children
Perspectives on Personalisation: event summary

Publishers and producers may collect children’s data to offer children an enriched experience of their products. But there are some significant privacy, security and educational challenges. On the 7th of November 2017, Children’s Media Foundation and UCL Institute of Education hosted a joint event to discuss research and industry perspectives on the use of personalisation […]
“They’ll watch TV on anything”: Children’s ‘messy’ media use and blurring boundaries between media devices and practices
This blog post is part of my PhD research into parents and children’s media use in the home. In this research, I was primarily interested in the experiences of contemporary parenting with regards to media and media technology. In the process, it uncovered various issues around children’s media use in the home and parents’ understanding […]
“Screen time” advice for a new generation of “digital” parents
by Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross Department of Media & Communications, LSE While earning less than £15,000 per year from her work in a budget supermarket, single mother Cecilia Apau has bought a desktop computer, a laptop, two tablets and two smartphones for her three children over the past four years, for use alongside […]
Scary children’s media: what are we so afraid of?
Channel 5 caused a stir last month when they aired the classic 1978 animated film Watership Down on the afternoon of Easter Sunday. Aside from Art Garfunkel’s tear-jerking song ‘Bright Eyes’, the film is infamous for the gore and violence inflicted upon, and by, rabbits that we would prefer to think of as cuddly and […]
Kids in the driving seat: personalised digital & printed books
On Friday, 25th of September 2015, academics and three key UK publishers of children’s personalised books met at The Open University, London Camden, to discuss the current status quo and future of children’s personalised books. Personalised books are books which use key information of the reader (in this case of the child), such as their name, […]
Net Children 2020- Creating a Roadmap
I was fortunate to be invited to Net Children 2020 an expert conference organised by the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research and the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. This took place on 16 and 17 April 2015 in Berlin. This was less a conference but rather a working […]
Six questions that parents ask about children and digital media
The Children’s Media Foundation recently asked me and my colleague, Jonathan Hancock, to write a research-informed and parent-friendly guide to some of the questions that are asked about children’s uses of digital media. The questions covered by the review are: 1) Are screen-based media ‘bad’ for my children? 2) Will playing violent video games make […]