Children and Families in the Digital Age

Learning Together in a Media Saturated Culture

Elisabeth Gee, Lori Takeuchi, Ellen Wartella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315297156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Children and Families in the Digital Age offers a fresh, nuanced, and empirically-based perspective on how families are using digital media to enhance learning, routines, and relationships. This powerful edited collection contributes to a growing body of work suggesting the importance of understanding how the consequences of digital media use are shaped by family culture, values, practices, and the larger social and economic contexts of families' lives. Chapters offer case studies, real-life examples, and analyses of large-scale national survey data, and provide insights into previously unexplored topics such as the role of siblings in shaping the home media ecology.

1

INTRODUCTION

Elisabeth Gee, Lori M. Takeuchi, Ellen Wartella

Media, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is “a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment.” Media have been a part of the human experience since ancient times, and over the millennia taken the form of cave paintings, maps for navigation, and the development of writing systems. In the past few decades, however, the Digital Revolution has yielded and continues to yield new systems and channels at what seems to be an ever-increasing rate. Common use of the term media includes the technological devices—also referred to as “tools” or “platforms”—as well as the content they deliver. Today, media include cell phones, tablets, laptop and desktop personal computers, DVD and Blu-ray players, streaming video services, game systems, websites, and social media, in addition to print newspapers and books, cinema, television, and radio.

Media play a prominent role in families with children. Parents use media to teach, entertain, preoccupy, bribe, and soothe their children, and some even use media to learn how to be better parents. Children use media to play, learn, explore, express themselves, and stave off boredom. Together, family members use media to communicate, coordinate, bond, and even disengage from one another. Given how much time adults and children alike spend with media, debates abound over the effects that the rapidly proliferating digital forms in particular are having on family life. But these sentiments are hardly new, as evidenced by one developmental psychologist’s observation more than 40 years ago:

Like the sorcerer of old, the television set casts its magic spell, freezing speech and action and turning the living into silent statues so long as enchantment lasts. The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces as the behavior it prevents—the talks, the games, the family festivities and arguments through which much of the child’s learning takes place and his character is formed.

(Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 170)

Indeed, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s remark rings as true today as ever, with television being just one of many sorcerers on the scene, albeit a stubborn one. While TV still dominates children’s screen time—2- to 10-year-olds watch, on average, 1:21 hours of video content in the form of television and DVDs per day—digital devices are occupying increasing proportions of children’s time. Children spend 17 minutes with video games, 14 minutes with computers, and 14 minutes with mobile devices, which, along with TV, contribute to an average daily screen time of 2:07 hours (Rideout, 2014). Adult media habits are shifting as well. E-mail, “productivity software,” and smartphones have revised the ethos of the American workplace such that employees are expected to accomplish far more in a day than ever before, and continue working even after they’ve physically left the office. Although location once demarcated one’s roles as employee versus parent, today parents can tote their work to a school play and even to the dinner table. When parents do finally break from work, they may be drained and, consequently, satisfied to hand their child a tablet while they catch up on Facebook or Netflix. For the single parent or the unemployed, these patterns are likely to reflect even greater strains on family together time.

As parents and children alike engage with a greater variety of media on a daily basis, how are family routines, rules, and norms evolving? To evoke Bronfenbrenner’s concerns, what can we expect in the way of the behavior digital media produce as well as the behavior they prevent? The portability and connectivity of new devices have spawned the type of family whose members are too often, according to MIT sociologist-psychologist Sherry Turkle, “alone together, each in their own rooms, each on a networked computer or mobile device” (2011, p. 280). Reports in the popular press alternate, rather predictably, between dramatizing how digital tools might damage family relationships, and extolling their potential to help families stay in touch, exchange information, and support learning. These stories, which sometimes are and sometimes are not grounded in rigorous empirical research, leave readers fearful or hopeful, and oftentimes just plain confused. In effect, these stories leave parents and educators, as well as policymakers and media developers, unprepared to help families navigate an increasingly complicated technological landscape.

Background

This volume aims to offer valuable guidance to these audiences, and contribute to the national debate on media’s potential to foster family engagement and learning. Drawing from the work of an interdisciplinary group of researchers who have been collaborating on studies of media-related practices and beliefs among families with children ages 2–12, we present new findings about media use in families, with an emphasis on how media shape learning at home. The Families and Media Project, which commenced its work in 2013, drew its inspiration from a growing body of research that began to delineate the ways in which family culture, values, practices, and social and economic circumstances shape young people’s learning and participation in a rapidly evolving, increasingly global society.

The Digital Youth Project was a significant source of this inspiration. The multi-year, multi-institution study led by Mizuko Ito and funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative is still the largest study of youth media practices to date. Between 2005 and 2008, the Digital Youth Project (DYP) employed a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods across 20 distinct studies to document adolescents’ through young adults’ understanding and use of new media. By focusing on youth-centered practices of play, communication, and creative production, the DYP located “learning in contexts that are meaningful and formative for youth, including friendships and families, as well as young people’s own aspirations, interests, and passions” (Ito et al., 2009, p. 6). DYP investigator Heather Horst (2009) identified family as one of these meaningful and formative contexts. She examined the many ways in which home- and family-specific circumstances—such as parent work schedules and income, family routines and rhythms, and the physical layout of the home—structure how youth engage with and around media. Living in cramped versus spacious quarters, for instance, may determine whether family members watch TV together or separately and, consequently, opportunities for conversation.

Other prior work in this space has focused on parental involvement in children’s media use. Barron, Kennedy, Takeuchi, and Fithian’s (2009) research with adolescents, their parents, and other learning partners articulated eight basic roles that parents play in nurturing their children’s interest in technological endeavors. With roles like learning broker, resource provider, nontechnical consultant, employer, and learner, the taxonomy highlights the fact that parents do not need to be technologically fluent to foster such fluency in their children. Similarly, Plowman, McPake, and Stephen (2008) found in their survey of 346 families and 24 case studies that parents are often unaware of the extent to which they model technological practices to their preschool age children. By assuming that their children independently learn how to operate the DVD player or log on to their favorite websites, the authors argue, parents underestimate their influence in transmitting technological know-how and values around media to their children.

Recent large-scale quantitative work provides further context for the qualitative research described above. In 2012, Wartella, Rideout, Lauricella, and Connell (2014) surveyed 2,326 parents of children ages 0–8 on their attitudes and practices surrounding their children’s digital media use. They found that home media environments varied greatly from family to family, with parents’ own media practices strongly influencing their children’s media use. About a quarter of the parents were deemed “media-centric,” averaging 11 hours of media use a day. Their children were heavy media users as well and reported spending about 4.5 hours with media per day. By contrast, “media light” parents, also about a quarter of those queried, spent less than 2 hours a day with media; their children spent just more than 1.5 hours with media on a daily basis.

These are just four of many studies published in the 2000s that have emphasized the importance of family as an important context for learning. They underscore the functions that family members and family circumstances play in shaping how youth use and learn with media and, in doing so, have helped debunk the myth of the “digital native” (Prensky, 2001), that generation of individuals naturally inclined toward and gifted with all things hardware and software. The Families and Media Project takes root in the scholarship described above, but extends its inquiry to understand how all family members—not just children—learn with media across the developmental lifespan, and how they are doing so together.

Given our interest in the shared experience of media use, our work also builds upon the co-viewing research that emerged in the 1970s around television viewing. These studies demonstrated that children who watch educational television with actively engaged adults learn more from shows than children who watch alone. Today, co-viewing has taken on a moniker that better describes what happens around more interactive forms of media (Takeuchi & Stevens, 2011). Joint media engagement, according to Stevens and Penuel (2010), refers to “spontaneous and designed experiences of people using media together … [including] viewing, playing, searching, reading, contributing, and creating, with either digital or traditional media.” Unlike the studies reviewed above, a focus on JME requires us as researchers to examine the interactions between learning partners as they engage with and around media. What is going on inside the room? What are family members saying to one another as they watch TV, play video games, or surf the web together? These in-the-moment interactions reveal quite a lot about how learning takes shape among family members, as do the interactions that play out asynchronously and sometimes even away from the medium that initially sparked the connection between family members. How do media provide anchors that sustain continued engagement between family members over longer stretches of time?

In a rare study for its day, Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy (2008) applied a JME lens to understand how young people play video games in the naturalistic environments of living rooms and dens. They describe the “learning arrangements” that 9- to 13-year-old siblings and their friends set up around the games and gaming systems they ordinarily play. Unlike most studies of games and learning, this one focused less on what youth were learning from the games and more on the spontaneous and oftentimes tacit forms of teaching and learning that transpired between players (and observers) to improve gameplay. The authors also extended their inquiry beyond home to understand how the “in-room” learning connected to the youths’ lives and identities in the world outside. Like Stevens et al., the Families and Media Project set out to understand how media—as well as the human interactions around media—drive children’s learning across the boundaries of home, school, and the other settings where they spend significant portions of their days.

Focus on Hispanic-Latino Families

Rather than surrender to our fate as an “alone together” society, the Families and Media Project aims to highlight the positive interactions that take place between adults and children around the growing number of devices at home and, in doing so, create a more hopeful future for the American family. American is a key descriptor here. Our research acknowledges the cultural and socioeconomic diversity that defines our nation by oversampling typically underserved and understudied populations, including low income, African-American, and Hispanic-Latino families. In fact, the Families and Media Project prioritized the study of Hispanic-Latino¹ families, as they comprise a significant and growing proportion of families with school-age children in the United States. Recent survey research on Hispanic-Latino families suggests that newer media are being widely adopted by Latino families and that, in fact, the digital divide between Latinos and Whites has significantly narrowed over the past decade (Livingston, 2011; Zickuhr & Smith, 2012). Seventy-six percent of Latino adults own cell phones—compared to 79 percent of Blacks and 85 percent of Whites—and are also more likely to use their phones to access the Internet in lieu of home broadband (6 percent of Hispanics, 6 percent for Blacks, 1 percent for Whites). Notably, Latino adults are acquiring smartphones and tablet computers at an equal or higher rate than White and Black non-Latino adults (Rainie, 2012; Wartella et al., 2014; Zickuhr & Smith, 2012). With increased access to these platforms and services at home, libraries, and other community settings, out-of-school time and locales present untapped opportunities to use digital media to fulfill Hispanic-Latino children’s education needs.

While the surveys cited above were useful in describing access, they told us little about the content and contexts of Hispanic-Latino families’ media use and learning. And in place of the vanishing access gap between Hispanic/Black and White youth, there is evidence of an emerging “participation gap” demarcating more or less empowering uses of digital media (Watkins, 2011). To design educational programs, services, and tools that Latino families can both benefit from and willingly embrace, the Families and Media Project set out to understand how media fit into their existing household routines, and how they hold up to parent beliefs and family value systems. At the outset of the project, we were cognizant that the racial identifiers “Hispanic” and “Latino” obscure a diverse reality that includes multiple countries of origin (Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, El Salvador, etc.), ethnic origins (European, indigenous, Asian, African, etc.), generations (first, second, third), and settlement regions (urban, suburban; Northeast, Southwest, West). Reasons for and experiences immigrating to the United States vary not only by a family or individual’s country of origin, but by the community they settle into upon arrival. Immigrants from rural towns in Puebla, Mexico who settle in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, for instance, live vastly different lives from Salvadoran immigrants who move to the Mission District of San Francisco. The education and life opportunities made available to their children (born abroad or in the States) consequently differ.

Because the routines, beliefs, and values we sought to understand could widely vary between these subcultures, the Families and Media Project ran field studies of Hispanic-Latino families in six different sites across the United States: New York City, Phoenix, Tucson, Denver, Chula Vista (near San Diego, CA), and San Francisco. Although we can only begin to document differences in media use across our collective field sample of 227 families, it is a good starting point for generating new questions and theories to test in subsequent research.

About the Families and Media Project

The Families and Media Project (FAM) is a multi-institution consortium composed of researchers from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Arizona State University, California State University at San Marcos, Northwestern University, Rutgers University, Stanford University, Sesame Workshop, and the University of Washington at Seattle. A distinct strength of the FAM consortium is its interdisciplinary composition, with scholars representing the learning sciences, communications, child development, and media studies. We came together with a common goal of producing research that could guide practitioners—including educators, policymakers, and media producers—in developing programs, policies, and products that:

• positively impact the learning, communication, and lifestyle needs of families with children;

• support family engagement with media—in real time and asynchronously—by taking advantage of technological affordances that may overcome the various challenges of using media together;

• better address the needs of today’s families, including single-parent households, nonnative speakers, and parents with demanding work schedules;

• help families be smarter media consumers and wiser in their content selections; and

• improve education, promote healthy lifestyles, and positively influence family development outcomes.

With funding from the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Bezos Family Foundation, AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Families and Media Project commenced its work in 2013 with the launch of two national surveys and seven qualitative field studies located in eight study sites around the nation, all focusing on families with children rangi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Sonia Livingstone
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• SECTION 1 Child Engagement
• SECTION 2 Parent Engagement
• SECTION 3 Family Engagement
• APPENDIX Study Methods 195
• Index