Parenting for a Digital Future : How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children's Lives

In contrast to panicky headlines about clueless parents and kids glued to screens, Parenting for a Digital Future offers a balanced, in-depth exploration of the realities of parenting today. Drawing on interviews with and surveys of diverse parents-rich and poor, parenting toddlers to teenagers-the book offers a warm and deeply human depiction of how parents'' hopes and fears about technology influence how they remember their own pasts, how they parent in the present, and crucially, how they shape their children''s futures.

In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. In Parenting for a Digital Future, Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross draw on extensive and diverse qualitative and quantitative research with a range of parents in the UK to reveal how digital technologies characterize parenting in late modernity, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent or support. They chart how parents often enact authority and values through digital technologies since "screen time," games, and social media have become both ways of being together and of setting boundaries. Parenting for a Digital Future moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change.