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Sonia Livingstone

July 28th, 2021

Parenting for a Digital Future – one year on

0 comments | 12 shares

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Sonia Livingstone

July 28th, 2021

Parenting for a Digital Future – one year on

0 comments | 12 shares

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

It’s been an eventful year in many ways, and a tough one for most people. Children’s lives became digital by default. Education went remote. Screen time hit the roof. Researchers had to do their research via Zoom. And parents? There’s never one answer to that question: parents are as diverse as society, and their experiences of the pandemic have surely varied hugely. For www.parenting.digital, Prof Sonia Livingstone talks about how digital parenting has changed during the past year.

I have had to think on my feet about digital parenting over the past year, since I have spent much of it launching my book with Alicia Blum-Ross on Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives. The book was researched and written just before the pandemic. Yet, I suggest, our findings became even more relevant since lockdown led us all to rely on screens more than we could ever have imagined. In each book talk, podcast or news report, I was asked about the effect of the pandemic on families’ digital lives.

The book argues that parents focus intensely on the changes that digital technologies bring to their lives in part because they symbolise the difference between their childhood and that of their child(ren). Further, technologies act as a lightning rod for deep-seated anxieties about the present, amplified because of a felt lack of control over their child(ren)’s future. This is not made easier by the practical difficulties of understanding how technologies work, combined with the dystopian imaginary promoted in the media (the end of in person communication, the take-over of the machines, the triumph of all-powerful corporations). Still, many are resourceful, and find ways to assert their values and accommodate the digital in their lives.

In their efforts to manage what one parent called the tsunami of devices arriving in their homes, parents adopt three distinct genres or constellations of practices – embrace, balance and resist. Do they work? As we said on publication,

When we look to the future, we can’t say for sure which practices will pay off. But we show how the families most in need or already facing more risk are often those who place the most hopes in technology, and embrace it the most enthusiastically. This is especially the case for the families whose children have special educational needs and disabilities, and for some of the “geeky” families who have chosen to vote with their feet for a digital future.

What difference did the pandemic make? One possibility is that these sometimes-negative responses to the digital have intensified. Another is that parents have found a degree of balance, even of new opportunities, by creatively mixing digital technologies (Zoom, Netflix, Fortnite, WhatsApp) and local resources (chatting at the front door, meeting in the park, arranging a picnic) to stay in touch with friends and family. Perhaps the pandemic has led to more parents also embracing digital technologies, though some may be ever more resistant.

I’d anticipate, therefore, that when we later look back on this period with the advantage of hindsight, we’ll see all the more clearly

 

the pincer movement of parenting in the digital age, in which parents are, on the one hand, more burdened with responsibilities given the erosion of state support and an increasingly uncertain financial future and yet, on the other, charged with respecting and encouraging the agency of their child as they negotiate “the democratic family”.

Looking back over this extraordinary year, I’m grateful to all those who invited me to talk about the book. For those who’d like to catch up on what we said about the book over the past year, here’s some links.

Watch

Listen

Read

Academic articles (open-access)

First published at www.parenting.digital, this post gives the views of the authors and does not represent the position of the LSE Parenting for a Digital Future blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

You are free to republish the text of this article under Creative Commons licence crediting www.parenting.digital and the author of the piece. Please note that images are not included in this blanket licence.

Image credit: Photo by Quinn Dombrowski on Flickr

About the author

Sonia Livingstone

Sonia Livingstone OBE is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Taking a comparative, critical and contextual approach, her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published twenty books on media audiences, media literacy and media regulation, with a particular focus on the opportunities and risks of digital media use in the everyday lives of children and young people. See www.sonialivingstone.net

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