Parenting in a world of deep mediatization

Children are handed digital technologies at a very early stage of their lives (Elias and Sulkin 2019). Based on the theory of social construction (Couldry and Hepp 2017) and research on media socialization (Trueltzsch-Wijnen 2020) media must be considered to have a major impact on children’s sense of reality, their acquisition of knowledge and their acting in society. As such children as media recipients are not considered to play a passive role but are active contributors that have the power to influence and co-shape social processes (Bachmair 2010). It is this impact on social processes that this communication will further explore by focusing on how parents need to adopt critical “digital parenting” skills (Mascheroni et al) in order to raise children to be not only critical towards media reception and production but also to use media to create an impact that shapes a more just, democratic and healthier society (Mihailidis et al. 2021). The research project presented here proposes to elaborate a media educational experience that makes parents more knowledgeable and critical about the impact of media on their children’s lives and teaches them ways to mediate their children “to be critical of media representations and discourses” and at the same time stresses “the importance of learning to use the media as modes of self-expression and social activism” (Kellner and Share 2005:372). By using the concepts “communicative figuration” and “recursive transformation” (Breiter, Hasebrink, and Hepp 2018) this communication will show how media education can create a useful and highly relevant impact on children and young adults and the society they live in.