Digital by default: the new normal of family life under COVID-19

Sonia Livingstone (@Livingstone_S) leads the MacArthur Foundation-funded Parenting for a Digital Future project in the LSE Department of Media and Communications. Her Ted Talk on Parenting in the digital age, and recent podcast for Good Thinking explain some of these ideas further, and her book on Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives will be out in the summer.

This blog was originally posted on LSE on 5 May 2020 who have kindly allowed for it to be reposted here. 

Digital by default: the new normal of family life under COVID-19

Just a few weeks ago, children went to school, parents worried about their screen time at home, and the digital future was the stuff of science fiction. Under COVID-19, school has gone online, worries about screen time have gone through the roof, and life is fast becoming digital by default. Technology is the taken-for-granted means of playing, seeing family, doing schoolwork, hanging out with friends. Teachers, babysitters, museums, youth clubs, social workers – the whole infrastructure of childhood has moved online. So have the threats to childhood – bullies, scammers, groomers, fake news manufacturers and manipulators of all kinds.

No wonder that anxieties about the future are rising. As I learned when researching my forthcoming book with Alicia Blum-Ross, Parenting for a Digital Future, parents make sense of parenting by looking back to their own childhood and forward to their children’s adulthood. In that intergenerational space of recollection and imagination, parents frame their hopes and fears for their children, and figure out the steps they can and should take, given their particular circumstances.

But under Covid-19, it’s not just our childhood that feels far away, but our lives just a few months back. Our future just a few months hence is equally unclear – “when this is all over” is the new mantra, but we don’t know how to plan for it, and uncertainty is stressful.

What’s striking when people compare their own childhoods to those of today’s children – and never more so than now – is that digital technologies seem to crystallise the difference. Compared with earlier times, digital devices absorb children’s attention, dangle from their ears and accompany them everywhere. They clutter our homes, drain our finances, and seem to have become the focus of pleasures and worries, the means of delivering rewards and punishments, and the occasion for both family conflicts and shared togetherness. As we argue in our book, the very visibility of these technologies, along with a lively public and media debate over how parents are supposedly mis/managing them, gets everyone talking about them, keeping them top of mind.

But these highly visible digital innovations risk obscuring many other important influences on family life. Recent generations have seen many transformations – in demography, stratification, job security, welfare provision, family structure, migration, identity politics, and more. It is these that predominantly shape parental expectations and fuel their anxieties. It is these that imbue everyday technological decisions and conflicts with such emotional intensity. And it is these, far more than their screen time or social media habits, that account for the problems children and young people experience. It is, therefore, these major societal transformations that have resulted in families being so unequally positioned when faced with the challenge of being locked down, including as regards their capacity to embrace a digital-by-default life.

Perhaps because society has preferred to treat parents as a homogenous group, criticising their digital parenting while averting its gaze from the fundamentally unequal difficulties that beset them, that recent headlines have betrayed some surprise in reporting, among other Covid-19 news, the discovery that not all families can afford the technology or connectivity to support home-schooling, or that at-risk children are vulnerable to intensifying levels of offline and online abuse, or that children with special educational needs or other needs cannot be reached online by the systems of care that previously supported them offline.

While I have argued that the digital is sometimes too salient, distracting us from the fundamental social and political challenges that families face, that is not to say that the digital is irrelevant. Covid-19 has triggered a step-change in our digital lives, as in our health, economy and world politics. To support parents, and reduce their anxieties, we are witnessing an explosion of online resources for parents promising to optimise children’s online opportunities and help them combat the risks. For the most part this is exciting and welcome, though undoubtedly many organisations have an eye to their bottom line too. But much of this may not be as helpful as hoped.

As we heard in our fieldwork, parents can feel oppressed by generalised injunctions and exhortations about what they should do, especially when these are accompanied by tacit judgments about good and bad parenting – and good and bad parents. Parents are more often spoken for than heard – recipients of advice on all sides but too rarely invited to discuss their needs or co-produce resources. As a result, much of this online provision is created for “everychild” (typically an able-bodied middle-class child living in a nuclear family home with technologically-competent parents and fast broadband). Meanwhile, real parents are likely finding it difficult to locate, evaluate and select resources and guidance appropriate for their child and their family’s circumstances.

On the one hand, the new normal of digital family life is unfolding organically, as people adapt to unprecedented circumstances. A key message from our research is that the consequences will be diverse, as parents variously embrace, resist or find ways to balance the digital and non-digital, as well as the different dimensions of the digital. Geeky families may relish the chance to share their passion for technology and develop new expertise. Others will be resisting the onslaught of digital-by-default, whether because of the dystopian associations of a digital future, or because they are determined to hold onto other ways of living. Most will seek some kind of balance, though balancing, we learned from our research, can be as effortful as staying upright on a rolling log, and require a constant – and exhausting – monitoring of events and outcomes.

On the other hand, digital-by-default has long been government policy: a gradual but determined shift away from (expensive) in-person state provision towards all things digital. Among many other consequences of Covid-19, we are living through an extraordinary experiment in relying on our national digital infrastructure. And it is problematic in many ways. A long-standing concern has centred on the ways in which socio-economic inequalities mean that not all benefit fairly, with the resulting digital inequalities fuelling further socio-economic inequalities in a vicious cycle.

A more recent concern centres on datafication and digital surveillance, whether by the government or businesses or both, as ever more of our private lives move online, mediated by proprietary platforms whose activities are far from transparent and whose business interests may be quite different from the interests of children.

“When this is all over,” will we find that families’ well-meaning efforts to find ways for children to play, see family, do schoolwork and hang out with friends online under lockdown have hastened a digital future in which our lives are tracked and monetised in ways that few fully understand? Or will we find the public more resistant to all things digital, more aware of the value of alternative ways of living, more determined to find their own balance and have their voices heard?

The affordances of digital technologies in children’s lives

This post is reposted with kind permission from its author Professor David McGillivray, Chair in Event and Digital Cultures, The University of the West of Scotland. The original post can be read on  David's blog.

[Last Thursday] I had the pleasure of attending a really interesting seminar titled, Children and Digital Technology, one of three events being hosted by the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) Digital Families across the Lifecourse. How technology mediates relationships within families and impacts on experiences of childhood (and what that now means) was the focus of the day’s discussions. We had presentations from Dr Joanne Westwood on the state of play for digital technologies and their social implications; from Prof Christine Stephen of University of Stirling on Digital Childhood and early years and from Dr Natalia Kucirkova of the Open University on Digital Childhood: Myths and Realities. There was also a healthy turnout from local authorities, government and third sector organisations impacted by the digital ‘turn’, including respectme, Parenting across Scotland and the Wheatley Group amongst others.

Some thoughts I took away from the event about the impact of digital technology on the experiences of young people, at home and in educational settings:

1. We don’t know as much as we ‘think’ we know. In other words, there are lots of myths and moral panics out there, especially around the ‘risks’ associated with children and young people being online for ‘excessive’ amounts of time.
2. Codes of conduct, regulatory frameworks and rules exist within and across online communities but they’re not always explicit. However, these more implicit codes are understood and followed by confident users of these platforms (and misunderstood by digital visitors!)
3. Yet, there remain a lot of young people who are not as digitally literate as we might presume, meaning that there is an even greater need for issues pertaining to privacy, ownership, rights, the provenance of knowledge online etc that needs to become more effectively part of the educational arena.
4. Crucially, for point 3, there needs to be a focus on the ‘affordances’ of digital technologies with an emphasis on , pedagogy, practice and literacies as opposed to ‘technology’ as and in itself. To emphasise the functionality of particular technologies is to miss their associated cultural practices.
5. We need to know more about what people are doing when they inhabit digital spaces and not just how long they’re spending there. Quantifying use is important (see the recent children’s media use stats from Ofcom) but only tells us part of the story. As researchers (and practitioners) we need to know more about what people are doing in digital space, who is doing it (and who is absent) and how these practices might impact on our understandings of whether participating in digital cultures is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing.
6. Relatedly, we need to know more about whether participation and production in the ‘creation’ of digital artefacts is part of positive learning experiences, for children and young people and, if so, how are these more active digital making experiences being facilitated in the home, at school and beyond?

There were many other takeaways from the session and I’d recommend you try to get along to the follow up seminars in February and later in 2016. There’s so much to unpack in this digital space, as a parent, teacher or researcher. I’ll leave you with a provocation from Christine Stephen:

absence of a screen is now becoming a barrier to learning

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The Digital Families Across the Lifecourse project aims to bring together parenting organisations, practitioners and researchers to share what we have already learned about technology and family life, and to discuss the main issues facing families in Scotland today. The project is a collaboration between CRFR and Parenting Across Scotland and is funded by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute.

The project's second event will take place on 26 February 2016. Details will be available soon; please bookmark the project's page on the CRFR website or subscribe to receive notifications of events on our Facebook page.

Digital epiphanies: work and family in a digital age

CRFR Associate Director Natasha Mauthner on the Digital Epiphanies project 

When I tell people that I am doing a research project on how digital technologies are reshaping our work and family lives, everyone has a story to tell.

A mother I meet on holiday in a youth hostel says that while her partner takes their three children skiing, she uses her day to clear emails, catch up on work and generally get ahead of herself for when she returns to the office.

Another mother explains that while her husband – who travels a lot for work – was physically present with the family during the Christmas holiday he was mentally absent, glued to his computer and iphone even when engaged in family activities.

While one father bemoans the fact that his wife spent their summer holiday ‘on the blackberry the whole time’, another tells me he finds the idea of having a holiday without wifi unimaginable. Gesturing to the smartphone that he his holding, he tells me his digital devices have become ‘part of my body’.

What questions do these anecdotal stories prompt?

• are people’s use of digital devices challenging not only the traditional separation between work and home, but also that between work and leisure

• is ‘the holiday’, as we have come to know it in recent historical times, undergoing change?

• who stands to gain or lose from these shifts? employers, employees, families, men, women, children?

• Are these changes contested by some while accepted and even embraced by others?

These are some of the questions that colleagues and I are exploring in a project, Digital Epiphanies, www.abdn.ac.uk/business/research/epiphanies/index.php, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).). Our collaboration emerged from an EPSRC interdisciplinary workshop ¬- “Sandpit and creativity greenhouse” – on work-life balance in a digitally dependent society. Read more about Sandpits on EPSRC’s website.

Having never met one another before, four of us – me; Anna Cox, University College London; Chris Preist, Bristol University; and Rosie Robison, Anglia Ruskin University –  came together as an interdisciplinary research team over the course of six days: two days face-to-face at the University of Nottingham, and the remaining four in a virtual 3D collaborative workspace.

We came together because of our shared interest in understanding how work-life boundaries are being reconfigured through the use of digital technologies; and what scope there might be for developing digital means of negotiating work-life challenges.

The Aberdeen study – being undertaken by myself and Karolina Kazimierczak - focuses on 15 case study families with children under 18 living at home. Informed by new and emerging mobile and digital methodology the project uses multiple methods including observation, shadowing, conversations, video ethnography, digital, photographic and written diaries. The overall approach is to invite family members to take part in the project as collaborators in the research by involving them in the selection of methods and production of artefacts. The project started in March 2013, and we look forward to sharing our progress in a future contribution to this blog.

If you’d like to know more about the project contact Karolina Kazimierczak  or Natasha Mauthner or visit the project website: www.abdn.ac.uk/business/research/epiphanies/index.php