Unequal Struggles and Impossible Digital Choices for Parents During Covid-19 (Part Three)
/C, M. Hoffman, cc
S. Craig Watkins: Meryl, thanks for these great examples of how we look toward a more inclusive post-COVID future. I agree that we need to develop ways to empower parents and other caregivers who are on the frontlines of social change. Community-based organizations will always be critical in the struggle for social and economic justice. As I think about social justice the implications for parents are significant. Parents are a vital resource in their children’s lives and to the extent that systemic forms of inequality, namely racial and gender, undermine adults they also undermine the families and children that they care for. I vividly remember meeting the parents in our research for the Digital Edge and thinking how resourceful they were in the struggle to keep their families afloat. Our field work began just as the Great Recession was coming from its peak. As economic data would later reveal the recovery for those in poverty was slow in coming, at best. Whether it was immigrant parents or a working poor African American parent, they spent every day fighting for their children and their families. The occupations they held, usually low-status and low-income, seldom offered them dignity or opportunity. And yet, they worked in those jobs, relocated to neighborhoods, and did other things to try and improve the life chances of their children. These parents understood the value of education more than anyone, even though many of them never reached high levels of educational attainment. When I think about the challenges parents face today, especially those heading resource-constrained households, I often think about the parents we met and how little support they received.
If we learn anything through this current and unprecedented crisis it is the need to make sure that families, especially the most vulnerable, are stable. Without familial stability, children are at greater risk for poverty, immobility, and health problems in their adult lives. One area of change that is desperately needed is the creation of a policy apparatus that is truly family-centered. So much of the financial mitigation policy efforts that we see happening in the U.S. in response to COVID (and the Great Recession) is about saving corporations that are so-called, “too big to fail.” But there is no greater institution in the modern world than our families. The lack of family friendly policies-- paid sick leave, childcare, health care, guaranteed income--continues to undermine the lives of working poor adults and the young people they care for.
A future challenge is cultivating a policy discourse that is sensitive to the needs of vulnerable families. Many of our elected officials and policy makers simply don’t get what it's like to try and keep a family together when you are paid poverty wages, do not have access to healthcare, and send your children to schools that are ill-equipped to prepare your children for the world of tomorrow. Thus, policy mechanisms that are designed to support parents and their desire to ensure that their children have access to social, educational, and economic opportunity is a critical feature of any social justice future.
Sonia Livingstone: I find it fascinating that we all research families’ lives in a digital world but, although the media themselves love to point to their own importance in shaping children’s experiences and life chances, we find over and again that the fundamentals of structural inequality matter hugely, and so for the most part, socio-economic divides shape digital divides. As Craig says, it is crucial that educators, social workers, policy makers and community workers keep this in mind when working with families instead, as so often happens, of somehow becoming overly focused on popular expectations of “silver bullet” technological solutions, or distracted by families’ particular, and supposedly problematic, uses of technologies.
Nonetheless, digital technologies make a difference, entering into families’ possibilities, and becoming the focus of parents’ hopes and fears for their children in ways that often compound but sometimes alleviate experiences linked to poverty, marginalization, mental ill-health, racism, or disability. Just reviewing our discussion across these three posts, we have noted that digital technologies enter as actors into families’ lives by introducing a series of specific safety, informational, and privacy risks. More positively, we have also suggested that, if parents and others (policy makers, educators…) could throw off misleading discourses relating to screen time, digital natives and the rest, they could embrace and support parents’ investments, energies and expertise regarding digital technologies in ways that are, thus far, undervalued and underexploited, and thereby further children’s interests for the better. As Meryl eloquently argued, this should be done not (or not only) parent by parent, as individuals, but by recognizing parents as a collectivity, and parenting as a phenomenon that society as a whole should invest in – and everyone could benefit.
Without exaggerating the role of digital technologies, we end our book on Parenting for a Digital Future with six recommendations for how society can better support parents – 1. Make room for parents’ voices in policymaking, including in relation to provision of digital resources; 2. Ensure that public and media discourses offer parents a realistic (rather than a contradictory, or simplistic) vision of their role; 3. Recognize the already-significant contribution of parents to their children’s learning, digital and otherwise, rather than endlessly rehearsing deficit accounts of parents; 4. Takes steps so that professionals who support parents are well-informed regarding the latest research and guidance on digital technologies; 5. Build in attention to parents and parenting when designing and governing the digital environment; 6. Resource research on diverse families and take the findings into account when formulating policy for families and education.
Meryl Alper: Thank you Craig and Sonia for summarizing and synthesizing our discussion as we find ourselves looking for ways to “build back better” (to echo a popular phrase among various political leaders at the moment) with respect to the recovery and reconstruction of social institutions and digital infrastructures that support children and families in the wake of the pandemic.
Rebuilding for youth and their communities will require nothing short of a radical reexamination of supposedly-democratic schooling. To this end, I wish more people knew the story of Reggio Emilia, an Italian city destroyed by fascist forces that after World War II completely reoriented itself to center early childhood education as its highest public priority. Out of literal wreckage and destroyed buildings, the citizens of the town (led by the Italian Women’s Union) rebuilt the working-class village around the site of a school they physically constructed together. The new school and others built in the area were driven by parent cooperatives who insisted that their children be raised with high expectations of citizen responsibility and participation. Children not only needed to be listened to by adults and their peers, but they had a right to. Further cultivated by educator Loris Malaguzzi, Reggio Emilia has become a global educational philosophythat emphasizes the responsibilities that adults have to actively respond to children as they co-construct their ideas and knowledge.
In contrast, instead of centering children, families, and public schools in the U.S. pandemic response, our leadership prioritized business interests (and unequally for that matter), as Craig notes. Going forward, we will need digital tools and environments that are explicitly designed not to surveil and monetize children’s participation, but to put children in charge of their own learning in an open-ended manner. And lastly, we deserve leadership at the very top of our government system that does not stand to financially benefit from the privatization of education, and even better, has actual classroom experience (even if for right now, that means teaching over Zoom).
Bios
Meryl Alper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, where she researches the social and cultural implications of communication technologies, with a focus on disability and digital media, children and families’ technology use, and mobile communication. She is the author of Digital Youth with Disabilities(MIT Press, 2014) and Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality(MIT Press, 2017), which was awarded a 2018 PROSE Award Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers and the 2018 Outstanding Publication in the Sociology of Disability Award from the American Sociological Association. In her research and teaching, Dr. Alper also draws on over 15 years of professional experience in educational children’s media as a researcher, strategist, and consultant with Sesame Workshop, PBS KIDS, Nickelodeon, and Disney.
Sonia Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communicationsat the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, especially children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Her new book is “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (Oxford University Press, with Alicia Blum-Ross). Sonia currently directs the Digital Futures Commission(with the 5Rights Foundation) and the “Global Kids Online”project (with UNICEF), among other projects. She blogs at www.parenting.digital.
S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of six books including The Digital Edgeand Don’t Knock the Hustle. Craig is also the founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation, a boutique hub for research and design. Among other things, the Institute is currently working on projects that address technology and mental health, bias in the deployment of artificial intelligence, and the social, racial, and economic aspects of a post-COVID world.
