Navigating children’s screen-time at home: narratives of childing and parenting within the familial generational structure

ABSTRACT

This article draws upon my qualitative study with 8–12-year-old British Indian children and their professional middle-class parents, to demonstrate the ways in which parental mediation of children’s digital leisure play out within the home. Using the relational lens of ‘generational order’, I identify the ways in which children ‘navigate’ their way around restrictive parental mediation of digital technologies just as parents ‘navigate’ multiple moral discourses emerging from media and policy circles imploring them to curb children’s screen-time. Understanding these ‘navigation’ strategies around children’s digital media use at home throws fresh light on parent–child relations, children’s agency and their imbrications with wider generational structures. I conclude by arguing that greater empirical analyses of the relational aspects of parenting and childing are needed for Childhood Studies to fully appreciate the way generational structures inflect the lived geographies of childhood and parenthood in the context of children’s home-based digital leisure.

KEYWORDS:

• generational order
• parenting
• childing
• children’s agency
• digital media
• parental mediation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work on this article was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (ESRC Grant Ref: ES/V011952/1) and the data collection was funded by Royal Holloway University of London Doctoral Scholarship.