Baby Gamers? Theorizing the 'Haptic Habitus' of Very Young Children, Parents and Touchscreen Technologies

This paper examines the largely overlooked relationship between very young children, touchscreen devices, and play, arguing that game studies has been slow to account for digital interaction at the earliest stages of life. Babies and toddlers cannot describe their own experiences, and devices and games have traditionally excluded them through minimum age requirements and placement out of reach. The authors contend that this is changing as mobile touchscreens become common in domestic spaces and are more responsive to small, gestural hands than keyboards or controllers, making infants and toddlers increasingly active participants in digital environments.

The study is positioned at the intersection of internet studies, digital ethnography, and childhood studies, deliberately departing from the medical and educational discourses that typically dominate this field. Its methods combine ethnographic interviews, household "technology tours," participant observation, and demonstrations of children's media interaction within family homes, supplemented by analysis of online content such as technology toy unboxing and review videos and images of young children using tablets and phones on YouTube and Instagram. This mixed approach allows the authors to connect domestic practices with the cultural circulation of representations of children's tactile media use.

Central to the analysis is the concept of a "haptic habitus," which describes how an emerging set of embodied, touch-based norms is shaped through very young children's encounters with touchscreens. Drawing on cultural studies discussions of habit and on scholarship in critical interface studies, the authors argue that this habitus is assembled through both mediation and materiality, with children's bodies, device design, and social representations all contributing to its form.

The paper's key theoretical contribution is the notion of "parental intermediation," which moves beyond one-sided accounts of parental governance toward a more entangled view in which parents' bodies, attitudes, and mediating actions both shape and are shaped by infants' digital play. From this framework, the authors identify three broad categories of infant digital play: accidental, assisted, and automated, offering game studies an initial vocabulary for understanding play at the earliest ages.