Digital Childhoods by Susan J. Danby Marilyn Fleer Christina Davidson & Maria Hatzigianni

Author:Susan J. Danby, Marilyn Fleer, Christina Davidson & Maria Hatzigianni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

9.6 Children’s Understanding and Management of Parental Rules

The data from this study indicate that on the whole, children in this age group are fairly compliant with parents’ rules and do not tend to challenge them. They know that if they are well behaved, they may receive a reward in terms of being allowed to use technology and if they are not well behaved, they may well be deprived of its use. In the Czech Republic, for example, a child in Family 1 stated: “For example, when I am naughty, mummy forbids me to use the MP3 player for four days, until I behave in a nice way”.

Some children are unaware that rules have been set. The rules appeared to be internalised as a set of practices that are not experienced as constraints. For example, one girl (Italy, Family 1) hated videogames because she stated that they make you stupid, a view also espoused by her mother; a boy (Italy, Family 7) thought videogames could be used to relax yourself once in a whilst, exactly as his father had said during the interview. This normalisation of parental discourse may lead to the adoption of rules without further need for adult intervention.

In some contexts, children are not fully aware that parents are limiting their use of technologies. For example, they see changes in their tablet’s configurations, discover that apps they like are no longer on their devices or that a device is not placed where it used to be, but they don’t know why. Parental efforts to regulate their media use, in this case, are not understood by children, and so they are less likely to be interiorised. An interesting example of this dynamic emerged during an ice-breaker activity with Italy, Family 6, when all the family was gathered together. The mother told the interviewers that she gave her son two old smartphones to play with but changed her mind about this because of his behaviour. At that point the child stated, “I cannot find them anymore”, as if it was his responsibility, but his mum had hidden the smartphones and not told him until that precise moment.

Children in general had an understanding of how parental rules were age appropriate, recognising as legitimate that older siblings could do more, use different devices or play different games because they were older, even though they might complain about this on occasion, or lack understanding of the full extent of their siblings’ practices:Child: [At home] we are not allowed to use Facebook. Only the oldest ones (…) I have four brothers and a very big one, he is 20, I think. He is all the time on Facebook. But we [younger children] cannot go on Facebook.

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