![]() Kids nowadays tend to see their parents use smartphones quite frequently, not just for communication and entertainment, but also to take pictures of the kids themselves. Plus, toddlers and preschoolers tend to incorporate a lot of what they see adults do into their own play-hence why some kids like to “parent” their toys. Toddlers are also squarely in the process of developing autonomy and of learning to do things on their own McLean identifies toddlerhood and the preschool years as the “ I do it!” phase, in which kids are particularly jazzed about being in control of how they interact with their surroundings. Read: How Millennial parents are reinventing the family photo album “Before digital technology, it wasn’t a big thrill to snap a picture of yourself, only to wait a week for it to come back.” And how good they look,” McLean said, adding that the way kids interact with front-facing smartphone cameras seems much more like the way they interact with mirrors than the way they’ve historically interacted with other kinds of cameras. “They’re just exploring who they are, how their face works. Toddler selfies can largely be understood as a technologically souped-up spin on little kids’ well-known tendency to play with mirrors. From the ages of 1 to 3, McLean told me, kids rapidly develop a sense of individual identity, making sense of the fact that they are separate humans from their moms and dads, and for most kids, that’s a pretty exciting prospect. ![]() For starters, there’s what many parents (and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and babysitters) already know: “Toddlers are delighted with themselves,” says Christine McLean, who teaches in the Children and Youth Study department at Nova Scotia’s Mount Saint Vincent University. Toddlers are attracted to the front-facing smartphone camera for a few reasons. This is what your camera roll turns into once you have a toddler /TANCAzyl4b - lex October 8, 2019 (She ended up tweeting one.) “He was like, ‘Don’t worry, Mommy. “I told him to pick a couple of them and we’d keep them and post them, but we had to delete the rest,” she told me. When Nicole Smith, a mom of three in Asheville, North Carolina, got an alert last summer that she was running out of storage space on her iPhone, she opened her camera roll and found to her amusement that her oldest son, now 4, had hijacked her phone and taken a bunch of extreme close-ups of his face a month before. As one mother wrote in a tweet that contained a pair of photos of the ceiling and her child’s blurry face, “If you don’t have a camera roll full of blasts like this, are you even a parent of a toddler?” On Instagram, the hashtag #toddlerselfie has been affixed to more than 32,000 photos. Parents are fond of posting their toddlers’ selfies online. Others are just single snapshots of foreheads, perhaps with a surprised eyebrow peeking into the frame. Some toddler selfies appear in large, camera-roll-dominating batches that have a flipbook (or Cindy Sherman) quality to them. Toddler selfies are a 21st-century expression of several age-old tendencies of this stage in childhood development-and while they certainly raise questions about kids’ relationship to technology, they also offer a unique new way for parents to hang on to memories of a challenging but joyous time in their children’s life. ![]() Many parents today know what to expect when they wrest their smartphones from their young children, who have been entertaining themselves in their car seat, or waiting for a snack, or playing nearby while their sibling takes a bath: a camera roll full of oddly avant-garde, poorly focused, poorly framed self-portraits. And its inventors probably did not anticipate that it would inspire a new genre of photography-the selfie-or become a beloved plaything for toddlers all over the globe. Introduced in Japan in 1999 and the United States four years later, it was not initially a widely heralded innovation. ![]() Reportedly, the front-facing cellphone camera was originally intended to be a way for business colleagues to teleconference one another while they were working in separate locations. ![]()
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