I’ve researched children’s digital lives since the internet first arrived in many people’s homes. Recently, I noticed parents’ concerns weren’t listened to – mostly, researchers interview parents to find out about their children rather than about parents themselves. Worse, policymakers often make decisions that affect parents without consulting them. So, in Parenting for a Digital Future we focused on parents, following my previous books on Children and the Internet and The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age. As a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, I love that moment of knocking on a family’s door, and am always curious to see what I will find!
Parenting for a Digital Future asks how parents manage digital devices, what they expect of them, and why technology is so hotly contested by families, policymakers, and the media. It’s based on detailed interviews with diverse families around London. We invited parents to look back to their own childhoods and forward to their children’s futures. We learned about three distinct genres for ‘digital parenting’ – embrace, balance, and resist.
Digital technologies intensify families’ opportunities and risks in today’s ‘risk society.’ We discuss what this means for screen time, social inequalities, geeky families, children with disabilities, and education and learning. Crucially, ‘digital parenting’ has become a way for families to explore pressing dilemmas over how to live, what constitutes wellbeing, and what ‘good life’ to hope for.
As a researcher, I’m always looking out for fresh ways to approach familiar problems.
Three problems really bother me. One is the idea of reducing all the different types of media, and all the different ways families use media, to a simplistic formula – screen time. As if we could just measure screen time, reduce it by turning parents into screen time police, and thereby solve the problems of our digital age.
Another is the idea of seeing parents as having all the power and children as willful or ignorant or naughty and so needing to be controlled. As if families weren’t trying to be more democratic and as if parents had nothing to learn from their children. The third is the idea that families have got to work all this out on their own, as if digital innovators and the wider society weren’t in some ways part of the problem and couldn’t be part of the solution.
This carefully researched book challenges all three problems and shows us another way, whether we are researchers, educators, parents, or designers.
Children and Families in the Digital Age offers a fresh, nuanced, and empirically-based perspective on how families are using digital media to enhance learning, routines, and relationships. This powerful edited collection contributes to a growing body of work suggesting the importance of understanding how the consequences of digital media use are shaped by family culture, values, practices, and the larger social and economic contexts of families' lives. Chapters offer case studies, real-life examples, and analyses of large-scale national survey data, and provide insights into previously unexplored topics such as the role of siblings in shaping the home media ecology.
I love how balanced and practical this book is, full of suggestions for parents to try out.
Yet at the same time, it’s thoroughly grounded in independent research. Crucially, it steers clear of moral panics about how tech is making everything worse and, instead, builds on tried and tested insights from evidence. This combination is because it’s written by an Oxford University professor and a parenting counsellor.
It’s also full of parents’ experiences – as I try to do in my own work, the book reminds us how incredibly diverse families are. So, there are no ‘one size fits all’ solutions – but after reading it, I felt there’s plenty I and other parents can do to support children growing up in a digital world. And that’s very encouraging!
Children today are digital natives, growing up in an age where social media and online communication is the norm. This book is an indispensable guide for parents who may feel they are struggling to keep up, addressing the issues that young people and their families face in the world of modern technology. Suzie Hayman, a parenting counsellor, and John Coleman, a distinguished psychologist, use their combined expertise to explore the challenges and possibilities of being constantly connected, helping parents to make choices about how they communicate, set boundaries and establish rules.
Using real-world examples and solid psychological theory, the book…
This book was published ten years ago, and it’s as fresh and relevant as ever. I’ve chosen to highlight it here because, honestly, it’s the classic book that catalyzed many researchers into properly listening to young people and really respecting their views.
I learned a lot from danah boyd’s fieldwork about how to put effort into gaining teens’ trust, avoiding adult assumptions, and properly listening to what teens had to say. The teens in this book are often troubled, struggling with mental health problems and difficult life circumstances – but it's not their fault, they are facing so many real-world problems – poverty, family breakdown, racism, etc.
As a result, teens turn to technology for support, privacy, intimacy, and belonging. But in key ways, technology can also make things worse. I found this book truly thought-provoking.
"boyd's new book is layered and smart . . . It's Complicated will update your mind."-Alissa Quart, New York Times Book Review
"A fascinating, well-researched and (mostly) reassuring look at how today's tech-savvy teenagers are using social media."-People
"The briefest possible summary? The kids are all right, but society isn't."-Andrew Leonard, Salon
What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens' lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She…
Media producers, digital designers, educators, child psychologists – professionals with different kinds of expertise and experience have different insights to offer.
I find it fascinating how these insights converge in this book on a vision of childhood that I can really support – children are seen as active agents making sense of their digital world, but also in need of thoughtful mentoring and guidance from parents, educators, and media producers.
Unlike some books which forget that media are not just tech but also content, this book really engages with the kinds of cultural representations that now populate children’s lives and imaginations. Of course there are differences between the authors, so this book offers plenty of food for thought to the reader.
All the essays are short, so you can get the gist of an argument and further reading in just a few pages – and each one has something new to offer.
Exploring Key Issues in Early Childhood and Technology offers early childhood allies, both in the classroom and out, a cutting-edge overview of the most important topics related to technology and media use in the early years.
In this powerful resource, international experts share their wealth of experience and unpack complex issues into a collection of accessibly written essays. This text is specifically geared towards practitioners looking for actionable information on screen time, cybersafety, makerspaces, coding, computational thinking, STEM, AI and other core issues related to technology and young children in educational settings. Influential thought leaders draw on their own experiences…
One of the questions I am most often asked by parents and the public is – is it OK to share pictures of my children online? (Other questions, by the way, are – at what age can my child get their own mobile phone? And how much screen time is too much? See my book for my answers).
The extraordinary amount of photos of children that are shared online from before their birth and every step of the way to adulthood – is simply unprecedented. And while these photos can give a lot of pleasure to family and friends, there’s so much that can go wrong.
I find it fascinating that Stacey Steinberg approaches this topic as an attorney and she really digs into the legal issues about privacy, legal redress, and children’s rights. At the same time, she’s super practical and parents can learn a lot about how to meet the challenge of growing up shared.
Is it okay to share details about my child's life on social media? What kinds of pictures should I avoid posting? Am I taking away my kids' ownership over their future online footprint? It has never been easier to share our lives online-from meals to selfies and relationship statuses to locations, information about our daily activities flows freely. But what about our right to share our kids' lives? In today's age of "sharenting", striking the right balance between engaging in online communities and respecting a child's privacy and safety can be difficult. In Growing Up Shared, Stacey Steinberg, law professor,…
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
