Parenting for a Digital Future

Last updated: 2024-01-25

About our SID activities

We will be highlighting our recent research on platforms in family life – PlatFAMs, asking whether and how platforms for social media, learning, entertainment and care make a difference in relationships among children, parents and grandparents.

What we are doing to create a better internet…

We seek to disseminate our work and raise awareness through the Parenting for a Digital Future (P4DF, www.parenting.digital) blog. To create a better internet, we bring quality research and evidence to public attention and inform public deliberation and policymaking.

About us

How do parents seek to bring up their children in the digital age?
What risks and opportunities shape children’s digital lives now and in the future?
What does the research say, and how do the findings vary in different parts of the world?
 
This blog began life as part of a research project called ‘Parenting for a Digital Future,’ part of the Connected Learning Research Network funded by the MacArthur Foundation. It has since grown into a wider examination of the many questions that arise now that children are growing up in a digital world.
 
We are keen to sustain an evidence-based dialogue between the public and social science. The public – especially, but not only, parents – face many challenges in relation to children’s changing digital lives. Some of these are in the here-and-now (e.g. should children have their own tablet computer?). Some are more future-oriented (will coding help them get a good job?). We reflect on such topical questions and debates under ‘In the news‘.
 
We have been conducting our own interviews, observations and survey with a wide range of parents and children. Some have ‘voted with their feet’, joining digital media or coding clubs. Some prefer to keep digital media for their personal leisure time. Some have special needs and hope that technology will help them connect better with the wider world. We’ll keep you up to date with our findings under ‘Our publications‘.
 
Since things are changing everywhere in different ways, we regularly invite other researchers from across the globe to add their own experiences, observations and expertise in ‘Research shows…‘. It’s often hard to see how our lives could be other than what they are. We really hope that collating accounts of diverse ways of living with ‘the digital’ will provoke you to think afresh about what we currently take for granted.
 
We will also step outside academia to take a look at the topic from the perspective of educators, activists, regulators and policymakers, and examine the broader picture through interviews with leading figures and book reviews of the latest publications. We’ll do that under ‘Reflections’.

Additional links/resources

Website
http://www.parenting.digital

Contact name
Sonia Livingstone

Contact email
s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk

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