Evolutionary Perspectives on Novel Digital Environments: Parental Strategies in the Ecology of Fear

Abstract

Many children born between 2010 and 2016 have access to an unprecedented variety of digital environments which comprise an evolutionarily novel landscape. Parental caregivers must make decisions without traditional environmental knowledge, introducing a high degree of uncertainty into parenting strategies. Evolutionary approaches reveal an adaptive mismatch between internet-enabled digital technologies and human behavioral adaptations. This mismatch represents a peculiarly human variant on the struggles of organisms to adapt to changing environments, and is characterized by the utilization of information-deficient strategies. This study applies models developed in evolutionary ecology to research on parental strategies for managing children’s online activities. Using semi-structured interviews of parents (n=20) of children in middle childhood (ages 6-12) and a dialogic method of synthesis, we found that parents lack effective strategies for navigating online environments and cannot conceptualize the technologies and corporate powers shaping the online worlds their children encounter. We conceptualize these digital environments as an evolutionarily novel landscape producing adaptive lag and propose a continuous two-dimensional framework which describes observed patterns of intersection between parental investment and parenting strategies. Less intelligible threats are rationalized, while tactics aimed at more proximally actionable threats are prioritized. Building on adaptive vigilance and parental investment, our work shows the value of evolutionary models in understanding parental responses to digital environments.