Parents' sites

The trend for targeting parents alongside children continues, with Disney's launch of a social networking site for parents - 'Disney Family Community'. What better way to tie the whole family into Disney products? There is also a parents' site on Yahoo! Kids. What a shame, then, that it plays into the deficit discourses around media, stating:

'Media immersion absolutely affects our kids' physical health. It contributes to obesity, eating disorders, attention deficit disorders, addictive behaviors, and declining levels of fitness. There's a direct link between hours of media consumed and calories consumed.'

It is not helpful to confuse correlation with causation in this way in advice for parents. Hopefully parents will take a broader view and find other sites more helpful for considering issues relating to children and media. One, then, to avoid is 'Unplug your kids', in which a parent provides advice on activities with children who don't have access to television or computer games. Ironic, then, that she seems to have all the fun taking digital photos of the activities and uploading them to her blog...

Parent power

Online sites aimed at children are becoming increasingly focused on giving parents and carers reassuring messages about safety- they realise that the path to commercial success has to take account of parental needs. Club Penguin is popular with parents because of its limited chat possibilities and the close monitoring of open chat, strategies that are explained carefully to parents in specially marked areas of the site. The social networking site aimed at 8-14 year-olds, imbee, even considers the needs of parents whose technical skills might be less well developed than their children’s. Their marketing brief states:

"For adults who might be intimidated by technology, imbee.com has made its powerful parental monitoring tools easy-to-use and making it simple for parents and guardians to have effective insight and control over their child’s online activities."

These moves are proving to be persuasive (link here for an example of a parental review of Club Penguin, for example). For younger children, this attention to the needs of parents will be irrelevant to their own engagement with these social networking sites - what do they care who else the sites they like cater for as long as they are fun for them? But at a later age, children will start to get a little itchy about this... it would be interesting to trace children’s developing sensitivity to social networking sites’ orientations to the parental audience. Another project I'll never have time for, unfortunately...it's enough just to be focused on tracing children's changing interests in popular culture and media and considering the implications for educators!

I will be away from a computer for the next 10 days, so no more blog posts from me for a while. I hope to be seeing some sea life, not the virtual penguin kind (fun though that is), here.

Parents as scaffolders

A couple of years ago now, I contacted this blogger, Beth, as I was very interested in what she had to say about scaffolding her child's understanding about blogs and wanted her permission to include her practice as an example in a chapter I was writing about young children and digital literacy. It seemed to me that Beth was supporting her child's understanding about blogging as a social practice in a similar manner to the way in which many other parents support their children's understanding of print-based literacy practices. Since then I have kept in touch with Beth's blog and noted that she has recorded other instances of family digital literacy practices. I do recommend a visit to Beth's blog for those of you interested in early childhood and technologies (click on the category 'Ed tech and early childhood' in the LH column). I am very interested in the phenomenon of 'tech-savvy' parents blogging about their technological practices with their children, as this, I think, gives us an insight into what other parents might be doing more generally with their children in five or six year's time, but I have not come across any other blogs like Beth's - let me know if you do!