Call for Papers: Early Childhood in the Age of AI — Special Issue June 2027

2026-08-26
Call for Papers — Special Issue, June 2027 Early Childhood in the Age of AI: Rights, Learning, Care and Protection

IKADPAUDI Journal of Early Childhood and Child Rights (IKAD-ECCR)
Advancing Early Childhood Education through Child Rights, Evidence and Policy

Submission window: 1 September 2026–15 January 2027
Full manuscript deadline: 15 January 2027
Expected publication: June 2027
Publication model: Diamond Open Access — no submission fee and no Article Processing Charge (APC)

About the Special Issue

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly embedded in the environments in which young children learn, play, communicate, create, receive care, and participate in family and social life. Generative AI, conversational agents, intelligent learning platforms, automated assessment, recommendation systems, AI-enabled toys, and emerging AI companions offer new possibilities, while simultaneously raising fundamental questions about childhood, development, education, safety, privacy, equality, relationships, and human dignity.

These questions require particular attention in early childhood. Young children have distinctive developmental needs, evolving capacities, and limited power over the design, data practices, commercial interests, and governance arrangements of the technologies that increasingly shape their environments. Consequently, technological innovation cannot be evaluated only in terms of efficiency, novelty, personalisation, or learning outcomes. It must also be examined in relation to children’s rights, developmental appropriateness, human relationships, inclusion, protection, and well-being.

The international normative framework is increasingly clear. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment No. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment establishes that States must respect, protect, and fulfil children’s rights across digital environments, including those shaped by algorithms, automated systems, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. UNICEF’s Guidance on AI and Children: Version 3.0 further identifies child-centred requirements concerning safety, data and privacy, non-discrimination, transparency, accountability, inclusion, children’s best interests, development, well-being, skills, and effective governance.

Recent evidence also demonstrates the urgency of building a stronger research base. Children are adopting AI rapidly, including for learning, information, creativity, communication, and personal advice, while evidence concerning long-term developmental consequences, effective safeguards, inequalities, and culturally diverse experiences remains limited. Emerging concerns around AI chatbots and companions also raise difficult questions about relational well-being, emotional dependency, commercial design, harmful content, and regulatory responsibility.

Against this background, IKAD-ECCR invites original, rigorous, and internationally relevant scholarship for its June 2027 Special Issue, Early Childhood in the Age of AI: Rights, Learning, Care and Protection.

The Special Issue seeks to move beyond discussions of AI merely as an educational tool. Its central concern is the relationship between artificial intelligence, early childhood, education, care, development, governance, and children’s rights.

Aims

The Special Issue aims to build an interdisciplinary evidence base for understanding how AI is reshaping early childhood and how innovation can be governed in ways that advance rather than compromise children’s rights. We welcome contributions from early childhood education, childhood studies, psychology, law, human rights, public policy, sociology, social work, computer science, human–computer interaction, health, child protection, and related fields.

Particular attention is encouraged to the principles of the best interests of the child; non-discrimination; survival and development; participation and voice; privacy; protection; inclusion; human dignity; equitable access; and accountability.

Suggested Themes
  • Generative AI, learning, play, and creativity: developmentally appropriate uses of generative AI in early learning, literacy, numeracy, language, storytelling, play, creativity, and inquiry.
  • Child-centred AI design: developmental appropriateness, human–AI interaction, age-sensitive design, co-design, usability, and the best interests of the child.
  • AI literacy: children learning with and about AI; teacher, parent, and caregiver AI literacy; critical AI literacy and professional capacity.
  • AI companions and conversational agents: chatbots, relational AI, emotional dependency, anthropomorphism, social and emotional development, trust, and well-being.
  • Privacy and datafication: children’s personal data, profiling, surveillance, biometrics, voice and image data, learning analytics, consent, and data governance.
  • Fairness and non-discrimination: algorithmic bias, stereotyping, unequal outcomes, cultural and linguistic bias, explainability, transparency, and accountability.
  • Assessment and decision-making: AI-supported assessment, automated decisions, educational recommendations, predictive systems, and professional judgement.
  • Inclusion, disability, and neurodiversity: assistive AI, accessibility, inclusive design, opportunities, exclusion risks, and equitable participation.
  • Safety and child protection: harmful or inappropriate AI-generated content, deepfakes, synthetic media, manipulation, grooming, exploitation, and safeguarding.
  • Children’s agency and participation: voice, autonomy, participation, evolving capacities, and meaningful involvement of children in AI-related decisions.
  • Parents, families, and care: parental mediation, family practices, AI-supported parenting, care relationships, trust, and changing adult responsibilities.
  • Culture, language, and inequality: Indigenous and minority-language contexts, culturally responsive AI, socioeconomic inequalities, digital divides, and unequal AI access.
  • Global South perspectives: locally grounded evidence from Africa, Asia, Latin America, small island states, and other contexts underrepresented in dominant AI research.
  • Governance and regulation: child-rights impact assessment, AI regulation, institutional governance, professional ethics, public procurement, accountability, and implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
  • AI and early childhood systems: uses of AI in education, health, social protection, child protection, family services, and other systems affecting young children.

The themes above are illustrative rather than exhaustive. Manuscripts addressing other dimensions of AI are welcome when they make a clear and substantive contribution to early childhood scholarship and/or children’s rights.

What We Particularly Seek

IKAD-ECCR particularly welcomes manuscripts that provide robust empirical evidence; critically examine both opportunities and risks; explicitly engage with developmental appropriateness or children’s rights; analyse implementation rather than technological possibility alone; include children’s perspectives where ethically and methodologically appropriate; investigate inequality and exclusion; or broaden the geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the evidence base.

We encourage studies capable of explaining not only whether AI produces particular outcomes, but also how, for whom, under what conditions, through which mechanisms, and with what implications for children’s rights and well-being.

Article Types

The Special Issue welcomes original empirical research; qualitative and participatory studies; quantitative and mixed-methods research; comparative and cross-national studies; policy and governance analyses; legal and child-rights analyses; systematic or scoping reviews that provide substantial new synthesis; conceptual and theoretical articles; and rigorous implementation or practice research.

Purely descriptive technology demonstrations, manuscripts primarily promoting a commercial AI product, and generic discussions of AI that do not make a substantive scholarly contribution to early childhood and/or children’s rights are unlikely to be considered suitable.

Research Ethics, Child Protection, and AI Transparency

Research involving children must demonstrate appropriate ethical oversight and must address informed consent and, where applicable, meaningful child assent. Authors should carefully consider privacy, confidentiality, safeguarding, digital traces, identifiable data, images, voice recordings, algorithmic profiling, and any transfer of child-related data to AI systems.

Studies using AI-generated, AI-assisted, or AI-processed data must report the role of AI with sufficient methodological transparency to permit scholarly scrutiny. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, integrity, authorship, ethical compliance, and evidential claims of their manuscripts.

International and Interdisciplinary Contributions

Submissions are welcomed from researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and interdisciplinary teams worldwide. The journal particularly encourages high-quality scholarship from countries, languages, communities, and research settings that remain underrepresented in international AI and early childhood literature.

Important Dates Call for Papers announced 26 August 2026 Submission window opens 1 September 2026 Full manuscript deadline 15 January 2027 Desk editorial assessment January 2027 Double-anonymous peer review February–March 2027 Author revisions March–April 2027 Final editorial decisions April–May 2027 Copyediting and production May–June 2027 Expected Special Issue publication June 2027

Submission by the deadline does not guarantee acceptance or publication. Every manuscript must successfully complete editorial screening and the journal’s peer-review process.

Submission and Publication

Manuscripts must be submitted in English through the IKAD-ECCR online submission system during the submission window and prepared in accordance with the journal’s current Author Guidelines.

Authors submitting to this Call for Papers should clearly indicate “Special Issue 2027 — Early Childhood in the Age of AI” in the submission information provided to the Editorial Office.

IKAD-ECCR applies double-anonymous peer review, normally involving at least two independent reviewers. Editorial decisions are based on originality, scholarly significance, methodological rigour, ethical integrity, clarity of reporting, and fit with the Special Issue.

IKAD-ECCR is a Diamond Open Access journal. There are no submission fees and no Article Processing Charges (APCs). Accepted articles are published Open Access under the journal’s Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) policy.

Selected Framing References
  1. Committee on the Rights of the Child. (2021). General Comment No. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. CRC/C/GC/25. United Nations.
  2. UNICEF Office of Strategy and Evidence – Innocenti. (2025). Guidance on AI and Children: Version 3.0 — Recommendations for AI policies and systems that uphold child rights. UNICEF.
  3. UNICEF Office of Strategy and Evidence – Innocenti. (2026). Snapshot of AI Usage and Concerns Among Children and Parents: Insights from 10 Countries. UNICEF.
  4. UNICEF. (2026). When AI Becomes a Friend: Child Rights Risks, Harms, and Regulatory Responses to AI Chatbots and Companions. UNICEF.
  5. UNESCO. (2023). Guidance for Generative AI in Education and Research. Paris: UNESCO.
  6. UNESCO. (2021). Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Paris: UNESCO.
  7. Su, J., & Yang, W. (2022). Artificial intelligence in early childhood education: A scoping review. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 3, 100049. DOI: 10.1016/j.caeai.2022.100049.
  8. Holmes, W. (2025). AI, education, and children’s rights. Frontiers in Education, 10, 1656736. DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1656736.
  9. Ljungcrantz, L. (2026). The interaction of AI and early childhood education: A state-of-the-art review 2020–2024. Early Childhood Education Journal, 54, 3565–3581. DOI: 10.1007/s10643-025-02079-3.
  10. Chen, J. J. (2026). Made in the image of human creators: Five key pillars to mitigate AI ethical risks and safeguard children’s rights. AI and Ethics, 6, Article 159. DOI: 10.1007/s43681-025-00977-1.
Why This Special Issue Matters

The central question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will become part of children’s environments. The more consequential questions concern what kinds of childhood AI systems are helping to create; whose knowledge, languages, cultures, and assumptions are represented; which children benefit and which may be excluded or harmed; and how responsibility should be distributed among governments, educators, families, institutions, researchers, and technology providers.

IKAD-ECCR invites the international scholarly community to contribute evidence, theory, policy analysis, and critical reflection capable of informing an AI future in which innovation advances — rather than compromises — the rights, learning, care, development, dignity, and well-being of young children.

IKADPAUDI Journal of Early Childhood and Child Rights (IKAD-ECCR)
Advancing Early Childhood Education through Child Rights, Evidence and Policy

Special Issue: Early Childhood in the Age of AI: Rights, Learning, Care and Protection
Full manuscript deadline: 15 January 2027
Expected publication: June 2027
Diamond Open Access — No APC