Digital technologies increasingly shape young children’s attention, yet current design paradigms often prioritise engagement over developmental appropriateness. This paper responds to growing concerns about the attention economy’s influence on children’s lives. While many theories address attention and digital engagement, there is no unified design framework to support balanced attentional development in early childhood (ages 3 to 5). We introduce the Balanced Attention Support for Early-learners (BASE) framework, which comprises three principles: (1) ally indoor and outdoor learning, (2) balance attentional processes in technology interactions, and (3) co-design with children’s attention in mind. Developed through a meta-narrative review of psychology, early childhood education, and human–computer interaction literature, the framework identifies five attentional modes: focused attention, restoration, switching, mindfulness, and relational attending. BASE reframes familiar design practices through the lens of attentional development, offering new directions for resisting attention-capture paradigms and supporting socio-cognitive growth, ethical engagement, and the whole child.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems