The parent app : understanding families in the digital age / Lynn Schofield Clark.

Includes bibliographies and index.

New technologies offer new ways for families to connect, access ideas and entertainment, and manage the risks faced by children and teens, but they also bring more responsibilities, choices and challenges. 'The Parent App' explores these differences and provides the kind of guidance backed by thorough research that parents today desperately need.

"This book draws on in-depth interviews with families from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in order to trace the difference that social class makes in how families are making decisions about digital and mobile media use. This book finds that upper income families employ an ethic of expressive empowerment, in which parents encourage their children to use these media in relation to education and self-development and to avoid use that might distract them from goals of achievement. Lower income families, in contrast, embrace an ethic of respectful connectedness, in which family members are encouraged to use digital and mobile media in ways that are respectful, compliant toward parents, and family focused. Each approach has its own benefits and drawbacks, as upper income families are increasingly tempted to employ communication technologies in helicopter and surveillance parenting, and lower income families may use technologies in ways that strengthen interfamilial and neighborhood bonds while inadvertently reinforcing social isolation from other groups. The book challenges the hope that digital and mobile media might assist in bridging cultural and economic divides. It concludes that as U.S. families experience lives that are increasingly isolated from those whose economic circumstances differ from their own, the different roles that digital and mobile media are playing in family lives are reinforcing rather than alleviating what continues to be a troubling economic and social gap in U.S. society."--Provided by publisher.

Preface: The parent app and the parent trap -- part 1. Digital and mobile media: Cautionary tales. Risk, media, and parenting in a digital age ; Cyberbullying girls, helicopter moms, and internet predators ; Strict parents, gamer high school dropouts, and shunned overachievers -- part 2. Digital media and youth. Identity 2.0: Young people and digital and mobile media ; Less advantaged teens, ethnicity, and digital and mobile media: Respect, restriction, and reversal -- part 3. Digital and mobile media and family communication. Communication in families: Expressive empowerment and respectful connectedness ; How parents are mediating the media in middle-class and in less advantaged homes ; Media rich and time poor: The emotion work of parenting in a digital age ; Parenting in a digital age: The mediatization of family life and the need to act -- Appendix A: Methodology -- Appendix B: Parents, children, and the media landscape: Resources -- Appendix C: Family digital and mobile media agreement.

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