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Being or becoming a parent raises a whole range of questions concerning the education and health of one's children. This leads parents to actively seek out information and build knowledge around various themes (e.g. Garbutt, 2012). Digital media allow them to access numerous sources of information that are heterogeneous in terms of their formats, subjects, and the actors who create and share them. Through their everyday digital media and information practices (Savolainen, 2008), parents are exposed to multiple discourses that contribute to the elaboration and dissemination of models of parenthood that can have a significant normative dimension (Martin, 2014). Faced with the plurality and heterogeneity of these discourses, parenting now requires complex skills that involve finding, understanding, filtering, comparing and criticizing media and information potentially useful to the development of their parenting skills. Our four-phase research aims to provide recommendations to childcare professionals on how to support parents of 0-6 years olds in the exercise of their digital media and critical skills. This contribution presents the results of the first two stages of the project. During the first phase, we investigated the perceptions of childcare professionals on the digital media practices of parents through group interviews. First analyses highlight the fact that professionals do not seem to know exactly where and how parents get information, even though they recognize that digital media are important resources for parents nowadays. Professionals testified that the use of digital media by parents can have a strong influence on their representations of parenthood, their behaviour, their psychological well-being and on their relationship with professionals. Moreover, two main types of motivations associated with the use of digital media by parents were identified: convenience (e.g. constant availability, practicality) and social and identity-related incentives (e.g. seeking peer support, avoiding stigmatization, showcasing their parental skills). The second phase, which is still ongoing, consists of guided tour interviews by parents of their personal space of information (Malone, 1983) in order to document their digital media practices related to parenting. By comparing the results of this phase and the previous one, this research will (1) identify tensions between parents and childcare professionals in terms of representations of parenting skills and attitudes towards digital media and (2) document the influence of parents’ digital practices on the relationship between parents and professionals. First analyses show the need for professionals to better understand the media practices of parents in order to meaningfully engage with parents about digital media.
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Robbeets, C., Jacques, J., Campion, B., Merla, L., François, A., Roberti-Lintermans, M., & et al. (2022). The effects of digital media on the representations and the exercise of parenthood: challenges and opportunities. ECREA 2022- 9th European Communication Conference, Aarhus. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/99907