“Take Everything from Life...”: the Discourse of Russian Parents about Children’s Video Games

Abstract

The study reveals the analysis of the discourse of St. Petersburg parents for their ideas about children's computer games. The focus of our attention was the settings that underlie the strategies of regulation of these game practices by adults. The empirical base of the study was a series of semi-structured interviews with parents of children under ten years of age with different social characteristics (gender, age, nature and level of education, income), whose children play video games, and for various reasons are not involved in this process. Interviews were conducted in St. Petersburg in 2016-2017. According to the results obtained, the prohibition or permission of games on the computer, as well as the frequency of access to the gadget and the type of gaming activity (educational – entertaining) are based on two key ideas. The first can be referred to as the idea of "fullness of life", and the second, respectively, as the idea of "quality of life". The idea of "fullness of life" is based on such ideas about the world, when the main value is the diversity of activities, the saturation of life with events. The idea of "quality of life" is based on the value of in-depth development of a particular activity, which is currently considered as an important, significant. As the analysis showed, Russian parents use both ideas in the argument of both permission and prohibition of children's video games, but do not mix them in justifying their own decisions and actions. We also assume that the idea of "quality of life" has a deep history and has been popular for several decades, while the idea of "fullness of life" characterizes the discourse of the modern dynamic and changeable consumer society.