This Palgrave Pivot book examines how AI-based technologies shape children’s everyday lives and imagines possible digital futures. Drawing on qualitative interviews and a child-rights approach, the authors map how new AI tools are used and understood at home, at school, and among peers. They trace shifts in family routines; education, care, and health practices; and peer cultures associated with AI; cutting through the current hype to assess both promises and risks. Building on prior work on the datafication of childhood and family life, Children and AI: Changing Digital Childhoods? rethinks AI’s implications for children’s wellbeing, rights, and life chances amid rapid market diffusion. It highlights potential harms, including widening digital divides and privacy violations, and calls for child-centred, safety-by-design legal and policy frameworks. Timely and interdisciplinary, it will interest scholars, students, and policymakers across childhood studies, digital and family sociology, internet studies, children’s rights, and education.
