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2020 •
Nelly Elias
Children, Youth and Media Around the World: An Overview of Trends and Issues
2006 •
Susan Gigli
on Children, Youth and Media
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Sirkku Kotilainen
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Young Children and Digital Media in the Home
Rita Brito
This chapter presents an overview of the digital practices of young children (under 8 years old) in the home. At such an early age, parents are the main mediators of the contact with digital media, thus paying a preponderant role in shaping young children's practices, perceptions and attitudes. In this chapter, we present partial results of a European-scale qualitative project that followed a methodology based on grounded theory, using interviews to families as method. Our findings reveal different roles played by the parents – role models, gatekeepers, companions, and supervisors. We also found that these different roles are related to the parenting style and also to the parents' own digital practices, and most importantly to perceptions and attitudes towards digital media.
The Journal of International Communication
Regulation, Awareness, Empowerment: Young People and Harmful Media Content in the Digital Age
2011 •
Andrew Ó Baoill
Guest editorial: Young children’s engagements with digital media
2019 •
Michelle Cannon
Pediatrics
Parenting and Digital Media
2017 •
Douglas Gentile
Understanding the family dynamic surrounding media use is crucial to our understanding of media effects, policy development, and the targeting of individuals and families for interventions to benefit child health and development. The Families, Parenting, and Media Workgroup reviewed the relevant research from the past few decades. We find that child characteristics, the parent-child relationship, parental mediation practices, and parents' own use of media all can influence children's media use, their attitudes regarding media, and the effects of media on children. However, gaps remain. First, more research is needed on best practices of parental mediation for both traditional and new media. Ideally, this research will involve large-scale, longitudinal studies that manage children from infancy to adulthood. Second, we need to better understand the relationship between parent media use and child media use and specifically how media may interfere with or strengthen parent-child...
PhD Thesis
Media technologies of the family: Parental anxieties, practices and knowledges in the digital age
2019 •
Catherine Page Jeffery
Children and young people’s use of digital media technologies has predominantly been framed in terms of risk, generating a collective anxiety typically expressed through media panics, ‘cyber safety’ information and ‘good parenting advice’ discourse. At the same time, discourses of opportunity frame the purported benefits and competitive advantages afforded by digital media and technologies, especially with respect to young people’s education and future job prospects. This study problematises the relations between the discursive formations of risk and opportunities with respect to children’s use of digital media and parents’ related perspectives, practices and knowledges, and social constructions of the ‘good’ parent who is ‘responsibilised’ for negotiating this tension. It reports on a qualitative analysis of 40 parents of children aged 12-16 to examine their anxieties, practices, knowledges and expectations in relation to their children’s digital media use. It draws on a number of theoretical influences from communications and media studies and parenting literature to critically interrogate popular discourses including those related to ‘media panics’ and the ‘good parent’. This study found that participants’ concerns were framed in terms of a tension between their children’s socio-biological and socio-technological development. Participants assessed the ‘appropriateness’ or not of their children’s activities in terms of whether or not it posed a threat to or an opportunity for their children’s ‘normal’ development. Participants established their own ‘hierarchies of value’, drawing on several criteria, to determine the implicit value and hence appropriateness or not of certain activities. This dissertation develops two distinct models of parenting to better understand the complexities of parents’ anxieties, practices and knowledges in negotiating the tension between minimising risks while maximising opportunities. The majority of parents adopted an ‘immersive’ style of parenting, immersing themselves in their children’s lives and embracing notions of trust, dialogue and child empowerment. Other parents adopted a ‘methodised’ approach involving adherence to a more structured set of rules and regulations. The primary contribution of this thesis is to problematise simplistic understandings of ‘good’ parenting in the digital age by uncovering the ways that parents themselves have developed their family practices to rely primarily on trust and communication as a way of minimising the risks while maximising the opportunities afforded by digital media technologies.
Children's media culture in a digital age
2011 •
Stuart Poyntz
Digital mediation is central to how children and youth grow up in the global North and in much of the global South today. In taking account of this situation, of late researchers have tended to draw on a sociology of the child in conjunction with an examination of how digitization is changing the experience of childhood itself. This article also begins by tracking key social, economic and cultural changes in young people’s lives. We then link these changes to the immersive media life many children around the world are living today, and note the worries this raises among parents, educators and others. To conclude, we identify the paradox of participation that is shaping children’s digital culture and forcing researchers and others to reconsider the relationships between consumerism and civic life.
