In the age of continuous data collection and algorithmic predictions, children’s privacy seems threatened by the variety of surveillance and data practices in which parents, institutions, corporations and children themselves engage. The vast amount of data routinely collected about children as they grow up include data shared online, whether by children themselves (social media updates, web searches and browsing, data traces of their internet and smartphone use) or their parents (sharenting practices); data shared in the home, like conversations and environmental data captured by internet-connected devices such as smart speakers and internet connected toys; data shared outside the home, including educational and school apps, biometric data in schools and/or airports and stations, health data and medical records, geo-location apps or wearables, etc. Data can be knowingly shared with others, or “given off” as traces of online activities, and even inferred by algorithms that profile, classify and predict users’ behaviour. This panel on the datafication of childhood draws together a number of leading scholars in this area of research to explore questions and issues associated with children’s privacy online as both a protective and enabling right. The collection of papers in this panel contribute empirical data and theoretical insight on a range of relevant topics in the study of the datafication of childhood from the perspective of both children and parents. Based on qualitative and quantitative methods, the individual contributions to the panel illuminate the situated nature of data practices, their embeddedness in diverse contexts and practices of meaning-making through which children and parents negotiate online privacy.

Due to their internet connectivity and intensive data collection about users and their environments, smart speakers extend the datafication of the domestic environment, while contributing to the normalisation of data relations as an integral part of family everyday life. Our study extends the analysis of the domestication of smart speakers into the domestic context, family relations, practices and imaginaries. In particular, we provide theoretical and empirical insights into the study of datafication as a diverse, situated and embodied experience. In order to analyse the emergent and situated relationships (through and with smart speakers), agencies and power structures mobilised in the domestication of smart speakers, we conceptualise families as communicative figurations comprising actors (family members), culture (including technological and surveillance imaginaries), communication practices, and a specific digital media ensemble. Drawing on mixed-method data, our findings show that communicative figurations involve a reconfiguration of power and agency relating both to traditional axes (status, class, gender and age) and new forms of power enabled by the progressive colonisation of the domestic environment by data colonialism. We propose and discuss a typification of households along a continuum of positions in family relationships with data between two opposite poles: data-resistants and data-normalisers. Households can negotiate, resist and oppose datafication practices and imaginaries by mobilising various strategies, discourses, meanings and practices. Ultimately, our theoretical approach and typification allow studying how data practices materialise – and are (partially) accepted, negotiated or rejected – as a specific communicative figuration in each family.

The discrepancy between children’s actual amount of viewing time and parents’ accounts of their concerns, rules, and parental mediation choices has been documented in empirical research, and typically interpreted through the lens of the Uses and Gratifications theory – showing how parents change their attitudes towards screen media in order to satisfy their own needs. Based on a qualitative longitudinal research project, including app-based media diaries, with 20 families with at least one child aged eight or younger, we aim to make two contributions to the literature. With regard to theory, we aim to highlight the heterogeneous and contingent ways of balancing the place of digital media in children’s lives that arise from parents navigating screen time discourses, social pressures, and daily schedules. With regard to methods, we argue for the combination of qualitative data and app-based media diaries to contextualise and interpret potential discrepancies between reported screen time and parental anxieties or hopes about digital media.

The COVID-19 pandemic has confronted families, and especially children, with significant social and psychological challenges. The lockdown was accompanied by a substantial expansion of digital and social media use and an increased probability of coming into contact with different kinds of online risks. Focusing on cyberbullying, we report on findings from an online survey to investigate the extent to which children aged 10-18 (n = 1.541) experienced cyberbullying and cybervictimization during the first lockdown in Italy and Germany. Looking at the role of different variables through two binary logistic regressions, results indicate that the most consistent predictor in both forms of bullying experiences was children’s emotional distress. No statistically significant country differences emerged. Finally, the implications and limitations of this work are discussed.