Parenting for a Digital Future

Abstract

Abstract In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. Drawing on extensive research with parents both rich and poor, parenting toddlers to teenagers, this book reveals how digital technologies give parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. It argues that, in late modernity, parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and yet increasingly charged with respecting and developing the agency of their child—leaving much to be negotiated. The book charts how parents enact authority and values through digital technologies—as “screen time,” videogames, and social media become ways of both being together and of setting boundaries, with digital technologies introducing valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward hard-to-imagine futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children’s lives. This book moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research in the United Kingdom, the book offers conclusions and insights relevant to parents, policymakers, educators, and researchers everywhere.

Cite this

Sonia Livingstone, Alicia Blum‐Ross (2020). Parenting for a Digital Future. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190874698.001.0001

@book{sonia2020parenting,
  title  = {Parenting for a Digital Future},
  author = {Livingstone, Sonia and Blum‐Ross, Alicia},
  year   = {2020},
  doi    = {10.1093/oso/9780190874698.001.0001}
}

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