Exploring Korean parents’ meanings of digital play for young children

This study is about contemporary Korean parents’ social tensions and the cultural meanings around digital play. Through interviews with 13 middle-class Korean parents, they discussed their perspectives on digital play, including their views of popular culture, high-technology, and learning, which created inner conflicts and negotiations with their children in their everyday lives. Furthermore, Korean parents tended to employ digital play for their children with their own purposes and meanings, such as rewards, social competiveness, learning English, and finding effective ways to keep their children occupied. Thus, based on the hypercompetitiveness of formal education in Korean contexts, this study argues that digital play is not merely children’s play with digital technology, rather digital play reflects the social pressures, concerns, and anxieties that these middle-class Korean parents feel regarding their notion of parenting, their parental practices, and their children’s intense competition in education (and the job market) in global and neoliberal times.