“Before Google Replies…..”: Conversational Assistants in the Homes of Very Young Children in the UK

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: AI in Early Childhood: Posthuman Perspectives on Digital Practices Across Children’s Geographies

Abstract

Purpose: Conversational assistants (CAs) are common in homes and early childhood settings in the UK, where raging diatribes around “screentime” concern UK parents (Green et al., 2024). Yet, somehow, CAs are hitherto relatively overlooked as instantiations of AI in young children’s lives. Drawing from a recently completed multi-method research project – Toddlers, Tech and Talk – we briefly summarise existing relevant research, identifying limitations of the primarily sociocultural perspective hitherto brought to the study of CAs, very young children, and the home, and explore ways in which CAs function as actors, intra-acting with the environment, people, and distanced entities.

Theoretical framework: Hackett (2021) moves away from traditional anthropocentric understandings of meaning-making and explores how children's communicative practices are entangled with material agencies and more-than-human forces. We employ the analytical heuristic of postdigital play proposed by Pettersen, Arnseth, & Silseth (2025) and explore how meaning-making emerges through the performative intra-actions involving CAs, which are intensely and multimodally performative.

Methods and data sources: Our project is the largest-scale investigation of digital technologies in homes of very young children (0-36 months) across four nations in the UK. We draw on data from three phases: Phase 1 comprised surveys of parents (N=1,444); Phase 2 involved interviews with parents/caregivers (N=60) and ECE professionals (N=20); and Phase 3 included intensive case study home investigations using a flexible methods palette (authors et al., 2025) (N=40). We endeavour to interrogate this research design with the support of Taylor's (2016) vision of a “new ethics for education by including the nonhuman in questions about who matters and what counts….”(p. 5).

Findings and discussion: Through five brief vignettes, we illustrate the emergent entanglements among CAs, with and without screens, visible or hidden in the home; animal sounds; music prompting dance, singing, eating, tidy-up, or sleep routines; connections with distanced environments, media, and people; and multisensory engagements involving young children.

Scholarly and scientific significance: First, we point out the achievements but also limitations of previous research with very young children and CAs as relying on a binary demarcation between ascription of “machine” and “human” qualities. Second, we illustrate how posthuman perspectives offer alternative analytical lenses for the enactment of ethical research. Finally, we point to the odd disjuncture of simultaneous societal discourses and moral panics around “screentime”, that somehow CAs evade; while with Jacobs, Changede, & Gradinar (2024), we interrogate the discourses of efficiency and commercial value that permeate AI discourses.

Authors

• Julia Gillen, Lancaster University

• Sabina Savadova, University of Edinburgh