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From Josh Karp, in “Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning.”
When University of California-Irvine associate project scientist Heather Horst and her colleagues at the Digital Youth Project set out to study how children, their parents and families interact with digital media, others thought they would probably come away with a set of “do’s and don’ts” for parents.
That, it turned out, was not the case. There was a lot of variety in how parents were dealing with the situation. Parents’ comfort or confusion depended on their own sense of expertise with new media.
Parents’ Involvement Depends on Their Digital Know-How
Parents with greater technological sophistication (a significant number of Silicon Valley families were interviewed for the study) didn’t view their children as digital natives, nor did they necessarily see themselves as outsiders.
“They knew their kids interests were different [from their own],” Horst says. “But, they weren’t afraid of the technology.”
For these families, the battles were the familiar battles. “[The arguments] weren’t about the media itself,” Horst says. “But, the kind of control debates that go on with adolescents in the U.S.”
But, in other less privileged families, and particularly those where English was not the primary language, the comfort with new media was markedly less, and the fear of online dangers much greater.
