Digitally strategic: how young people respond to parental views about the use of technology for learning in the home

In recent years parents have invested heavily in providing their children with technologies at home in order to support their present and future educational activities. UK education policy has encouraged parents to help their children use these technologies to support their learning, but within a broader social context of growing anxiety about issues of Internet safety, and the unreliability of knowledge taken from the Internet. This paper draws on recent research within a large-scale mixed methods project looking at a range of issues relating to the use of technologies in the home for learning, in order to explore the ways in which parents try to balance the sometimes contradictory roles of being both technology providers and technology regulators, and the ways in which young people act in response. While parents inevitably experience a gradual loss of control over their children's uses of technology as they enter the later years of adolescence, findings show that although some young people develop highly autonomous and innovative uses of technology for learning, many others come to moderate their uses of technology in ways that are acceptable to their parents.