Negotiating and Resisting Digital Media in Young Children's Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Study

While the dominating societal discourse highlights the positive aspects of digitalization of childhood, families with young children may perceive things differently, even demonstrating various forms of resistance to children’s media practices and use of digital technology. It is within the domestic sphere that young children are introduced to digital media, but still policymakers and scholars have paid little attention to these issues. In this chapter, preliminary Swedish findings from a European comparative study on 0- to 3-year-olds and their digital life are presented and discussed in relation to domestication and parental mediation of media.

"This chapter stresses the need for a contex- tual approach as a means to map different processes of negotiation or resistance within the domestic sphere related to young children’s adoption of digital media. In order to understand children’s digital practices and emerging skills, it is not enough to examine media access in the household. The examples presented in this chapter emphasize the need to consider values and aspirations, social relations, family constellation, and general media use of the family (cf. Haddon, 2011), all of which can facilitate and pro- mote, but also prevent and delay the development of early childhood digital literacies.... While international and national policies often highlight the benefits of digitalization for society and family life, the lives of Anna and Oscar show that several mechanisms of resistance and negotiation are the outcome of strong beliefs concerning what constitutes a good childhood, to which digital media might not always be thought to belong. Thus, there seems to be a clash between family ideologies and political aspirations." (Authors, 125)