Parental Approaches to Digital Technologies

Abstract

This chapter presents another important context of contemporary adolescent life – family and the home environment. Young people spend a large part of their time in this environment, where they encounter digital technologies in various situations and contexts. In the family environment, generations meet that grew up in different times and have diverse experiences with digital technologiesdigital technologies. The parents usually represent a generationgeneration that grew up when access to digital technologies was not common at home nor in school. However, today’s young people live in times when digital technologies are a natural part of their lives. The first part of this chapter presents theoretical views on digital technologies in the lives of young people and adults and on generational conflicts. We focus on the family environment, the primary social context within which children encounter digital technologies. Parental regulatory strategies directing the use of digital technologies by children are another important topic. We also pay attention to how adolescents view parental regulations. The next part of the chapter presents the results of our research and looks in more detail into the everyday lives of several Czech families to describe and explain how digital technologies permeate their lives, how the parents view digital technologies, and how the adolescents use the digital technologies in their free time and in their learning. We focus on how the rules for the use of digital technologies by adolescents are set in the families. These rules create frameworks for the use of ICT in various activities. We present the categories common for all the investigated families, then we gradually present three types of digital generationgeneration gaps identified in the investigated families and the characteristics of these gap types.