Amid all of the confusion regarding how to raise children in a technology-saturated world, everyday household routines connected with screens have become a source of struggle. What parent or caregiver has not been stressed over questions about their children and technology? What apps are OK, and how worried should we be about YouTube? How much time is too much? When can children handle their own social media accounts?
Parents and caregivers are constantly developing family rules connected with digital media and technologies. They struggle with contradictory advice about providing children access to screens or about regulating screen access.
Parents are told that children need to have full access to technologies to succeed academically, prepare for the workforce, be a part of their peer culture and learn how to handle issues such as privacy and misinformation.
About the scholar
Rebekah Willett is an associate professor in the Information School. Her research areas include childhood studies, media and cultural studies, education and girlhood studies. She is interested in children’s media cultures, new literacies, digital culture, play and public library makerspaces. Her current research project examines libraries as community hubs for teaching positive screen media practices.
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On the other hand, parents are told to be wary of online risks and potential harm.
My research provides new ways of thinking about children’s media engagements that go beyond benefits and risks. I explain that there is danger of over-celebrating the potential for children’s interactions with media while promising results that likely will never materialize.
In addition, over-regulation on a national and even household level can reduce children’s access to the benefits of media engagement, create family anxiety and shut down dialogue with children.
My aim is to put children, families, and their experiences at the center of conversations about children’s media culture.
I demonstrate ways parenting advice in media and in everyday conversations often set up hierarchies that indicate “good” versus “bad” parents.
Some parental practices are set up as “good” by describing certain media-related activities as safe and educational, and by indicating that “good parents” are those who provide these apps and activities while also carefully regulating their children’s media time.
Other parents are viewed as less discerning; allowing their children to play in virtual and real-life spaces where there are risks, such as “stranger danger,” privacy issues and exposure to advertising pressures.
These hierarchies privilege middle-class families’ media usage, which does not account for the multiple ways our culture consumes media. I argue that the framing of parenting in this good parent-bad parent way is not new and has been used throughout the history of children and media.
This history means that the everyday advice that society seems to understand as norms, is hard to change. It seems like common sense that children should primarily be consuming media with parents, that media should be mainly educational and that screen time is strictly controlled.
However, it is important to recognize these assumptions favor particular types of families; but all families are different.
My research analyzes the factors that shape decisions families make about screen media ranging from disabilities, ethnicities, religious beliefs through to work schedules, access to technologies and geographical isolation.
My aims are for researchers to see the complexities and meaning- making that happens as families negotiate children’s media use and for professionals who provide guidance about media to better see families as individuals.
This essay originally appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal’s Fueling Discovery section on May 4, 2020. Fueling Discovery is a special partnership between the Wisconsin State Journal and the College of Letters & Science.