The Parent App: Understanding Families in the Digital Age
Media scholar Clark examines how various media are consumed by American children and teens today and how families make decisions about the role of media in their lives. Clark and her team interviewed dozens of families from all socioeconomic backgrounds, uncovering both major and subtle differences in kids’ media use and their parents’ attitudes about time spent online, texting, or playing games. At the core is Clark’s thesis that digital interaction is simply a new peer culture space in which many of the same old parenting questions—setting guidelines, teaching awareness, determining when to intervene—apply. Parents today will agree that one extraordinary new stress, however, is the emotional work spent keeping up with new media and their effects. Clark doesn’t comment on policy and regulation until awfully late in the book, and one wonders how quickly any book on ever-changing media will date. However, the stories are engaging, and Clark’s analyses are very accessible, particularly in her concluding pages, when she summarizes different best practices for parents seeking guidance in making such important decisions. --Annie Tully