1st Edition
Children, Media, and Pandemic Parenting Family Life in Uncertain Times
This book examines changes in families’ rules and routines connected with media during the pandemic and shifts in parents’ understanding of children’s media use.
Drawing on interviews with 130 parents at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book explores specific cultural contexts across seven countries: Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, South Korea, United Kingdom, and United States. Readers will gain an understanding of family media practices during the pandemic and how they were influenced by contextual factors such as the pandemic restrictions, family relationships and situations, socioeconomic statuses, cultural norms and values, and sociotechnical visions, among others. Further, encounter with theoretical framings will provide innovative ways to understand what it means for children, parents and families to live in the digital age.
This timely volume will offer key insights to researchers and graduate students studying in a variety of disciplines including media and cultural studies, communication arts, education, childhood studies and family studies.
Foreword: Learning from the pandemic
Julian Sefton-Green
1 Introduction: Families, screen media, and daily life during the pandemic
Rebekah Willett
2 Space, Time, and Families' Relational Media Practices: China and Canada
Lindsay C. Sheppard, Xinyu Zhao, Natalie Coulter
3 Temporalities and changing understandings of children’s use of media: Australia, China and the United States
Rebekah Willett, Sarah Healy, Xinyu Zhao
4 Schooling with and through technologies during the pandemic: South Korea and the UK
Rebecca Coles, Hyeon-Seong Jeong, Rebekah Willett
5 ‘Just doing stupid things’: Affective affinities for imagining children’s digital creativity
Diana Carolina García Gómez, Sarah Healy, Rebecca Coles
6 Imaginaries of Parental Controls: The State, Market and Families
Xinyu Zhao, Maureen Mauk, Amie Kim
7 Conclusion: contributions, provocations, and calls to action
Rebekah Willett, Xinyu Zhao, Diana Carolina García Gómez
Biography
Rebekah Willett is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She conducts research on children’s media cultures, focusing on issues of play, literacy, identity, and learning. Her publications include work on makerspaces, playground games, amateur camcorder cultures, online gaming, and family media practices.
Xinyu Zhao is a Research Fellow (Digital Childhoods) at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, Deakin University, Australia. As a sociologist, he is interested in researching the political economy of digital childhoods and cultural diversity in contemporary digital parenting.
"Before the pandemic, society worried that all children wanted was more screen time. But as the pandemic interrupted children’s access to the ‘real world’, it became clear that the opposite was the case. This closely evidenced book demonstrates parents’ myriad and nuanced responses to this crisis moment for families and provides hope for new ways ahead."
Sonia Livingstone, Professor, London School of Economics, author of Parenting for a Digital Future
"Centering on the voices, perspectives and ideological commitments of parents in seven countries,‘Children, Media, and Pandemic Parenting: Family life in uncertain times’ offers culturally and politically nuanced insights into media practices, discourses and norms in diverse homes that make up children’s living, playing and learning at the height of the pandemic. This book is a must to all those who want to understand home media ecologies through the lenses of parenting, as well as children’s agency and rights, honoring differences and counter-stories of what it means to be a parent and a child in an ever-evolving mediatized and turbulent world."
Kristiina Kumpulainen, Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada
"This is an important and insightful book which explores pedagogical, social and cultural practices with digital media in families around the world during the pandemic. Willett and Zhao have assembled an international set of contributions which carefully resist the prevalent and overly simplistic discourses that emerged during the global pandemic on ‘screen time’ and ‘learning loss’. Instead, the contributors provide methodologically innovative and nuanced accounts of family life and ‘the digital’ in pandemic times in a range of locations worldwide. In his foreword, Sefton-Green is right to point out how the book demonstrates the value of international comparative work in the field. In their conclusion, Willett and Zhao call for future research which builds on these multi-layered findings which is based on observation rather than surveillance, is respectful of children’s rights, and is designed with curiosity and attention to the detail of families’ lived experience. This book deserves the widest possible readership, not only drawn from researchers and policymakers but also from families negotiating the complexities of ‘the digital’. They will all benefit greatly from this book’s informed and considered response to uncertain times which has important implications for our understanding of digital life well beyond the pandemic and into whatever the future holds."
John Potter, Professor, UCL Knowledge Lab, University College London, Institute of Education
"This is an exciting and highly informative book that offers a range of fascinating insights into families' experiences with digital media during the pandemic. The authors provide a wealth of information about digital parenting in an international context, and challenge existing and limiting assumptions about issues such as digital surveillance, screen time and screen-mediated schooling. This is an impressive volume that engages with innovate analytical frameworks and fascinating datasets in an insightful and nuanced manner, bringing important new theoretical and methodological insights that can inform researchers, parents and policy-makers alike."
Jackie Marsh, Emeritus Professor, University of Sheffield, UK
"The Covid pandemic of the early 2020s posed unprecedented challenges for family life, not least in relation to the role of screen media. Children, Media and Pandemic Parenting presents in-depth collaborative research, conducted across some very diverse international settings, looking at how parents and children learned to cope with the dilemmas and anxieties that arose. In the process, it points to the need to move beyond received wisdom – for example about screen time – and to rethink our understanding of the complexities of contemporary parenting much more broadly. In a world where childhood is now ‘digital by default’, this is precisely the kind of research we need."
David Buckingham, Emeritus Professor, Loughborough University, UK
"At a time when parents are challenged by the omnipresence of media in their children’s lives, the analysis of the experiences of families in seven different countries during the pandemic is highly insightful and provocative. The interdisciplinary and multi-cultural perspective offered in this unique collection inspires us to ask new questions, consider what seems to be shared across the globe and what is culturally specific, and how our approaches to the media-technologies in our lives are shaped by our contexts and circumstances. Parents, educators, scholars of media, professionals and policy makers will find within these pages new understandings of what parenting and schooling with media are or could be."
Dafna Lemish, Professor, Journalism and Media Studies, Rutgers University, USA
