[Air-L] Book announcement - Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears About Technology Shape Children’s Lives by Sonia Livingstone & Alicia Blum-Ross (OUP 2020)

[Livingstone,S]

Dear colleagues, we’re delighted to announce that our book is published, and available with a 30% discount at www.oup.com/academic<http://www.oup.com/academic> (order with promo code ASFLYQ6).


Here’s the blurb


“Parenting for a Digital Future” asks how parents manage digital devices, what they should expect of them, and why these questions are so contested within families, among policymakers and in the media. Based on rigorous and in-depth fieldwork with diverse families around London, we argue that ‘digital parenting’ is not only about technology, salient as this may seem. Indeed, family practices and values around technology have become a crucial means by which people explore pressing dilemmas over how to live, what constitutes wellbeing and what ‘good life’ to hope for.


By inviting parents to look back to their own childhood and then forward to their children’s futures, we first position parenting in relation to the risk society before showing how digital technologies intensify families’ opportunities and risks in distinctive ways. We introduce three distinct genres for ‘digital parenting’ – embrace, balance and resist – and we explore how these play out in terms of screen time, social inequalities, geeky families, parents of children with disabilities, and more.


The book reveals the pincer movement of parenting in the digital age, in which parents are, on the one hand, more burdened with responsibilities given the erosion of state support and an increasingly uncertain financial future and yet, on the other, charged with respecting and encouraging the agency of their child as they negotiate ‘the democratic family.’


Reviews


“The best book yet written on the dilemmas of parenting in the digital age, a period of constant innovation and change for adults and children alike. Based on in-depth studies of family life, and giving close attention to inequality and deprivation, this work is an indispensable source both for academics and the lay reader.” –Anthony Giddens, House of Lords and King’s College, Cambridge


“In this rare parents-eye view over the digital landscape, Livingstone and Blum-Ross cut through polarized debates and one-size-fits all solutions. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of how digital technology intersects in unexpected and varied ways with the everyday lives of diverse families.” –Mimi Ito, Director of the Connected Learning Lab, University of California, Irvine


“Parenting for a Digital Future offers readers a rich and deeply nuanced picture of how children’s digital technology use reflects the concerns and hopes parents have for bringing up balanced and successful children. This book is a must read for anyone who cares about children and families, including scholars, policy makers, advocates, educators and, most importantly, parents themselves.” –Amy Jordan, Professor, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University


Links


‘Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives’ is published in the US at https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/parenting-for-a-digital-future-9780190874704?cc=us&lang=en&<https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/parenting-for-a-digital-future-9780190874704?cc=us&lang=en&%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank>


Published in the UK on 7 Aug https://global.oup.com/academic/product/parenting-for-a-digital-future-9780190874704?cc=gb&lang=en&<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/parenting-for-a-digital-future-9780190874704?cc=gb&lang=en&%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank>


Review copies available from academic.reviews at oup.com<mailto:academic.reviews at oup.com%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank>


On Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Parenting-Digital-Future-Technology-Childrens/dp/0190874708/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=


US book launch is kindly hosted by the Joan Ganz Cooney Centre on Wednesday 29th July  at http://joanganzcooneycenter.org/event/parenting-for-a-digital-future/

See also:


Interview and podcast for NPR with Sonia and Alicia at https://www.npr.org/2020/07/20/893020810/when-it-comes-to-screens-kids-need-a-guide-not-a-disciplinarian

Sonia’s TED Talk about the book is at https://www.ted.com/talks/sonia_livingstone_parenting_in_the_digital_age


Interview with Sonia in the Chronicle of Evidence-based Mentoring at https://www.evidencebasedmentoring.org/professor-sonia-livingstone-on-parenting-in-the-digital-age/

Implications for media literacy - FOSI Briefs the Hill webinar at https://www.fosi.org/events/fosi-briefs-hill-misinformation-and-importance-media-literacy/


We’re blogging about the book and related work at www.parenting.digital<http://www.parenting.digital>


Sonia Livingstone, LSE