Digitally strategic: how young people respond to parental views about the use of technology for learning in the home
Abstract
In recent years parents have invested heavily in providing their children with technologies at home in order to support their present and future educational activities. UK education policy has encouraged parents to help their children use these technologies to support their learning, but within a broader social context of growing anxiety about issues of Internet safety, and the unreliability of knowledge taken from the Internet. This paper draws on recent research within a large-scale mixed methods project looking at a range of issues relating to the use of technologies in the home for learning, in order to explore the ways in which parents try to balance the sometimes contradictory roles of being both technology providers and technology regulators, and the ways in which young people act in response. While parents inevitably experience a gradual loss of control over their children's uses of technology as they enter the later years of adolescence, findings show that although some young people develop highly autonomous and innovative uses of technology for learning, many others come to moderate their uses of technology in ways that are acceptable to their parents.
Introduction
In its study of over 25 000 young people in 25 countries throughout Europe, the recent EU Kids Online survey (Livingstone et al., 2011) found that along with playing games (83%), watching video clips (76%), instant messaging (62%) and social networking (82% for 15–16 years old), 85% of EU children aged 9–16 use the Internet for schoolwork. While this makes schoolwork the single most common online activity within the broad age group, these figures also show just how many other activities are competing for young people's attention online and, above all, demonstrate the quandary in which many parents find themselves. Not only must they try to ensure that their own children are not excluded from the educational advantages of the Internet, but there are strong pressures upon them to protect their children from the risks and distractions that are also found online.
The previous UK government, as part of its Harnessing Technology strategy, promoted the ‘vital role’ of parents ‘… in ensuring that technology helps their children to develop and learn at home’ (Becta1 2008, para. 71). Insofar as they permit technology into the home, pay for it, support and monitor its use, parents certainly do play a vital role, although not necessarily focused on specific educational goals. The Harnessing Technology strategy talked about the need to make parents aware of the benefits available to their children from using the Internet at home to support their learning, and also acknowledged the importance of balancing concern about the safety of their children online against the danger of discouraging ‘the use of valuable resources’ (Becta 2008, p. 50).
The issue of parental involvement in homework generally was a high priority for the New Labour government from its start, with a particular emphasis on the importance of fostering autonomous learning practices, a long-standing rationale for homework2: ‘to develop the skills, confidence and motivation needed to study effectively on their own. This is vital given the importance for pupils in the future of lifelong learning and adaptability’ (DfEE 1998, para 43). Such an aim has long been used particularly in support of using digital technologies for learning, from Papert's advocacy of technology's power to endow ‘an empowering sense of one's own ability to learn anything one wants to know’ (Papert 1982) to numerous governmental statements about technologies' capacity to enable ‘pupils of all abilities to take greater control of their learning’ (DfES/NGfL 2002, p. 8), and increase ‘independence and motivation for self-directed study’ (Becta 2003).
But a tension arises between two somewhat conflicting concerns for the large number of parents in the developed world who possess the financial and cultural capital needed to provide technology for their children. Ito et al.'s Digital Youth project found parents in the United States lamenting ‘that they had lost control’ of their children's technology use, noting that ‘the anxiety surrounding the integration of new media into the home also reflects concerns about independence, separation and autonomy that, at least in the context of Western societies, occur during the teenage years’ (Ito et al 2010, p. 152). Their study recognizes ‘the relative importance of rules in shaping family life as new media take on an increasing presence in the domestic ecology’ (ibid. 191), and observed that ‘parents, guardians, and other significant adults in kids' lives spend a great deal of time managing their kids' opportunities to go online at home’ (ibid. 182).
In a climate of increasing anxiety about the quality of knowledge, the distracting nature of the Internet and actual threats to safety online, parents feel bound to take actions that potentially undermine self-reliant learning practices. The great majority of young people interviewed in the course of the research reported in this paper preferred to use their access to the Internet in the course of doing their homework, alongside many other uses, in largely self-directed ways. The same findings also suggest that their parents often had conflicting impulses about these opportunities: they found it hard not to provide them for their children, but having provided them often moved quickly to regulate their use.
This paper explores the question of whether parents' attitudes towards technology use do limit the extent to which their children develop autonomous uses of technology for learning. This question concerns not only the parents' views and rules relating to using technology in the home, but more importantly the various ways in which their children respond to those as they grow older, moving from relatively unquestioning compliance at first towards a range of possible positions. This paper will draw on Lacey's (1977, p. 64) account of the ‘situationally constrained strategies’ used by beginning teachers, who lack the formal power to act and interpret situations as they prefer. In doing so, this paper will suggest that, like those novice teachers, internalized acceptance by young people of the preferred views and behaviour of those with formal power (i.e. their parents) is as likely an outcome as the development of autonomous habits of using technology previously discouraged by parents (an outcome that Lacey terms ‘strategic redefinition’).
The project
The findings referred to in this paper emerge from research carried out between 2008 and 2010 in association with Becta as part of a programme of research and development around the previous government's Harnessing Technology strategy. The main focus of this work was on ‘the experiences and opportunities for learning’ occurring in learners' own contexts away from school or college as a result of their access to and use of technologies. This was a broad remit covering learners from primary education right through to higher education. The research has looked at the part played by digital technologies in these young people's overall lives, seeking to understand how they used technologies for learning in self-directed ways, within the context of their peer group, and as members of families.
Conceived as a ‘learner voice’ project, the research design focused primarily on young people's own accounts of technology in their lives. Over 3 years of data gathering, the project has employed a mixture of enquiry methods, combining extensive individual interviews on more than one occasion over the course of the project with learners across the age range, and follow-up home visits with a proportion of those, with a nationally representative survey.
Two hundred and sixty-two young people across a range of ages – 8/9, 12/13, 14/15 and 17+ at the start of the project – took part in qualitative data gathering through semi-structured interviews, carried out in their schools or colleges. In these interviews, the young people were asked about how they spent their time at home after school, the part played by technologies in those activities, the ways in which their parents provided and regulated their technology use, their perceptions of their skills in using technology and the extent and ways in which technologies were used for learning of various kinds.
This sample of 262 students was selected with the help of a variety of educational institutions at each educational level, involving three primary schools, three secondary schools, two sixth-form colleges and four universities within the midlands and southeast regions of the UK. The sample of students within each institution was selected with the help of teachers and with the consent (where appropriate on account of age) of parents. The aim was to achieve a spread of socio-economic background, but the generally high proportion of technology provision in homes of those interviewed suggested that the lowest socio-economic groups were slightly under-represented.
The national survey was designed by the project team in collaboration with Becta, and was carried out for the project by a market research company. The data-collection phase took place across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the Christmas holidays of 2008, and worked with the same age groups as the qualitative data collection. The survey questions focused on use and non-use of technologies; the young people's attitudes and skills; the quality of access to technology; family, peer, school and work contexts; and demographic and socio-economic variables. Among the total of 1069 respondents, there were 265 8-year olds, 265 12-year olds, 275 14-year old and 264 17- to 19-year olds. The sample was broadly representative of the population, and encompassed young people from a range of socio-economic backgrounds as evidenced by the ACORN classification. Gender was evenly split across the four age groups, with slightly more female respondents overall (51%).
Subsequent to the survey, 35 of the 262 young people interviewed in the first phase of the project were interviewed in greater depth through home visits. These home visits provided opportunities for talking to parents as well as young people. Parents were normally interviewed (again through semi-structured interview) by one researcher, while in another room a second researcher sat beside the young person in front of the computer they used most at home, and encouraged them to demonstrate the kinds of activities they regularly engage in with that computer, while probing issues such as how they multitasked (especially during homework), their understandings of safe behaviour online and their skills at using the computer and the Internet. Interviews with parents focused on the history of technology in their home and the rationales behind that, family use of that technology, opinions about how the child uses it for learning and how the parent helps, ways in which the Internet enables communication from and with the school, ending with general questions about parental concerns and worries regarding technologies.
All semi-structured interviews and observations were recorded, transcribed and analysed using N-Vivo (in the case of student interviews), working with a range of analytic categories focusing on issues such as computer access, learners' attitudes towards technology, time spent using technologies, parental regulation, range of technology use, skills possessed and how learnt, and use of technologies for formal and informal learning. It is the findings from the qualitative elements of the research that mainly inform this paper, supported by reference in some respect to the survey data. All quotations from students or parents presented in the sections that follow come from materials segmented and coded during the course of the N-Vivo analysis. Quotations used below have been selected on the basis of illustrating views characteristic of various subgroups within the overall sample.
Findings
In her study of how homework is perceived within differing views of parenting and childhood in British schools, Brent describes what she observed of parental engagement in children's homework, thus:
Most of the children in the case study described their mothers having some sort of policing role with homework, including direct supervision, checking work after it was done, or ensuring that work was done before engaging in other family activities (Brent 2005, p. 327).
The extent of that supervision did, as Brent showed, vary quite considerably (in ways that largely tended to reflect parents' own educational backgrounds) from background support to what might be described as micromanagement of the work being done. This range of practices to some extent reflects also the various ways in which researchers have observed parents engaging with their children's use of media, especially TV, in the period directly before the Internet became the dominant problem for parents:
Parents seem engaged in a constant battle with their children as they seek to balance the educational and social advantages of media use and the negative effects that some content or mediated contact might have on children's attitudes, behaviour, or safety (Livingstone & Helsper 2008, p. 581).
These authors (referring especially to Nathanson's work) outline three broad strategies of parental regulation, namely active, restrictive and co-viewing mediation (ibid. 583), which Livingstone and Helsper suggest has subsequently come to be applied by parents to the regulation of Internet use of their children:
Parents have a preference for social over technical forms of mediation, preferring active co-use over technical restrictions, interaction restrictions, and monitoring practices (ibid. 596).
The findings from our own research reflect something of this range, although in some cases parents appeared to move freely between one approach and another, from laissez-faire to co-use or restrictive regulation, until such times as something goes markedly wrong. Whatever their approach, though, parents appeared to perceive the Internet, whether used for schoolwork, socializing or leisure activities (often all at the same time), as a significant focus for their concerns about many issues relating to their children's journey from childhood towards independence, including educational progress, social behaviour and risk.
In the sections that follow, parental provision of technology is considered first of all, followed by exploration of a range of perceptions from a number of parents interviewed in the research, with respect to how they feel they need to manage the uses of that technology. This will be followed by an examination of the strategies used by the young people in response.
Parents' provision of technology to their children
We encountered levels of access and connectivity in our own study which were in line with many other studies focusing on these groups of learners. For example, in relation to 9–19 years old, the UK Children Go Online project reported that 87% of the children interviewed for the study had a computer at home and very few did not use the Internet at some location, either home, school and/or elsewhere (Livingstone & Bober 2005). Facer et al. (2003) found that over four-fifths of 9–14 years old claimed to be using computers outside school. In relation to younger children, the Learners and Technology: 7–11 study (Selwyn et al. 2010) found that most of the children surveyed had access to a computer at home, with just 7% of children relying on other households, libraries, community centres and youth clubs for access.
More recently, our own survey showed increased levels of access among the age group, with just 11% of 12 years old, and 8% of 14 years old having no access to a computer in the home, and approximately 95% nationally of all those with computers in the home also having Internet access. Such high degrees of access, although highly significant in terms of opportunities for using technology for learning in the home generally, inevitably exacerbate the problems faced by those young people who do not have the opportunity to use computers or the Internet in their homes, in that teachers increasingly come to expect young people to use such resources for homework (an issue addressed to some extent by the last UK government's ambitious Home Access3).
The vast majority of parents we interviewed ensured that their children had access to an Internet-connected computer at home, often bought specifically for the purpose of supporting their child's learning:
We bought a very, very expensive [computer] at that time … I want to make them [children] happy and to – and get the education here on the computer… It's important for learning, yeah. Anything in – it is on computer nowadays (father of Cain, aged 9).
I think it wouldn't be fair on him for his future to deny him the right to get the exposure of a computer […] the more skill he has, the more he understands how people use them you know, it just gives him a better chance in life with jobs and you know his work future and studies (parents of Adam, aged 9).
It was hard for us to research a lot of things at school because they block a load of things. So my Nan and my Mum decided like it would be easier for us if we could search things for school at home and just write things like that (Mandy, aged 15).
As indicated above, not everyone in our sample had access to the Internet or connectivity at home. Also, once people have access in the home, as was the case in our study, actual access to computers and the Internet is not always equally distributed among family members. This is not just in terms of the quality of the connection to the Internet (see, for example, Cranmer 2006; Livingstone 2006; Peter & Valkenburg 2006), but also quality of access in terms of the degree of independence and exclusivity of access available in the home:
We've got an 8 year old Toshiba which is just sitting around, which my Mum doesn't use anymore, so if I want to do something longer I usually go on that. But it's not terribly advanced (Denise, aged 12).
But it doesn't have the internet. … mum has to write a letter saying we don't have the internet so we can't do the homework (Laurence, aged 13).
But the provision of such access, in whatever form it takes, does not mark the end of the story, so much as the start of an ongoing process of negotiation and adjustment, in which children begin to discover how they want to use these technologies, and parents try to mediate these developing uses.
Parental views on their children's technology use
The findings from our national survey indicated that many parents do provide some kind of support to their children while they are using the Internet: 65% of young people still living at home stated that their parents sit with them at least sometimes and use the computer or laptop; 59% stated that their parents suggest interesting websites for them to visit; and 67% stated that their parents help them when they are on the computer or laptop. Survey results confirmed the evidence from the qualitative data that overall, female parents and carers seem to offer more support than male parents and carers, but both offer a relatively high level of support: 83% of participants stated that their mothers, stepmothers or female guardians help them at least sometimes with schoolwork or other interests, and 70% stated that their fathers, stepfathers or male guardians help them at least sometimes with schoolwork or other interests. Not surprisingly, both survey and qualitative evidence indicate that parental involvement in their children's learning and with respect to using technologies reduces as children grow older.
It was in the more discursive context of the interviews carried out in our home visits that we were able to get below the surface of such figures. The parents we spoke to emphasized the importance of providing their children with the opportunity to gain the experiences and skills seen as essential for participation in a future information society, and claimed to regulate the extent and manner of their children use. The parents of 9-year-old Adam said that they made it clear to him that ‘the priority is his homework’ (with a time-limited opportunity for playing computer games allowed after this is done), but within the context of such regulation operated a pro-technology philosophy of allowing his enthusiasm for using his computer to stimulate engagement in study, whether formal or informal: ‘as long as he's interested, then we can encourage him to continue learning’. To this end, Adam and his father constructed a personal website together in order to display his Lego constructions, and his parents also spend time helping him to develop some of the skills such as evaluating the information he obtains through his own Internet searches.
A considerable proportion of the parents of younger users – those still in primary school – that we spoke with tended to exercise extensive oversight of their children. Michael (9) explained that ‘… if we go on Google, my dad says I'm only allowed to use it when he's watching me’. The mother of Clare (9) makes it clear that she is ‘not anti-computers at all!…I do want her to be on the computer and be able to work it competently, and the only way she can do that is to use it. So I'm not silly about it’. Nonetheless, the opportunities she provides are closely monitored:
I decide what she goes on at the moment […] I do nosey in sometimes […] I'm probably pretty strict with it. I don't want her going on anything I haven't been on already – but I'm like that with everything. She doesn't watch a film that I haven't watched and I do vet most things that she goes on …
She acknowledges though that as her daughter grows older, ‘I'm probably going to find it a lot harder to keep control of that’. This parent's motivation relates to a problem when her daughter and her friends accessed inappropriate material on the Internet one night, rather on the quality of the material on the Internet relating to their learning. Other parents were rather more concerned about the educational value of technology, often suspicious of the worth of the Internet as a source of knowledge in general, and in some cases attempted to limit the use of computers for learning. The mother of Tasha (aged 9) expressed a perception held by many parents regarding the poverty of the Internet compared with books:
I'm sceptical about the quality of the information which can be found on the Internet, which is why I will always go to a book first, if we have it on the shelf.
She also assumed that children will, as a matter of course, ‘copy out or cut and paste whole chunks of text that, for a homework assignment or something – that would be quite easy’ and preferred to give her children experiences which will ‘encourage them to think for themselves, be creative in their thinking’– something she does not associate with using technology. She characterized herself as being quite strict about computer use, restricting her children to ‘half an hour a day which we time. They put the timer on; when the buzzer goes, they're supposed to come off. Because I have always – we've always encouraged them to spend their time in other ways in addition to the computer’. Nonetheless, the family did spend some time around the computer together, on occasions, talking via Skype to friends and family, looking at photos or watching a film they have rented. This particular mother was also hostile to TV, which was regulated in much the same way, placing her towards the restrictive end of the mediation scale discussed by Livingstone and Helsper.
Tasha's mother mediated her child's technology use in two key ways: first, keeping a regular passing eye on what she is looking at on the Internet, which requires having the computer in an open space within the home; second, reinforcing broadly traditional values about knowledge, represented by her conviction about the primacy of the book over the Internet. The latter in particular involves constantly issuing warnings about the unreliability of Wikipedia as a source of knowledge (something done almost as a matter of course by the great majority of parents and teachers we spoke with) but, at the same time, is bound up in the quite different issue of cutting and pasting from the Internet, which is presumed not to be the case when children use encyclopaedias, reference books and textbooks.
These same reservations about their child's capacity to make proper judgements about the material found on the Internet were expressed by parents of older children in secondary education, including those approaching their first public examinations at 16 (i.e. General Certificate of Secondary Education). The mother of Alex (15) was highly concerned by her suspicion that ‘he just wants to click on the one with the most information, copy and paste the lot, probably not even correct the American spelling, which winds me up no end’ and saw her role quite explicitly as being to help him to ‘… sort the wheat from the chaff; even if you're not getting dodgy sites, you know, his instant reaction is to use Wikipedia’. She gives as an example some work he was doing in biology, which she oversaw quite closely: ‘I was saying, well you know, somebody who has had a bad personal experience of cystic fibrosis or Huntington's might not give you the full picture […] and give you a balanced view of all of them. I said you've got to be careful how you choose your sites here … and that doesn't occur to him’.
In fact, Alex's own account of using Wikipedia for this same work (given during the simultaneous interview in a different room in his home) did not entirely confirm her belief that he tended simply to grab the first results he found:
Wikipedia is really useful […] if I couldn't find what I was looking for in the contents I would use the find function, yes. […] That one I would go to first because it said [Cystic Fibrosis] Trust. […] You know you can trust it if it has org in it really. Then I might go to this one because it's a leaflet, so it's been written by someone who knows what they're talking about.
Whether or not the process he describes is sufficiently rigorous, it does constitute a more developed approach than the indiscriminate copying and pasting that his mother attributes to him. He gives the strong impression of being a learner, who has by this stage in his learning begun to work out his own ways of doing things that he does not really expect or require his mother to understand, and it appears that although his mother is strongly driven to intervene, she knows that she has to some extent accept his manner of working:
He tends to come home and if I start… you know, if he walks in the door and it's like homework straight away … that really doesn't work with Alex, he's got to have some chill out time.
She describes how she recently tried to demonstrate to him that he could not concentrate on his work adequately while multitasking in this way, by testing him on his maths, but got nowhere with this because he answered all her questions correctly:
I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, please get it wrong so I can get cross and say, turn it off! But he gets it right because he can multitask.
The tensions here effectively arise from conflicting beliefs about appropriate educational behaviour rather than the actual outcomes of the work done by the young person. This is very much the case with Craig (15) too, whose parents have in fact given him considerable scope to set up a highly personalized computer area for himself (using two screens squeezed into a tight space at the top of the stairs), because of their firm belief in the need to be digitally literate in order to do well in school and university. But his mother, in particular, nonetheless demands (according to Craig) constant reassurance that he is not wasting his time up there on the landing. She feels, for instance, that whenever she climbs the stairs she can hear him clicking various applications shut, because he has heard her coming and closed something down. Often, she finds homework on one screen and MSN Messenger on the other. Craig sees this level of multitasking as quite normal:
I have to be checking things, going on websites and all those kind of things, so it's sort of – I'm just like I'm tired of trying to explain because it's just going to get worse, so I don't say anything. It's kind what I'm doing. It's like I bring good grades home, I bring As, Bs, Cs, I never bring Ds… How can I achieve these grades if I'm not studying?
He sees this as a generational phenomenon:
The way they've grown up is very very very very very different to how we're growing up. And it's like I'm able to do sort of – I can be on MSN but can appear offline and still see who's on and what's going on.
Craig is occasionally frustrated by his mother's vigilance over his use of the computer for schoolwork:
I might decide that I need to catch up on some show I've missed, and so I get playing, you know get the sound and it's slow, and then I'm still chatting and I'm not finished the homework, then I'm still doing the homework. I'm able to do this, it's just simple to me. … and that's when [mum] she comes in and says ‘you're not doing any revision, you just get off the computer! You been on there for ages now’ and then my Dad has to agree.
In this respect, his mother is behaving in very similar ways to the parents in the United States described by Ito et al., who ‘sometimes assert their status in the family hierarchy by moving through home freely, even when a space is deemed to belong to their kids’ (op. cit. 157). Nonetheless, it was also clear that many parents do not in fact actively and regularly monitor or mediate their children's Internet and media use, nor involve themselves in their homework, whether using technology or not. Some of the parents we spoke with were fairly relaxed about their children's use of technology, having satisfied themselves that their children generally behave in sensible ways.
The mother of Simon (13) considered that the computer is ‘an indispensable tool these days’ and indeed felt ‘a little bit concerned that he doesn't gravitate towards it more readily and want to use it more’. In a few more extreme instances, we came across children left entirely to their own devices, especially if using their computer in their bedroom. Dean (15) described such a home situation where his computer use had been completely unmonitored for many years:
Just me and my dad and um we've got one computer which is upstairs. My dad doesn't know how to use a computer so it's just mine. … he stays downstairs and watches TV while I go upstairs and play on the computer.
Within that context of non-regulation, Dean was free to become an exceptionally intensive user:
Full range – um I do my homework on it, like research and everything like that. Um, I talk to friends on it via MSN or Skype. I play games on it like World of Warcraft or Everquest 2 or something like that. Um, it's mainly just those. I go on YouTube and stuff like that and look at videos. I listen to music on it. It's my life bases around that really, I can't… because um I couldn't really live without the computer to be honest.
By his own admission, Dean became addicted to playing online games and tried to handle this on his own, presumably because he did not wish to put the freedom to use his computer at risk by telling his father. Fortunately, his peer network provided support instead by pointing him to a website that helped break his addiction:
It was actually a friend who showed it to me because he was actually worried about me at the time because I was so addicted to it.
The dangers of allowing young people to use the Internet unsupervised in their bedrooms are well recognized, especially in the advice given to parents about safeguarding their children. In fact, the evidence of our project nonetheless showed that current concerns about these issues in the popular media especially (such as the coverage of the Byron Review 2008) had raised awareness of potential problems to the level where parents and carers were generally alert to Internet risk, and aware of the potentially negative aspects of the information sources that young people tend to use.
Even where parents are not quite as hands-off as Dean's father, a large proportion is self-conscious about their own shortcomings in terms of technical expertise and understanding for using computers and the Internet, and find themselves at more of a disadvantage when it comes to providing guidance than is normally the case in their role as parents:
I've learnt with Maddy, and she'd moved on way ahead of me now, so I'm probably at a stage that I'm comfortable with [younger son] now (Mother of Maddy, aged 15).
Young people's strategies
As indicated earlier in this paper, Lacey (1977) outlined three distinct strategies used by novice teachers in order to reconcile their views and preferred practice with those with formal power over them: strategic compliance, strategic redefinition and internalized acceptance. Strategic compliance involved these novices appearing to act in ways expected of them, strategic redefinition involved them attempting to change beliefs about what was desirable, internalized acceptance involved adapting their own beliefs to the status quo (Lacey 1977, pp. 72–73). There is a parallel here with the processes by which young people attempt to accommodate parental expectations surrounding their uses of technology. As many researchers (such as Ito et al 2010, cited above) argue, many young people, especially as they enter the teenage years, develop their own cultures of technology use, which are very often as strong or stronger than those of their parents. At the same time, the power relations of the family place them in positions of subordination which, over time, necessitate some degree of situationally based strategic response, if they are to achieve their goals and live in some degree of harmony with their parents' expectations.
The younger primary school-aged children we spoke with generally did appear to be fairly willing to comply with their parents' authority regarding their use of technologies. This often seemed to be driven by some degree of uncertainty and anxiety about unspecified dangers relating to viruses and adult content from many of the younger learners we talked to:
We might get a bit disturbed by something quite dark (Briony, aged 9).
Sometimes you get emails and then you have attachments and then you have viruses in it which could probably kill your computer (Kim, aged 9).
It appeared that the strategies adopted at this stage of computer use, which generally takes the form of a period of apprenticeship monitored by parents, involved a combination of unsystematic and often hesitant experimentation, and the appearance or reality of strong compliance with parents' wishes. In cases where the experimentation leads these younger children in directions of perceived danger, they spoke often of actively seeking the security of parental intervention as soon as things seem to go wrong:
If I just go in just adult one, I call my dad or I go away from it and I close it (Laura, aged 9).
Only download things with your parent's permission because there could be a virus on them (Anthony, aged 9).
Both the interview and the survey data confirmed, though, that for most as they enter the early teenage years, the compliance that they continue to display becomes increasingly strategic. It was evident from our data, as from other studies such as Livingstone's (2011 op. cit.), that very many teenagers look for the freedom to do their homework against a background of activities that are likely to be disapproved of or actively proscribed by parents (especially during time set aside for homework), such as instant messaging, online games-play, social networking, browsing YouTube, watching TV on demand or participating in a special interest forum:
Well, I can have like 2 or 3 conversations going at once by emailing … if I sit on the phone, I sit on the phone and I don't do anything else. Whereas if I'm emailing people, I can email them and then maybe do 5 minutes of my coursework and then email them again, and it will work like that. So, yeah, it's quite good (Katherine, aged 16).
Interviewer: Does your mum know about the Bebo page?
No (Lorna, aged 13).
They don't think I go on MSN while I'm doing the work.
Interviewer. So you have to keep it hidden?
Yes (Ostin, aged 15).
I also have like iTunes and stuff which I'll listen to if I'm on the computer. I don't actually… I don't go onto MSN that much because it annoys me […] I'll always sign in, even if I'm doing homework I'll always sign in just in case anybody needs to tell me something important (Chris, aged 15).
Others we spoke with were confident about the fact that they were able to balance their attention to their homework with other online activities, as Craig made clear: ‘I'm able to do this, it's just simple to me’. Craig, at 15, found himself balancing usually unsuccessful attempts at strategic compliance with equally unsuccessful attempts at strategic redefinition, which left him quite frustrated. The findings of our survey4 in fact suggest that a number of these older teenagers were seeking ways of solving the problem of wanting to enjoy their various uses of technology in ways that enhanced rather than hindered their learning.
Participants in our survey were asked how often (i.e. never, sometimes, often, always) they had specific applications open on their computer during their homework. From the factor analysis, two types of multitasking, specifically while doing homework, were identified: constructive multitasking and distractive multitasking. Constructive multitasking was based on three items – using a search engine, having instant messenger open and playing music – that, from the qualitative aspects of the project, appeared to indicate that young people were setting an environment that tended to be conducive to study. Internet users aged 17–19, who are still in education, tend to be the most likely to have one of the ‘constructive multitasking’ applications open when doing homework. For example, 65% of 12-year-old, 77% of 14-year-old and 85% of 17- to 19-year-old Internet users play music on their computers at least sometimes while doing homework.
Not all, unsurprisingly, appear to have achieved this kind of potentially productive balance of activities. The second factor, distractive multitasking, comprised three items that, based on the qualitative findings from the learner and their context study, arguably indicate young people setting an environment that will not be conducive to study: using a computer to watch TV on demand; watching videos on a computer; and playing games on a computer. The patterns of use by age differ according to the application. For example, 29% of 12-year-old, 35% of 14-year-old and 37% of 17- to 19-year-old Internet users still in education watch TV on demand on their computers at least sometimes while doing homework. Sixty-three percent of 12-year-old, 57% of 14-year-old and 41% of 17- to 19-year-old Internet users still in education play games on their computers at least sometimes while doing homework.
Revisiting them 2 years onwards from our first meeting, the interviewees in our qualitative sample appeared to be engaging in the same range of things, but we encountered evidence of growing polarization in approaches between those young people who were concerned about the temptations of multitasking while working, and others who were confident in their ability to handle such practices. This was particularly visible in the way different members of the age group were engaging with Facebook, which over the last 2 years has effectively become a portal for the full range of their activities for many young people of secondary school age, through which they communicate with friends, play games, join special interest groups, share videos and seek help for schoolwork:
Nowadays you've got Facebook on your phone, it almost removes the need for other communications … specially helpful with homework (Ed, aged 17).
In being supported in his ownership and use of a smartphone, it is clear that Ed has gained the approval of his parents for technology use that only a few years ago would have been unacceptable (he and his fellow sixth-form pupils are even allowed to use their smartphones for seeking information from the Internet during lessons). Similarly, other intensive users, such as Craig, appear to have gone some way towards achieving a real degree of strategic redefinition, in that he no longer encounters parental opposition to his wide-ranging use of technology, and instead has taken on the role of IT support for his mother: ‘My mum gets me to help her with her work, because she is not as good with computers, so I help her research and type stuff up’.
Others, though, appear to have substantively taken on the concerns and anxieties expressed by the adults in their lives – teachers and parents – about the supposedly deleterious effects of excessive technology use, by deliberately and systematically setting themselves limits, preferring to stay away from the computer for schoolwork entirely when at home, well aware of temptations such as Facebook:
I am very easily distracted if I am on a computer (Shawna, aged 16).
Shawna is in many respect highly committed to using Facebook, and the Internet more broadly (she regularly uses ITunes U to investigate potential undergraduate degree courses), but is nonetheless resistant to using the Internet for her learning, preferring the authority of the textbook, and only uses the Internet for learning at home when all other options fail. She describes her typical approach to her A level studies thus:
Just making notes through the textbook there, and then when I'm making revision notes I go from the revision guide, and then if I'm confused about anything I go back to textbook if I am still confused go back to my teacher. That's how it works … and then sometimes if I'm confused at home … you like go to your room where your laptop is to Google it and then come away from it.
She appears to be by no means unusual in this. Another sixth-form student, Steven (17), expressed a considerably greater degree of reserve about using technologies than he had in his previous interview at 15 (when he told us that he tended to go straight to Google and Wikipedia for most information during homework):
I rarely use the Internet, unless I was really searching for something I wanted – sort of a second opinion or different information, I'd use the internet. I tend to use the textbooks. It's just easier to find what you're looking for – the Internet tends to be a bit general, or sort of opinionated.
It was far from rare in our most recent round of interviews to encounter such reservations, although one final example must suffice in the interests of space:
Before in like year 7 and 8 I went on to MSN quite a lot … I don't know why I just don't like it anymore. … I just got bored of it really (Simon, aged 15)
Such views do not represent a wholesale rejection of new technologies, as Simon here values some aspects of the Internet in his life. But in the most recent data (i.e. March 2011) from our own project, we have seen continued evidence of an increased acceptance on the part of some of the young learners of the views of those adults – their teachers, and parents especially – who advocate caution and even distrust of new technologies and the Internet. In that respect, it appears that those youngsters may well have passed from strategic compliance to internalized acceptance. Not all, certainly, wish either to undermine or redefine their parents' beliefs in this respect.
Conclusions
Out of the various methods available to parents for mediating their children's technology use, the parents in our study tended to follow the model suggested by Livingstone and Helsper (2008), preferring social over technical forms of mediation. In effect, as specific means of regulation become less viable for older children, the key mode of mediation tended to involve a mixture of monitoring, advice and rules of different kinds.
The findings of our research vividly showed that interactions between parents and children concerning home technologies can move in a variety of directions: this is by no means simply a field of conflict between progressive youth culture and reactionary adults. In our study, we encountered a significant proportion of parents who – with varying levels of enthusiasm – supported and in some cases encouraged their children in the process of becoming familiar with new technologies. Their motivation for doing so was both in the interests of their children's learning at school, and in order to ensure that they were prepared for future demands of the workplace and, given the perceived importance of such potential benefits, these parents were prepared to accept and help their children to navigate safely the negative aspects of technology use. We also encountered some parents – a smaller proportion – who had concerns about new technologies, and about how they understood young people in general to be using them, which were so pronounced that they potentially undermined their children's confidence in the technology resources they had provided for them.
The young people themselves also displayed a variety of feelings about technology and about their parents' attitudes towards it. By the time they were in secondary school, most young people were beginning to forge their own preferred repertoires of technology use, and had learnt that the price of such autonomy was some degree of co-operation with parental rules and attitudes. As they advanced through the secondary school, and the realities of gaining qualifications and finding work become more influential, it appears that these young people's attitudes and uses of new technologies tended to develop in one of two distinct directions: towards a pro-technology enthusiasm for constructing learning activities in line with their broader repertoire of technology activities (often at the same time trying to redefine parental attitudes), or towards a rather more reserved and selective attitude towards technology.
The pro-technology attitudes and behaviour generally appear to grow out of strong ties with peer networks, but are also sometimes engendered in families with an approving technology culture, such as where one or more parents work in the technology industry. The more ambivalent attitudes appear to arise from factors such as the consciousness and increasing acceptance of parental concerns (for instance, regarding the quality of knowledge in printed texts as against the Internet), anxiety about the formal requirements of public examinations (which might most safely be addressed through reliance on textbooks) or some degree of self-distancing from the dominant modes of peer group online behaviour for various reasons.
It is possible to characterize these choices in very different ways, either celebrating the confidence of those young people who make use of technologies in order to construct their own paths of learning while regretting the impact on others of the overcautious perspectives of some parents and teachers or, just as reasonably, applauding the more discriminating approaches of those who take the reservations of their parents and teachers seriously, and worrying about the unquestioning preference for anything digital of some of their peers. Our research does not enable us to make a judgement in this respect, and rather it is the aim of this paper simply to demonstrate that claims about the richness of digital resources for learning, and for helping young people to become autonomous learners, need to be moderated by an understanding of the growing influence of more negative arguments about technology. Our findings indicate that some young people readily buy into this negativity, and therefore it is important that adults – especially teachers and parents – are careful to consider the long-term effects of such attitudes towards technology as seriously as they consider the risks of unquestioningly positive attitudes.
