Melissa Mazmanian
ABSTRACT
Parenting is a complex and morally loaded endeavor, especially in our technologically saturated world. Popular culture, news articles, and children's groups regularly suggest that parents should monitor and control children's experiences with media. Parents are thus encouraged to establish clear rules around technology exposure, screen time, and access to content. HCI parenting research tends to reflect these general messages and often assumes that media 'rules' are the norm, or at least the goal, in families. Through a two-year ethnographic study of nine families we find that the presence of technology rules is not as straightforward as literature and mainstream media suggest. In particular, our data proposes that media rules are highly variable across and within families, regularly undermined in practice, and more often around exposure than content. Further, we find that the impetuses for various family policies around media use are related to how rules are enacted in practice. Given the loaded emotional stakes that parents in this study place on negotiating media use and exposure, we argue that it is important for designers to take a more situated perspective on parenting practices.
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Index Terms
- "Okay, One More Episode": An Ethnography of Parenting in the Digital Age
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