Family cultures, digital media and young people. Explicit and implicit restrictions in the reproduction of generalized advantage

Abstract

The emergence of digital media is enabling, in families with teenagers, new ways of being together and interacting with the exterior, which are often experienced with anxiety by parents. To understand the rules that parents and their children produce to regulate them, and how these regulations relate to the reproduction of generalised advantage and disadvantage, the narrow orientation of the risks and opportunities approach can be widened in order to pay attention at the way family cultures and family identities generate specific balances between the normative tensions of work, consumption and authenticity.

The analysis of a qualitative empirical research with 23 families of two secondary schools shows that rather than looking at how specific rules or parenting styles relate to different social positions, it is preferable to analyze how different family cultures and family identities regulate young people’s acquisition of autonomy. By doing so, aspects such as the familiarity with, and reflexivity towards technology; family routines and schedules; or the specific relational contexts, emerge as fundamental to understand the reproduction of generalised advantage. These elements allow to dynamically contextualize the complex combination of implicit and explicit regulations in young people’s process of maturation.