Digital technologies, children and young people's relationships and self-care

Children’s and young people’s access to and use of digital technologies have received increasing attention in recent years. While influential UK media commentators have often focused on associated risks, researchers have taken a less exclusively problem-focused approach. Children and young people’s use of, for example, social media and computer games to extend the spaces available to them in which to maintain relationships, to experiment with social identities, and to engage in an ‘economy of dignity’, however fragile, have all been highlighted. This paper builds on this work to further consider the role of such resources, accessed primarily through computers and mobile phones, as means of caring for oneself or ‘self-care’. It draws on a qualitative study which employed visual and audial methods to explore the sense of belonging (or not) of young people who have been ‘looked after’ by others than their biological parents, often in less affluent circumstances.

"The findings presented in this paper reflect more difficult minority world social circumstances to those on which much of this research work has been based, but confirm their interest. Dylan’s pride in his new phone might be seen as misplaced. However, it is important to recognise that he felt such possessions allowed him to belong to a broader community, as well as illustrating that he was worthy of the care, love and esteem of the person who bought them for him, a former foster mother, who in his account was definitely ‘someone’. The multi-functionality and sometimes portability of many technologies also often served other relational purposes, including storing photographs and providing affordable means of communication. They were, as for Reggie who had very little money, and for Penfold who had experienced multiple moves, a means to build and maintain significant relationships and to be part of some form of (online) community, however precarious... Rather than considering only the potential risks of such new online contacts, and thus reproducing conventional assumptions that such interactions are necessarily more risky than those encountered in the (family) home, such research might also consider digital technologies as providing technologies of self-care. As suggested by the work of DeNora (2000) and Bull (2007), sources of music and other sounds were important for many respondents. Leah, for example, used her i-Phone™ to negotiate difficult, even hostile encounters in public space, while Channel emphasised her discomfort in home spaces where she could not play music. Online computer games and music videos had also been used to blank out sources of stress, including volatile home circumstances (Reggie) or a new foster placement (Penfold). They also provided some, like Drab, with resources with which to think through difficult relationships and events, and to develop more positive interpretations of these." (Wilson, 2019: 291-2).