Parenting for a Digital Future turns one

This month, Parenting for a Digital Future turned one! Since its launch in spring of last year, the project has used the latest research to answer some of the dilemmas foremost in the minds of parents, and those who support them. The Parenting for a Digital Future team, with help from guest posters, has explored:

Date 2016-03-30 Author Parenting for a Digital Future Section awareness, research
  • How parents around the world are bringing up their children in a digital age.
  • What are parents' visions of their children's futures, and that of wider society.
  • The risks and opportunities that characterise the digital future.
In celebration of this anniversary, read highlights of some of the excellent recent content that you might have missed.
 
The Parenting for a Digital Future Team writes:
 
Knowing that parents are always hungry for good advice, we published 10 tips for digital citizen's parents, full of sensible wisdom on why your teen's use of social media isn't necessarily a problem, but what you or your kids can do if it is.
 
As part of our on-going project to show the texture and diversity of what children, young people and families actually do online, we presented emerging research looking at the surprisingly wide array of digital skills that pre-schoolers need to use on tablets, and what parents (and app designers) should consider when designing for or evaluating learning potential. Writing against the ‘deficit narrative' that characterises policy about poor families, this research showed the myriad ways in which kids from low-income Hispanic families in the US acted to facilitate their families' digital lives. We also considered where and why parents go online to find information and support, and when they still called on their face-to-face communities. So not all families are necessarily digital families, and some have even gone as far as to try to consciously opt-out of the culture of ‘digital by default.'
 
The internet holds special promise for many marginalised young people, for reasons of disability or poverty. But these opportunities are not evenly distributed, nor are they viewed with the same enthusiasm by parents around the world. For example, research on parents in Ireland, Russia and in the Asia Pacific region showed very different approaches to ‘good' digital parenting – with some overlaps too. Calls for new policy interventions aimed at supporting children and young people to develop ethical, critical approaches to privacy need to take into context these existing assumptions, in order to develop digital skills for a new generation.
 
We hope you'll read and share some of the posts above, and get in touch with us if you have something you'd like to write this year.
 
Find out more at www.parenting.digital or click here to subscribe to Parenting for a Digital Future updates direct.

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