Parenting For A Digital Future

"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 diverse parents, this book reveals how digital technologies give personal and political parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. The book reveals the pincer movement of parenting in late modernity. Parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and charged with respecting the agency of their child-leaving much to negotiate in today's "democratic" families. The book charts how parents now often enact authority and values through digital technologies-as "screen time," games, or social media become ways of both being together and setting boundaries. The authors show how digital technologies introduce both valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward varied imagined 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"--

An essential guide for parents navigating the new frontier of hyper-connected kids. Today's teenagers spend about nine hours per day online. Parents of this ultra-connected generation struggle with decisions completely new to parenting: Should an eight-year-old be allowed to go on social media? How can parents help their children gain the most from the best aspects of the digital age? How can we keep kids safe from digital harm? John Palfrey and Urs Gasser bring together over a decade of research at Harvard to tackle parents' most urgent concerns. The Connected Parent is required reading for anyone trying to help their kids flourish in the fast-changing, uncharted territory of the digital age.

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. In Parenting for a Digital Future, Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross draw on extensive and diverse qualitative and quantitative research with a range of parents in the UK to reveal how digital technologies characterize parenting in late modernity, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent or support. They chart how parents often enact authority and values through digital technologies since "screen time," games, and social media have become both ways of being together and of setting boundaries. Parenting for a Digital Future 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.

Parenting for the Digital Generation provides a practical handbook for parents, grandparents, teachers, and counselors who want to understand both the opportunities and the threats that exist for the generation of digital natives who are more familiar with a smartphone than they are with a paper book. This book provides straightforward, jargon-free information regarding the online environment and the experience in which children and young adults engage both inside and outside the classroom. The digital environment creates many challenges, some of which are largely the same as parents faced before the Internet, but others which are entirely new. Many children struggle to connect, and they underperform in the absence of the social and emotional support of a healthy learning environment. Parents must also help their children navigate a complex and occasionally dangerous online world. This book provides a step-by-step guide for parents seeking to raise happy, mature, creative, and well-adjusted children. The guide provides clear explanations of the keys to navigating as a parent in the online environment while providing practical strategies that do not look for dangers where there are only remote threats.

Offers parents strategies for coping with the increasing presence of digital and mobile media and for managing new technology for their children, and examines how approaches differ among families according to income.

When children as young as three can take their own selfies, and customise their own avatars, how should we respond to the opportunity and threat of digital personalization for young children? In this book, Kucirkova offers a comprehensive account of the effects of digitally-mediated personalization on children’s development of ‘self’.

Whether members of the family are headed to school or work, smartphones accompany family members throughout the day. The growing sophistication of mobile communication has unleashed a proliferation of apps, channels, and platforms that link parents to their children and the key institutions in their lives. While parents may feel empowered by their ability to provide their children assistance with a click on their smartphone, they may also feel pressured and overwhelmed by this need to always be on call for their children. This book focuses on the phenomenon of transcendent parenting, where parents actively use technology to go beyond traditional, physical practices of parenting. In drawing on the experiences of intensely digitally-connected families in Singapore to tell a global story, Sun Sun Lim argues how transcendent parenting can embody and convey, intentionally or not, the parenting priorities in these households. Chapters outline how parents exploit mobile connectivity to transcend the physical distance between themselves and their children, the online and offline social interaction environments, and the timelessness of seemingly ceaseless parenting. Transcendent Parenting further explores how mobile communication allows parents to be more involved than ever in their children's lives, leaving readers to question whether or not parents have become too involved as a result. With its clear discussions of the effects of transcendent parenting on parents' wellbeing and children's personal development, Transcendent Parenting will appeal to a broad audience of readers, from scholars, educators and policy makers to parents and young people across the globe.

A New York Times Bestseller Award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales crisscrossed the country talking to more than two hundred girls between the ages of thirteen and nineteen about their experiences online and off. They are coming of age online in a hypersexualized culture that has normalized extreme behavior, from pornography to the casual exchange of nude photographs; a culture rife with a virulent new strain of sexism; a culture in which teenagers are spending so much time on technology and social media that they are not developing basic communication skills. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media: Instagram, Whisper, Vine, Youtube, Kik, Ask.fm, Tinder. Provocative, explosive, and urgent, American Girls will ignite much-needed conversation about how we can help our daughters and sons negotiate the new social and sexual norms that govern their lives.