From parenting with baby apps to coordinating dinner plans via WhatsApp, families are increasingly living their lives through digital platforms. But this is not just about convenience, it is also about power. Platforms shape family life, often invisibly, by setting the rules, gathering data, and influencing behaviours. For www.parenting.digital, Kate Mannell ...more

Sonia Livingstone was interviewed by Ashley McDermott, University of Michigan, for CaMP Anthropology. Ashley McDermott: Your work looks at how technology provokes anxieties in parents about agency, values, and tradition while simultaneously offering hope for a better future for children.  You argue that parents’ approaches to the digital are about more ...more

As societies repeatedly raise concerns about the harmful outcomes of certain online experiences on young people’s wellbeing, one priority for research is to identify the factors that mediate between risk and harm. If we can find these, surely we can deploy them strategically to protect young people from these harmful ...more

If you are on social media, there is little chance that you missed it: yesterday was Safer Internet Day and the online space buzzed with discussions of internet risks, child protection and how to make the digital world safer for children. Now that the heat of the day has passed, ...more

Full speed ahead into the new year, we reflect on what we learned over the past six months. P4DF has followed some prominent issues related to children’s internet use and digital parenting. Mental health and wellbeing Mental health and wellbeing were the focus of several Parenting for a Digital Future blog ...more

Around the world governments encourage teaching in digital skills and literacies in the school curriculum and promote digital learning at home. The hope is that gaining digital skills will help implement e-government initiatives, foster civic participation, prepare young people for the ‘jobs of the future’, promote domestic adoption of digital ...more

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 ...more

How do parents and carers approach bringing up their children in the digital age? Drawing on research for Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shapes children’s lives, Sonia Livingstone examines how children gain media literacy in after-school clubs, digital media learning sites, makerspaces and, of ...more

Digital technologies are often praised for having special relevance for children with disabilities, affording new opportunities and enabling their participation.  These benefits, however, are not without limitations, as Alicia Blum-Ross and Sonia Livingstone discovered when interviewing children and parents for their new book, Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about ...more

At a time so many everyday activities have gone online, parents are confronting the need to balance the desire to ensure children’s online participation and future opportunities with traditional “screen time” advice. For www.parenting.digital, Sonia Livingstone discusses the challenges of digital parenting in lower socio-economic status households as we learn from Ariam and ...more