The privilege of pausing: Children reflecting on media and reading experiences

Markéta Supa

Children’s contemporary media and reading lives are increasingly governed by the imperative to consume and progress quickly. Whether in print, digital or multimodal forms, engagement with text, image and sound is shaped by a logic of acceleration. Algorithms and digital platforms encourage more frequent, faster and larger-volume interaction with content, and educational assessments often measure reading in terms of proficiency levels and numbers of books completed. These linear metrics neglect the diverse ways children engage with media and literature and leave little room for reflection on their authentic experiences. Taking time to pause and reflect offers a form of resistance to these external pressures. Instead of always moving forward, children can turn inward and responsively explore their own thoughts and feelings.

We might first associate such pauses with education or parenting, but they can also be intentionally cultivated within childhood research. In our phenomenologically guided conversations with children (ages 9–12) in Czechia, we used tangible props and open-ended prompts to support reflection on their media and reading experiences (see Supa et al., 2025; Kuzmičová and Supa, 2024; Kuzmičová et al., 2022). While talking with and listening to our participants, I repeatedly witnessed their capacity and delight in returning to past experiences of reading, viewing, imagining, playing, creating, and wondering. As van Manen (1997) noted, lived experiences gain meaning when gathered through memory and reflection in the acts of dwelling in time.

Importantly, children reflected not only on what they had once done, but also on how these experiences had felt and how they continue to matter in the present and for the future. In this way, our research conversations opened up shared spaces and moments in time for “remembering with analysis” (Epstein, 2003: 2) opening a distinct temporal horizon for both children and researchers. Disturbing “the illusion of linear time” (Pomerantz and Knight, 2025: 307), pausing to reflect invited children to stay with experiences long enough for multiple meanings to emerge. They could slow down, re-feel, re-think, and re-imagine their past, present, and future media and reading experiences, while momentarily resisting a culture of moving quickly from one act of consumption to the next, from reading to reading “better” or “more”. While doing so, they made sense not only of these experiences, but also of themselves, others, and the world around them.

Being with children in moments of reflection, I felt honoured and grateful. Although we (researchers) may have our own aims and goals—whether related to research or to children’s learning—we should, phenomenologically speaking, at least momentarily bracket them. This makes it possible for childhoods and adulthoods to dialogically co-exist in shared understanding (Sheppard, 2025). However, the temporality of awareness is essential. Reflection should not aim at constant self-consciousness, but at allowing new understandings to settle, fade, and re-emerge within the flow of living (Gadamer, [1960] 2004; Holquist, 2002). As Gadamer reminds us, every act of understanding repositions the past within the present and opens possibilities for the future. Reflection thus mediates between two “interacting temporal modes” (Bjerrum Nielsen, 2016: 1); it unfolds within chronological life while continually reworking meaning in non-linear time. Here, children’s media and reading experience remains fluid and in dialogic relation with what was, what is, and what follows (Woodfall and Zezulkova, 2016), as well as with the world of others.

Yet any reflective pausing, and listening, does not occur in isolation from the outside world, because a person has not only “a history, but also a context” (Bjerrum Nielsen, 2016: 5). Reflection belongs to children themselves, but the capacity to pause cannot be understood as purely individual. It is learned, socially mediated, and culturally shaped, rather than innate or universal (Lindholm, 2018). Pausing to reflect is therefore a privilege. It is unevenly accessible across children and communities and impacted by wider conditions of time equity (Bettencourt et al., 2025). In media- and text-saturated worlds, creating contexts in which every child can claim the time and space to pause and reflect is thus a matter of equality, inclusion, and social justice—a commitment to which research with children can actively contribute.