birth, a relational distribution of responsibility and ethical attentiveness as a fundamental practice in early childhood.