In this talk, TED Speaker, Sonia Livingstone will talk about :
The promise of coding as the new Latin encapsulates the hopes and fear mentioned to us by parents during interviews for “Parenting for a Digital Future” (Oxford University Press, 2020). Learning to code can seem vital to parents seeking to support their child’s digital future, to ensure they have the necessary tools to succeed. However, our research shows that digital parenting has become highly fraught because it acts as a lightning rod for the many societal challenges faced by families in recent years, now exacerbated by the pandemic. Drawing on in-depth qualitative work with families as they navigate a changing digital world, I will address the pincer movement of parenting in late modernity. Parents are, at once, more burdened with responsibilities, given the erosion of state support and an increasingly uncertain financial future, and yet also charged with respecting the agency of their child – leaving much to negotiate in today’s “democratic” families. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look towards varied imagined futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children’s lives.
About Speaker
Sonia Livingstone FBA, OBE is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics, and Political Science. Her 20 books include “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives.” She directs the projects “Children’s Data and Privacy Online,” “Global Kids Online” (with UNICEF) and has advised the European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe, ITU, OECD, and others on children’s risks and rights in a digital age. See www.sonialivingstone.net