This is a first-class repository of new knowledge on how media and family routines intertwine in daily interactions. The multi-method approach reveals how varying forms of media affect the interaction between children and their parents. Avoiding criticism of these interactions, the contributors instead offer an impartial view of the natural occurrences in media-related family life.
"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"--
Taking an approach grounded in the media effects tradition, this book provides a comprehensive, research-oriented treatment of how children and adolescents interact with the media. Chapters review the latest findings as well as seminal studies that have helped frame the issues in such areas as advertising, violence, video games, sexuality, drugs, body image and eating disorders, music, and the Internet. Each chapter is liberally sprinkled with illustrations, examples from the media, policy debates, and real-life instances of media impact.
This companion presents the newest research in this important area, showcasing the huge diversity in children’s relationships with digital media around the globe, and exploring the benefits, challenges, history, and emerging developments in the field. Children are finding novel ways to express their passions and priorities through innovative uses of digital communication tools. This collection investigates and critiques the dynamism of children's lives online with contributions fielding both global and hyper-local issues, and bridging the wide spectrum of connected media created for and by children. From education to children's rights to cyberbullying and youth in challenging circumstances, the interdisciplinary approach ensures a careful, nuanced, multi-dimensional exploration of children’s relationships with digital media. Featuring a highly international range of case studies, perspectives, and socio-cultural contexts, The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children is the perfect reference tool for students and researchers of media and communication, family and technology studies, psychology, education, anthropology, and sociology, as well as interested teachers, policy makers, and parents.
Wall Street Journal Best Nonfiction Pick; Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year Clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair takes an in-depth look at how the Internet and the digital revolution are profoundly changing childhood and family dynamics, and offers solutions parents can use to successfully shepherd their children through the technological wilderness. As the focus of the family has turned to the glow of the screen—children constantly texting their friends or going online to do homework; parents working online around the clock—everyday life is undergoing a massive transformation. Easy access to the Internet and social media has erased the boundaries that protect children from damaging exposure to excessive marketing and the unsavory aspects of adult culture. Parents often feel they are losing a meaningful connection with their children. Children are feeling lonely and alienated. The digital world is here to stay, but what are families losing with technology's gain? As renowned clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair explains, families are in crisis as they face this issue, and even more so than they realize. Not only do chronic tech distractions have deep and lasting effects but children also desperately need parents to provide what tech cannot: close, significant interactions with the adults in their lives. Drawing on real-life stories from her clinical work with children and parents and her consulting work with educators and experts across the country, Steiner-Adair offers insights and advice that can help parents achieve greater understanding, authority, and confidence as they engage with the tech revolution unfolding in their living rooms.
This companion presents the newest research in this important area, showcasing the huge diversity in children’s relationships with digital media around the globe, and exploring the benefits, challenges, history, and emerging developments in the field. Children are finding novel ways to express their passions and priorities through innovative uses of digital communication tools. This collection investigates and critiques the dynamism of children's lives online with contributions fielding both global and hyper-local issues, and bridging the wide spectrum of connected media created for and by children. From education to children's rights to cyberbullying and youth in challenging circumstances, the interdisciplinary approach ensures a careful, nuanced, multi-dimensional exploration of children’s relationships with digital media. Featuring a highly international range of case studies, perspectives, and socio-cultural contexts, The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children is the perfect reference tool for students and researchers of media and communication, family and technology studies, psychology, education, anthropology, and sociology, as well as interested teachers, policy makers, and parents.
As fast-evolving technologies transform everyday communication and literacy practices, many young children find themselves immersed in multiple digital media from birth. Such rapid technological change has consequences for the development of early literacy, and the ways in which parents and educators are able to equip today’s young citizens for a digital future. This seminal Handbook fulfils an urgent need to consider how digital technologies are impacting the lives and learning of young children; and how childhood experiences of using digital resources can serve as the foundation for present and future development. Considering children aged 0–8 years, chapters explore the diversity of young children’s literacy skills, practices and expertise across digital tools, technologies and media, in varied contexts, settings and countries. The Handbook explores six significant areas: Part I presents an overview of research into young children’s digital literacy practices, touching on a range of theoretical, methodological and ethical approaches. Part II considers young children’s reading, writing and meaning-making when using digital media at home and in the wider community. Part III offers an overview of key challenges for early childhood education presented by digital literacy, and discusses political positioning and curricula. Part IV focuses on the multimodal and multi-sensory textual landscape of contemporary literary practices, and how children learn to read and write with and across media. Part V considers how digital technologies both influence and are influenced by children’s online and offline social relationships. Part VI draws together themes from across the Handbook, to propose an agenda for future research into digital literacies in early childhood. A timely resource identifying and exploring pedagogies designed to bolster young children’s digital and multimodal literacy practices, this key text will be of interest to early childhood educators, researchers and policy-makers.
International Perspectives on Digital Media and Early Literacy evaluates the use and impact of digital devices for social interaction, language acquisition, and early literacy. It explores the role of interactive mediation as a tool for using digital media and provides empirical examples of best practice for digital media targeting language teaching and learning. The book brings together a range of international contributions and discusses the increasing trend of digitalization as an additional resource in early childhood literacy. It provides a broad insight into current research on the potential of digital media in inclusive settings by integrating multiple perspectives from different scientific fields: (psycho)linguistics, cognitive science, language didactics, developmental psychology, technology development, and human–machine interaction. Drawing on a large body of research, it shows that crucial early experiences in communication and social learning are the basis for later academic skills. The book is structured to display children’s first developmental steps in learning in interaction with digital media and highlight various domains of early digital media use in family, kindergarten, and primary schools. This book will appeal to practitioners, academics, researchers, and students with an interest in early education, literacy education, digital education, the sociology of digital culture and social interaction, school reform, and teacher education.
This book highlights the multiple ways that digital technologies are being used in everyday contexts at home and school, in communities, and across diverse activities, from play to web searching, to talking to family members who are far away. The book helps readers understand the diverse practices employed as children make connections with digital technologies in their everyday experiences. In addition, the book employs a framework that helps readers easily access major themes at a glance, and also showcases the diversity of ideas and theorisations that underpin the respective chapters. In this way, each chapter stands alone in making a specific contribution and, at the same time, makes explicit its connections to the broader themes of digital technologies in children’s everyday lives. The concept of digital childhood presented here goes beyond a sociological reading of the everyday lives of children and their families, and reflects the various contexts in which children engage, such as preschools and childcare centres.
