Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children's lives

The book reveals the pincer movement of parenting in late modernity. Parents are both more burdened with responsibilities, given the erosion of state support and an increasingly uncertain financial future, and yet also 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 both ways of being together and of setting boundaries. For many parents, digital technologies introduce valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look towards 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.

Investigated how children and young people, along with their parents, carers, mentors and educators imagine and prepare for their personal and work futures in a digital age. Drawing on extensive research with diverse parents – rich and poor, parenting toddlers to teenagers – Parenting for a Digital Future 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. See also: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2020/08/19/book/