Studying Children’s Digital World Within the Family Ecosystem: Seeing the Forest and the Trees, but What About the Biome?

Barr and Kirkorian (2023) provide a much-needed comprehensive framework for studying children’s learning and memory in the context of screen-based digital media. By integrating decades of research about what is known about children’s abilities and limitations in learning and memory in early childhood, both generally and via digital experiences, they offer a framework offering testable hypotheses and a potential path forward for parents, educators, and policy makers. This commentary suggests that this is an important step forward for the study of children’s increasing digital world, but we also push forward an argument that an even wider lens view is necessary when the world’s children are facing a number of community and societal challenges coupled with a period of rapid technological advancement.