Parenting and Digital Media: From the Early Web to Contemporary Digital Society

Parents have accessed websites, online discussion forums and blogs for advice, information and support since the early days of the World Wide Web (which first became widely available to users in the mid-1990s). In this century, the advent of mobile media such as smartphones and tablet computers and Wi-Fi has allowed parents to access the web from almost any location. They can use social-media platforms and apps (software applications for mobile devices) as part of their parenting practices. These technologies have brought with them opportunities for parents to seek information and support and exchange details of their experiences with each other in a variety of ways. These practices contribute to datafication, that is, rendering details of people’s lives into digital data formats (van Dijck 2014) - not only of parents themselves but also of their children. The possibilities that now exist not only for voluntary sharing of one’s personal data with others, but also for data leakage and commercial exploitation of this information, are key differences between the early digital media that were available to parents and those that they currently use. In this article, we review the literature in sociology and related social research addressing the ways in which digital media have been used for parenting-related purposes. We begin with the longer-established media of parenting websites, online discussion forums, blogs, email, mobile phones and message and video services and then move on to the newer technologies of social media and apps. This is followed by a section on data privacy and security issues. The concluding section summarises some major issues arising from the review and points to directions for further research.