Parental legitimacy and the ideal of resistance to connected screens : Principles put to the test in practice

Résumé 0

This article considers parental attitudes and relationships regarding the use of screens in the family. Based on the results of a survey that systematically cross-referenced the discourses and perceptions of children and parents, with respect to the uses of each member of the 15 families we met, we show how digital practices and their perceptions are at the heart of issues of distinction for the parents. While children’ uses of screens and their parental regulation have been studied extensively, we propose a shift in two respects: (i) to update the inclusion of digital parental mediation in contemporary norms of “good parenting”, which implies studying it from the angle of social class and gender; and (ii) to uncover the uses and perceptions of adults, that is, the annoyances, tensions and conflicts that they fuel within couples and between ex-spouses. It is thus on the horizontal axis of parental and marital socialization that the argument is built, to show how the discourses on the place of screens in families are markers of identity and social belonging. Talking about uses is a form of legitimization (of oneself) or on the contrary of denigration (of others), depending on one’s position in a stratified and gendered social system.