ABSTRACT

This article draws upon my qualitative study with 8–12-year-old British Indian children and their professional middle-class parents, to demonstrate the ways in which parental mediation of children’s digital leisure play out within the home. Using the relational lens of ‘generational order’, I identify the ways in which children ‘navigate’ their way around restrictive parental mediation of digital technologies just as parents ‘navigate’ multiple moral discourses emerging from media and policy circles imploring them to curb children’s screen-time. Understanding these ‘navigation’ strategies around children’s digital media use at home throws fresh light on parent–child relations, children’s agency and their imbrications with wider generational structures. I conclude by arguing that greater empirical analyses of the relational aspects of parenting and childing are needed for Childhood Studies to fully appreciate the way generational structures inflect the lived geographies of childhood and parenthood in the context of children’s home-based digital leisure.

摘要

本文借鉴了我对 8-12 岁英属印度儿童及其专业中产阶级父母的定性研究，以展示父母对儿童数字休闲活动的家庭调解方式。使用“世代秩序”的关系镜头，我确定了儿童“导航”他们的方式绕过数字技术的限制性父母调解，就像父母“导航”来自媒体和政策圈的多种道德话语，恳求他们遏制儿童的屏幕-时间。了解这些围绕儿童在家中使用数字媒体的“导航”策略，可以为父母与子女的关系、儿童的能动性及其与更广泛的代际结构的叠加提供新的思路。