Learning time privacy in early childhood: reciprocal mother–child learning of temporal boundaries

Purpose This study explores how time privacy is understood and negotiated in early childhood through a structured educational intervention. Framed within a learning sciences perspective, the study examines how children and mothers make sense of temporal boundaries through everyday interaction and reciprocal learning, thereby extending discussions of privacy beyond informational and spatial dimensions. Design/methodology/approach The study employed a qualitative intervention design involving 19 children aged 48–72 months and their mothers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews conducted before and after a structured educational intervention and were analyzed using thematic content analysis to explore participants’ evolving understandings of time privacy. Findings The findings indicate that children increasingly interpreted time privacy through familiar everyday experiences, including recognizing their own and others’ personal time within daily family routines. Mothers similarly described greater awareness of temporal boundaries and more intentional conversations about personal time in everyday life. Rather than indicating uniform behavioral change, the findings point to the gradual development of time privacy through reciprocal mother–child learning, everyday interaction, and shared meaning-making. The study also proposes the Time Privacy Learning Model in Early Childhood, which conceptualizes time privacy as a relational and learnable dimension of privacy literacy. Originality/value This study contributes to the learning sciences by conceptualizing time privacy as an emerging dimension of privacy literacy in early childhood. It extends existing privacy research by positioning temporal boundaries as a relational construct that develops through reciprocal mother–child interaction and everyday family experiences. The proposed conceptual model offers an interpretive framework for understanding how temporal awareness, relational awareness, and self-regulation may contribute to children’s developing understandings of time privacy. These findings provide practical implications for early childhood education and family-based learning in increasingly digitally mediated contexts.