Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross
The book is published today in the UK following earlier publication in the US.
It’s available with a 30% discount at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/parenting-for-a-digital-future-9780190874704?cc=gb&lang=en& (order with promo code ASFLYQ6). The first chapter of the book is free to read until 24 October at Expectations.
“Parenting for a Digital Future” asks how parents manage digital devices, what they should expect of them, and why these questions are so contested within families, among policymakers and in the media. Based on rigorous and in-depth fieldwork with diverse families around London, we argue that ‘digital parenting’ is not only about technology, salient as this may seem. Indeed, family practices and values around technology have become a crucial means by which people explore pressing dilemmas over how to live, what constitutes wellbeing and what ‘good life’ to hope for.
By inviting parents to look back to their own childhood and then forward to their children’s futures, we first position parenting in relation to the risk society before showing how digital technologies intensify families’ opportunities and risks in distinctive ways. We introduce three distinct genres for ‘digital parenting’ – embrace, balance and resist – and we explore how these play out in terms of screen time, social inequalities, geeky families, parents of children with disabilities, and more.
The book reveals the pincer movement of parenting in the digital age, in which parents are, on the one hand, more burdened with responsibilities given the erosion of state support and an increasingly uncertain financial future and yet, on the other, charged with respecting and encouraging the agency of their child as they negotiate ‘the democratic family.’
Links
Read more at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2020/08/19/book/
Review copies available from academic.reviews@oup.com
UK book launch event on 24th September, please register at https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2020/09/202009241600/parenting
