Promoting the centrality of real world relationships and interactions with young children in an increasingly digitalised and virtual world

We thought we would begin this Editorial with a panoramic view of early childhood and its place in our ecosphere, before relating some particular features of this Issue’s contribution to that encompassing paradigm. Given global changes in birth rates and the use of Artificial Intelligence it might be useful to start with these two challenges to our ECE research community.

Firstly, according to The Economist (2024), the ‘average woman’ in a ‘high-income’ country has 1.6 babies. Yet, with few exceptions, all ‘high income’ countries have a fertility rate below the 2.1 level required to replicate their populations, with some inter-generational populations dropping by 25% (The Economist 2024). In Africa, on the other hand, where health interventions continue to impact beneficially, birth rates will make it within 10 years the largest centre of child population in the World, becoming more numerous than China and India.

Clearly, an early childhood research Journal such as ours, which despite the implications of our title has always had a world-wide vision, international contributors and distribution, needs to be cognisant of the impact these global features will have on our work. The ‘global Norths’ will inevitably become more dependent for labour on the ‘global Souths’. Korea and Japan, facing labour force shortages are already finding ways to encourage families to grow. Inevitably, migration and diversity in populations is likely to increase. Former, net migrant countries, such as Ireland, are now immigrant destination countries. This dynamic context will bring challenges that professionals, practitioners and researchers will have to explore.

In addition, there are changing models of family formation. Currently, in the UK, more babies are born to mothers over 40 than those under 20, and that is a pattern being replicated elsewhere (ONS 2024). Suggestions are made that more support should be given to incentivise mothers but the Scandinavian evidence is that financial incentives, increased welfare and high quality accessible early childhood services do not increase women’s desire to have more children or to have them earlier. Primary births, as the American data shows, are happening later in a woman’s life not because of inadequate preschool provision or because of career choice but simply because most women, whatever their socio-economic class, choose to have children much later in life than their grandmothers and so have fewer children. As an academic community we need to reflect and consider what implication this has for our work.

Secondly, let’s consider the phenomenon of Artificial Intelligence or AI. Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and was from 2008 to 2011 an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He founded and leads the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at Berkeley. In 2021, he broadcast a series of Reith Lectures (Russell 2021), on Living with Artificial Intelligence which included a lecture titled AI: A Future for Humans. In a small way AI has already impacted on our Journal’s submissions. Our publishers are working hard to identify papers that may be AI generated and reviewers are beginning to notice the potential for AI content as they scrutinise papers. At one level, AI applications can be useful tools especially for those who are not native English speakers, rather like Google translation. But it is challenging to think we could end up with a future Journal issue largely written and reviewed by AI. We are currently updating our EECERA Ethical Guidance (Bertram et al. 2016) to take account of these shifts in knowledge creation.

Stewart Russell is helpful in putting some context to this. Undoubtedly AI is going to bring huge advances in scientific thinking and we are already seeing its impact, for example, in Health studies. But Russell differentiated knowledge transfer between the physical sciences and the humanities. His position was that AI in the hard sciences will free us to work more on the Humanities, those aspects and interactions which so far AI has not been able to replicate. Within this he explicitly mentioned early child education and care as being inevitably related to the quality of engagement between a young child, parent, carer and educator. The dystopian science fiction novel, Klara and the Sun, by the British writer, Kazuo Ishiguro (2021) is told from the point of view of Klara, a solar-powered artificial friend, and explores the nature of humanity and friendships and vividly illustrates these compelling themes.

Falling birth rates and more focus on the characteristics of our interactions with our youngest children provide the frame for this editorial. There is still much to be learnt and shared about the quality of early childhood education within this changing global context. This Journal Issue, containing contributions from eight countries including Australia, China, Finland, The Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Sweden and Turkey, contributes to generating and disseminating our developing knowledge base about living well in these uncertain and dynamic times scientifically, systematically and rigorously.

The papers contained in this journal issue provide a rich and diverse exemplification of how the ECE research sector is responding to this dynamic, global context. We have identified five strands of innovation and originality from our reading of the eleven papers in this issue, each of which demonstrate the increasing consciousness of these challenges in our published research. In particular they reveal our growing recognition of the centrality of quality relationships and interactions in an increasingly digitalised and virtual world.

The first and most dominant strand of innovation and originality we can identify is the foregrounding of the importance of human relationships and interactions. This focus can be found in the paper by Jenny Marttila, Ruben Fukkink and Maarit Silvén from The Netherlands, whose study of an online study module using Video Enhanced Reflective Practice (VERP) was aimed at Finnish ECE Student teachers to enhance their mentalization, interaction and relationship competencies. The VERP supplemented evidence-based lectures, tutorials and practical training on children’s language development, teacher–child interactions. They found that the focused intervention using VERP led to enhanced interaction skills in students and more capacity to talk about cognition and less conflict in relationships with children. So the blend of online mentalization and more traditional content and teaching methods was beneficial but both mattered. This focus on human relationships and interaction is also very evident in the paper by Yolanda Sánchez-Sandoval and Natalia Jiménez-Luque from Spain which explores the parental competencies of both fathers and mothers of young children and their relationship with family and child characteristics, demonstrating that parent support strategies need to be tailored to individual child and family circumstances and the style of interaction within the families.

The second strand of innovation and originality we can identify is the centrality of encouraging a better understanding of cultural identity, hybridity and diversity. This focus can be found in the paper by Mirka Maaret Kivimäki, Kirsti Karila and Maarit Alasuutari who capture Finnish parents’ perspectives on what is essential in ECEC services from the child’s point of view. For parents the key priority is enrichment of experience for the child and their safety. The paper also highlights the importance to parents of child wellbeing and belonging rather than their development for the future. The paper by Maria Papakosma adds to this theme and investigates contemporary conceptualisations of cultural and linguistic diversity in ECEC by Swedish policy makers by foregrounding the importance of enhancing policy makers understanding of the centrality of cultural learning and the role of language in enculturation of children in contemporary Swedish society. A further paper on this theme of identity and diversity by Ipek Ozbay and Yagmur Ozge Ugurelli offers an interesting study from Turkey exploring the negativity of stepfamily representations in fairy tales and YouTube animations where stepmothers and stepchildren are often portrayed in a stereotypical and negative light. The recommendations are to challenge these stereotypes by increasing parent and teacher awareness of cultural identity and diverse family formations.

The third strand of innovation and originality we can identify is the value of adopting participatory and play based pedagogies. This focus can be found in the paper by Fatma Busra Aksoy-Kumru from Turkey, who studied practitioner perspectives on child participation in ECEC settings in Scotland and revealed the potential of Froebelian approaches to open up new ways of thinking and acting to encourage child participation, agency and competency with regard to realising children’s rights. The paper by Elena Castro Rodríguez, María D. Torres González and Marina Maniega Fernández also reveals the power of pedagogy in supporting or inhibiting children’s mathematical learning. This Spanish case study focuses on the interventions of an ECE teacher during a mathematical problem-solving lesson and revealed that the teacher’s instructional interventions often discouraged rather than facilitated problem-solving strategies by child. They suggest professional development is needed to transform pedagogic practices.

The fourth strand of innovation and originality we can identify is the urgent need for professional development in pedagogic processes rather than curriculum content. This strand of knowledge is very clear in many of these papers but IS foregrounded in the paper by Olalla Juaristi, Inaki Larrea and Alexander Muela whose mixed method study of ECE teachers in Spain investigated the enculturation process of children and teachers’ beliefs about this. Their findings reveal the key role of teacher as an agent of enculturation and social role modelling and they suggest this should figure more prominently in professional development programmes for ECE teachers. The paper by Elife Barmak, Burçin Aysu, Fatih Aydoğdu, Neriman Aral and Halil Tayyip Uysal also highlights the need for a wider view on professional development. This Turkish study compared the play skills of children with typical development with those with speech and language delay. It found that children’s play skills were influenced by parent demographics suggesting that early intervention programmes need to be more culturally nuanced and that practitioners need to develop their skills to respond more flexibly to support children’s individual preferences and capacities.

The fifth and final strand of innovation and originality we can identify is a growing recognition of the formative influence of practitioner and child wellbeing on flourishing and fulfilment at this stage of life. The paper by Yuan Yang, Xin’ge Tan, Jian Gaoa and Zi’ning Liua explores the impact of work intensification, increased teacher-child conflict and sleeping disorders on Chinese ECEC teachers’ vocal ability. Their findings indicate a need for vocal training and more professional development in child-teacher interactions with a priority of supporting both child and teacher wellbeing. The final paper by Fiona Boylan, Lennie Barblett, Leanne Lavina and Amelia Ruscoe offers an Australian study exploring the impact of transitions to school on child wellbeing, development and learning. Their case studies of transition practice revealed that teacher development that addressed issues of teacher and child wellbeing led to more effective and empowering experiences for the children during times of transition.

We believe that each of the papers in this issue makes a valuable and original contribution to the burgeoning ECE knowledge base which EECERA and its Journal documents and promotes. In particular these five strands of research work suggest a growing awareness and understanding in our research community of the centrality of realising and nurturing quality relationships and interactions if children are to flourish and experience fulfilment in an increasingly digitalised and virtual world. We celebrate the positive, proactive and forward looking perspectives of our EECERA research colleagues as we live through these challenging times.