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Welcome to our blog

  • How do parents seek to bring up their children in the digital age?
  • What risks and opportunities shape children’s digital lives now and in the future?
  • What does the research say, and how do the findings vary in different parts of the world?

This blog began life as part of a research project called ‘Parenting for a Digital Future,’ part of the Connected Learning Research Network funded by the MacArthur Foundation. It has since grown into a wider examination of the many questions that arise now that children are growing up in a digital world.

We are keen to sustain an evidence-based dialogue between the public and social science. The public – especially, but not only, parents – face many challenges in relation to children’s changing digital lives. Some of these are in the here-and-now (e.g. should children have their own tablet computer?). Some are more future-oriented (will coding help them get a good job?). We reflect on such topical questions and debates under ‘In the news‘.

We have been conducting our own interviews, observations and survey with a wide range of parents and children. Some have ‘voted with their feet’, joining digital media or coding clubs. Some prefer to keep digital media for their personal leisure time. Some have special needs and hope that technology will help them connect better with the wider world. We’ll keep you up to date with our findings under ‘Our publications‘.

Since things are changing everywhere in different ways, we regularly invite other researchers from across the globe to add their own experiences, observations and expertise in ‘Research shows…‘. It’s often hard to see how our lives could be other than what they are. We really hope that collating accounts of diverse ways of living with ‘the digital’ will provoke you to think afresh about what we currently take for granted.

We will also step outside academia to take a look at the topic from the perspective of educators, activists, regulators and policy-makers, and examine the broader picture through interviews with leading figures and book reviews of the latest publications. We’ll do that under ‘Reflections’.

We will publish one or more posts each week, from our team and from guest bloggers. We’d love to hear from you in return. Contact us (s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk) to tell us what you think, to offer great links or suggested topics, etc. If you are interested in contributing to our blog, our editorial guidelines are here.

All posts are published under a Creative Commons license, and they may be reposted, with attribution and with no editing for content, with attribution.

See our YouTube channel for more details about our research.