Tech Shock - from Parent Zone
Tech Shock: Everything you always wanted to know about tech and family life.Podcasting from Parent Zone,the media literacy experts, host Vicki Shotbolt explores the upsides and downsides of family life in the digital age. With a range of expert guests she looks at online harms to children ranging from pornography to gambling and at what should be done about them. Incurably optimistic, Vicki also celebrate the many benefits of tech for children and young people, as she considers how best to live in a world in which family life is now inescapably digital.Listen every Monday, subscribe, and give us a five star review.
Tech Shock - from Parent Zone
3. Digital parenting and monitoring technology
The use of technology to assist with parenting is something that’s becoming a social norm. It's easy to understand why: parents want to know what their children are doing online, where they are when they're out of sight and what digital content they're being exposed to. Knowing your child is safe is the most fundamental of all parenting priorities.
But digital parenting, particularly when it involves monitoring technology, raises questions around children’s rights to privacy. This use of technology may also (somewhat counterintuitively) impact family dynamics and wellbeing in negative ways. Far from supporting conversations it might be making them less constructive.
This week Vicki is joined by Ekaterina Hertog and Jun Zhao from the University of Oxford and Netta Weinstein from the University of Reading – co-authors on a recent research paper exploring ‘data-driven parenting’ – to discuss this in more detail, to consider some of the issues surrounding it, and explore the concept of a ‘good digital society’.
Talking points:
- Is digital parenting technology altering – or even replacing – things like communication and open discussion?
- Does monitoring technology prevent children from learning to self-regulate behaviours and make good decisions?
- Even with safety as its aim, does digital parenting infringe on a child’s right to privacy or are parents getting the balance right?
Tech Shock is a Parent Zone production. Follow Parent Zone on social media for all the latest on our work on helping families to thrive in the digital age. Presented by Vicki Shotbolt. Tech Shock is produced and edited by Tim Malster.
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