Imagining the Future

In this chapter the authors develop conclusions by revisiting families from earlier chapters to demonstrate what differences their conceptions of the future made to their parenting in the here and now. It is observed that the genres of practice—embrace, balance, resist—illuminate the generational stories that parents tell, looking back to their childhoods and forward to particular visions of an often-digital future. Whether parents embrace, balance, or resist technology, it is through these practices, and the values that parents invest in them, that parents shape their family’s present and their children’s future. Given that families’ lives are, further, characterized by risk and inequality, the results vary considerably as future uncertainties compound parental anxieties. Not only may parents’ fascination with or resistance to the digital turn out to be misplaced, but digital technologies add further complexities and compound parents’ uncertainties. Having listened to parents and sought to recognize their concerns, the authors end with recommendations for action for the organizations tasked with addressing and improving families’ lives and their futures, digital or otherwise.

Parents and Digital Learning

This chapter explores parents’ practical efforts to realize the promise that the believe digital technologies hold for learning –at home, at school and in extracurricular activities-- in the present and for the future. Our fieldwork contrasts the values and imaginaries of three extracurricular digital learning sites, bringing together the voices of educators and parents to understand how each conceives of the learning potential associated with digital technologies. Somewhat unexpectedly, although the chosen learning sites vary considerably in resources, each tends to underplay the importance of parents in scaffolding children’s digital interests and, through a series of minor but significant barriers, to disconnect parents from their children’s learning.

Social Inequality

This chapter contrasts the experiences of families living in very different circumstances, many of whom are engaging in what has been described as “intensive parenting.” Here we argue that it is not only privileged families but also, indeed, families from across the social spectrum that now invest in the kinds of “concerted cultivation” practices through which parents try to realize the future they imagine for their children, including through embrace of digital technologies. Examining distinctive intersections of cultural and economic capital in a global city like London complicates standard linear classifications of households—including an emergent category of educated but low-income families who seek especially creative ways of engaging with digital technologies. While the case studies of diverse families challenge existing interpretations of class and parenting, we nonetheless show how privilege remains important in shaping the unequal opportunities enabled by digital technology.

(Dis)abilities

Parents of children with special education needs and disabilities (SEN) often experience an intensified struggle to balance the risks of digital technologies while also embracing the opportunities. This chapter argues that, rather than being the exception, these families illustrate the dilemmas of the digital age felt in varying degrees by many families. For families with children with special education needs and disabilities, these dilemmas, we argue, are heightened given parents’ efforts to chart individualized pathways under conditions of significant uncertainty and reduced structural support. Digital technologies, in short, seem to suggest a potential path toward a socially sanctioned and innovative future, along with some creative workarounds to resolve a lack of domestic resources or capacity. However, the hopes raised by digital technologies for some of the families discussed in this chapter may be unrealized, and do not substitute for provision of better state services.

Geek Identities in the Digital Family

This chapter addresses families that have most actively embraced the idea of a digital future—self-declared “geeky” children and parents. Although these families are in some ways exceptional, their lives reveal the considerable emotional, financial, and time investment required by the premise—avidly promoted by both the public and private sectors—that the future is digital. But the outcomes remain unknown and are, arguably, riskier than more traditional routes. Families accept these terms, it is suggested, insofar as they see the adoption of a “geeky” identity as offering them a plausible pathway to overcome some unique biographical challenges. However, the authors avoid celebrating them as “positive deviants” even though they may yet benefit from being in the vanguard.

Expectations

How should parents manage their children’s use of digital devices? Why do parents hope for so much from the digital world and yet fear it? The rights and wrongs of “digital parenting” are hotly contested within families, among policymakers, and in the media? To answer these questions, this chapter introduces fieldwork grounded in the day-to-day experiences of families. We argue that “digital parenting” has become a crucial means by which society explores pressing dilemmas over how to live, what constitutes well-being, and what a “good life” is. The chapter explores how parents look backward to their childhood to reflect on how they were parented, and then forward to the conditions in which their children might themselves parent in the future. We begin by positioning parenting conceptually in relation to theories of late modernity and the risk society, but find we must give more emphasis to the importance of established (if changing) social structures and persistent social inequalities. Throughout the book, we reveal how it is through their everyday practices that families navigate between present desires and material constraints. The chapter then introduces three distinct genres for “digital parenting”—embrace, balance, and resist—as a way of understanding the particular constellations of practices, values, and imaginaries that are threaded throughout the stories of individuals and families that follow.

Family Life in the Digital Age

The frame of a single day is used to reveal the multiple ways in which parents move between and among the genres of digital parenting within the day. Through negotiating the now-mediated activities of getting up, homework, family time, and bedtime, parents articulate their values not only about digital technologies but also, importantly, about family life. The authors contrast public policy that, problematically, exhorts parents to police their children’s “screen time” with parents’ efforts to sustain a more democratic mode of family life that respects their and their children’s interests in digital technologies. Eschewing the myth of parents as unremittingly digitally ignorant, this chapter reveals how their own interest in and hopes for digital technologies lead them to seek new modes of parenting, surprisingly often focused on shared digital pleasures.