Our member, Prof. Rebekah Willett (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US), and her co-editor, Dr. Andy (Xinyu) Zhao (Deakin University, Australia), talk about their edited collection, Children, Media, and Pandemic Parenting: Family Life in Uncertain Times (Routledge, 2024).
This book examines families’ media practices during the pandemic as well as shifts in parents’ understanding of children’s media engagements. Drawing on interviews with 130 parents at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book explores cultural contexts across seven countries: Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, South Korea, United Kingdom, and United States. In each chapter, we intentionally pair researchers who collected data from countries with contrasting cultural or political situations in relation to children and media. This allows the chapter authors to consider the contextualised nature of family media practices and experiences during the pandemic.
Overall, the book examines how family media practices are influenced by factors such as the pandemic restrictions, family relationships and situations, socioeconomic statuses, cultural norms and values, and sociotechnical visions. The book uses parents’ accounts to understand the complicated roles of digital and screen media in broader family dynamics and in relation to children and childhoods. To do this, each chapter develops theoretical frameworks to see beyond parental perspectives, and to move across different sets of data in order to understand family media practices holistically.
We started this project because we wanted to find out how and if parents and caregivers changed their understanding of children’s media engagements during pandemic lockdowns. Based on research from before the pandemic, we knew that it was common for parents and caregivers to feel guilty or anxious about the amount of time their children were consuming screen media, struggling to keep to the pervasive guideline of limiting children to two hours of ‘screen time’ per day.
During the pandemic, children had to be online for school, online spaces provided a valuable means of socialising with friends and relatives, and families increasingly relied on digital spaces for entertainment. Parents had little choice but to throw out previous rules about how many minutes or hours per day children could spend on screen media.
Further, as the authors of the book came together, we started to understand the specificity of each families’ experience of media during pandemic lockdowns. Creating a transnational study gave us the chance to consider macrostructures present in each country, such as government regulation of children’s media, while also taking account of the microcultures in each household. Writing the book together allowed us to dig deep into the situatedness and meaning making involved in families’ media practices during the pandemic.
‘Generation C’, people who were children during the COVID-19 pandemic, is under close scrutiny, with news articles, medical journals and educators reporting signs that pandemic conditions might have had detrimental effects on children’s learning, social skills, attention spans, and mental and physical wellbeing. In the hype that surrounds these concerns, it does not take long for discussions to turn to children’s use of media during the pandemic as one of the root causes of Generation C’s ills, drawing on an age-old discourse about negative effects of media. For example, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, Keith Humphreys, is quoted in The New York Times as stating, ‘There will be a period of epic withdrawal’ that will require young people to ‘sustain attention in normal interactions without getting a reward hit every few seconds’ (Richtel, 2021). Drawing on emotive language used to describe drug addiction, Humphreys is likening children’s media consumption during the pandemic to a prolonged period of drug or alcohol abuse. Discourses from news articles such as this added to the stress of the pandemic for many families with children.
Even before the pandemic, parents felt guilty or anxious about the amount of time their children were consuming screen media, often feeling they failed to keep to the pervasive guideline of limiting children to two hours of ‘screen time’ per day (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2018; Willett & Wheeler, 2021). During the pandemic, parents had little choice but to throw out previous rules about how many minutes or hours per day children could spend on screen media, as children had to be online for school, online spaces provided a valuable means of socialising with friends and family, and families increasingly relied on digital spaces for entertainment, with extra-curricular activities cancelled and family spaces closed. We know that families’ use of media increased dramatically during the pandemic, and there continues to be a feeling that there’s no turning back the clock – returning to pre-pandemic levels of family media use is out of the question. So how do we understand Generation C’s experience of media during the pandemic? What has changed, and what concerns remain? Are parents and caregivers rethinking the role of media in family life?
This book documents and analyses families’ experiences as digital media became increasingly embedded in the fabric of everyday family life during the pandemic. Across the interviews, we heard about children’s media use prior to the pandemic being restricted, particularly in terms of content and time. We heard about various family practices connected with media prior to the pandemic: screen time (the number of minutes or hours spent consuming media on screen technologies) was limited, content was restricted by setting up Netflix channels for children, weekly family movie nights involved finding something for the whole family to watch together, computers were set up in family spaces rather than in private bedrooms.
We heard many parents talk in nostalgic ways of ‘the before times’ (pre-pandemic), when children were occupied with school, extracurricular activities, and playing with friends; in the before times, there was little time for children to ‘be on screens’. Parents yearned for the ‘old days’ when children did not want to go to their screens as soon as they woke up in the morning, and when it was easier to set boundaries on children’s media use. As one mother in the US described, ‘before the pandemic, it was a strict no. Like there was no wavering… it was black or white. And now obviously there's grey areas’.
This book analyses shifts away from the ‘black and white’ rules: a sense of parental control, a view of children’s engagements with media as easy to define, and the use of simplistic binary terms associated with ‘screen time’. The pandemic forced many of these views and practices to become more nuanced in order to acknowledge the ‘grey areas’. New routines and practices connected with media, often created out of necessity, indicated changes in parents’ understanding of children’s engagements with digital media. These changes responded to the realities of the pandemic, and as we analyse in this book, they reflected broader societal discourses about these topics, as well as specific microcultures in each household.