Digital Well-Being and Superdigital Citizenship: A Class Comparison of Parenting Practices for Remote Learning
- Open Access
- 10-05-2025
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Abstract
The move to online schooling during the COVID pandemic created a natural laboratory for the study of remote-learning. Remote-learning expanded to a previously unknown scale, bridging across social classes, requiring parental support for all involved. Parental involvement in the daily support of getting to school prepared, doing homework, maintaining physical and psychological health for learning, and advocating for a child’s individual needs is crucial for student success. Yet sociologists have shown that it is also a source of the reproduction of class advantage; middle-class parents, who have the cultural capital of knowledge, financial resources, and communication skills are better equipped than low-income parents to fulfill these demands of parental involvement. This study is concerned with the changes in parental involvement that the demands of remote-learning elicited and implications for educational justice across classes. Remote-learning during COVID utilized an eclectic variety of pedagogical approaches and tools, including synchronic learning platforms, a-synchronic applications and programs, and hybrid models, and was dynamic as educators and administrators tried out diverse numerous pedagogies and tools for learning digitally in order to provide an alternative to school. In this respect, remote-learning during COVID provides a glimpse into the social dynamics of the use of educational technology.
The article brings a contextualized analysis of social justice to the critical discussion of educational technology, and argues that parental involvement is a unique sphere of educational justice in which classed cultures of parenting in the digital age are implicated in issues of cultural and distributive justice for children and in which associational justice is very marginally attended to.
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In interviews with 25 middle-class and low-income parents, parents contended with these changes in parental involvement from within perceptions of their parental role in facilitating learning and in regulating children’s participation in digital spaces. In other words, their involvement took shape in conversation with deliberations about parenting in the digital age. This article questions: What do parents across social classes see as their role in facilitating their children’s education in this new context? How does this role fit into their practices for parenting in the digital age? What is the classed nature of these practices?
The article presents two classed practices of parental involvement in remote-learning: middle-class parents espouse a digital well-being approach while low-income parents espouse a superdigital citizenship approach. The former is concerned with maintaining what parents see as a healthy balance between their children’s digital activity and school learning, while the latter is concerned with ensuring their children have access to what they see as varied and different resources and opportunities for learning and social connection on- and offline. The identification of disparate classed practices for supporting remote-learning highlights the salience of parental involvement as a sphere of educational justice, showing that edtech alone is not a panacea for equality of opportunity. Parental involvement is a crucial sphere of educational justice with parenting practices shaping the possibilities for how children from different classes participate in and engage with edtech pedagogy.
Literature Review
The analytical framework of this study brings together three theoretical approaches: a critical approach to edtech which views technology as socially constructed and contextual and therefore implicated in issues of democratic participation and social justice; sociological insights on parental class capital and the reproduction of advantage through parental involvement; and studies of parenting in the digital age.
Critical Edtech Approach to Remote-Learning
Prior to COVID, studies on parental involvement in remote-learning worked from the assumptions that parents must have a role in order to support their children in remote-learning, schools will have to teach parents to correctly perform this role, and parents will eventually abide (Fedina et al., 2017; Kong, 2018; Kong & Li, 2009). These studies worked from a technological optimism approach (Selwyn, 2011), which reflects an assumption of technology as inherently good at increasing educational opportunities, as well as a neoliberal assumption of individuals’ responsibility for their educational performance (Selwyn et al., 2020) – though in this case of parents’ responsibility for their individual children’s performance. During the pandemic, as remote-learning expanded across countries and educational systems, this approach proved unfeasible; parents across classes experienced difficulties that revealed structural inequalities and barriers to parental fulfillment of a supportive role of children’s remote-learning. Pandemic studies across national contexts easily identified personal (digital literacy and pedagogical or content knowledge), technical, logistical (organizing time and household, between kids), and financial (buying hardware) difficulties parents experienced in facilitating remote-learning (Aladsani, 2022; Alkinani, 2021; Alon & Nachmias, 2021; Budhrani et al., 2021; Bunga et al., 2021; Daniela et al., 2021; Flynn et al., 2021; Fontenelle-Tereshchuk, 2021; Garbe et al., 2020; Misirli & Ergulec, 2021; Toran et al., 2021; Lau & Lee, 2021). These studies all pointedly illustrated that educational technologies are not a panacea for crises nor are they magical opportunity-expanders; rather they are deeply embedded in the context of everyday life in homes and institutions that shape the possibilities for how children participate in and use technologies and how parents support learning with educational technologies (Williamson et al., 2020).
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In order to approach questions of class and educational justice in remote-learning, technology should be understood as socially constructed and negotiated, situated in material conditions of political and social stratification, and implicated in larger issues of social justice and democratic participation (Selwyn, 2010). Such an approach begins by asking questions about the differential access, skills or digital literacy, and the meaning of engagement with digital spaces and technology for learners from different social groups (Williamson et al., 2020; Selwyn, 2004). The move to remote-learning during the pandemic highlighted the need to consider these questions regarding not only learners but also parents, and to consider how parents from different classes manage and adjust to the requirements for facilitating learning through technologies.
Critical analysis of pandemic pedagogies such as remote-learning can thus provide insights that might inform just decisions about future practice and design of pedagogies that utilize edtech (Williamson et al., 2020; Cribb & Gewirtz, 2003). Adopting a critical stance stems from a desire not to criticize technology or parents, but to elucidate the complex partnership between schools, parents, and technology as shaped in social context, striving for insights on how to work within the structures of schooling and parenting across classes.
Parental Involvement as a Sphere of Educational Justice
Home-school relations have become an undisputable foundation of educational practice, with policy, practitioners, and researchers working from a shared assumption that parental involvement is key to children’s educational success and well-being (Christenson & Reschly, 2010). Yet there is also widespread recognition of the challenges to inclusive involvement of parents across classes and social groups (Crozier & Reay, 2005; Vincent, 2000). Sociologists have pointed out that schools’ expectations of parents correspond to middle-class parents’ cultural capital, creating parental involvement as yet another venue for the reproduction of class advantage (Lareau, 2011; Golden et al., 2021). Schools’ images of parental involvement are often overwhelmingly in line with middle-class parents’ ways of involvement whether in contribution to school and class resources (Possey-Maddox, 2013; Erdreich & Golden, 2017), communication with teachers (MacLure & Walker, 2000), or the complementary educational work that makes daily learning possible (Griffith & Smith, 2005). Low-income parents who seek to be involved or support their children in different ways often find their involvement unrecognized, excluded, or deemed inadequate (Gilles, 2006; Lavee & Benjamin, 2015).
Whether it be low-income parents who feel disposed in the realm of home-school relations or middle-class parents who feel entitled, parental involvement can be seen as an arena for the distribution of educational goods, replete with rules for just distribution in relation to which participants can form specific perceptions of actual justice. I thus suggest viewing parental involvement as a sphere of justice within education, overlapping with Sabbagh et al’s (2006) previously identified five – right to education, allocation of learning places, teaching-learning practices, teachers’ treatment of students, students’ evaluation of grade distribution. A contextualized analysis of social justice in education (Gewirtz, 2006) complements a critical edtech analysis in that both call for attention to the situated nature of education in material and cultural conditions outside the educational realm. Specifically, the two dimensions of the contextualized approach to justice in education meet up with issues of access and use of edtech and with parenting in the digital age as a cultural context.
On the first account, contextualized analysis is focused inwards within the educational sphere and recognizes the multiple dimensions or of categories of social justice (distributive, cultural, and associational) at play, pointing to a need to attend to tension amongst these categories (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2003). Uses of edtech thus can put forward ideas and regulate the performance of what is expected of parents in the realm of schooling on a daily and intensive basis. Regarding parental involvement in remote-learning, this necessitates consideration of how the ways the parents from different classes provide for, support, and create opportunities for engaging with edtech pedagogies mediate the distribution of educational goods (Livingstone & Sefton-Greene, 2016). As part of this mediation, we should consider issues of cultural justice that touch on the fit between school’s perceptions of parental involvement in remote-learning and the digital capital of parents – the specific forms of cultural capital for making meaningful use of technology (Selwyn, 2004) and how these are involved in supporting children’s use of edtech. Class differences in capital necessitate also considering practically whether recognizing and catering to class difference will conflict with issues of distributive justice (Gewirtz, 2006). Further complicating the picture, is the consideration of associational justice, and how, if at all, the demands of parental involvement in remote-learning include parental participation in decisions about their children’s engagement with edtech.
The second account of contextualization entails attention to the ways that issues of social justice in education are mediated by cultural norms, institutional constraints, and everyday life conditions outside of the educational sphere. Similarly, the critical edtech approach calls for attention to how home and community settings shape the different cultural and digital capital people from different backgrounds can draw upon (Selwyn, 2004). The backdrop to these differences is the issue of how technology has shaped parenting.
Classed Parenting in the Digital Age
Remote-learning has appeared on a scene in which parents’ relationships with their children are shaped in and around digital spaces. Parents’ own proficiency and participation in digital spaces, what they know about their children’s digital participation, and the risks and benefits they perceive for their children shape practices for raising children in a digital world. Parenting has come to include online care work, meaning that parents feel expected to perform parenting online (Moravec, 2011), particularly in response to the perceived risks of digital media and to the persistent ability to access, process, and manage information (Clark, 2013; Jeffery, 2021). Yet parents are aware of their children’s digital future and oftentimes actively pursue opportunities for facilitating children’s connected learning, acquisition of 21st century skills, and cultivation of collaborative and creative competencies (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2019). Parenting practices for surveillance, guidance, facilitation, and the like differ across classes in ways that reflect class habitus - dispositions, ways of thinking, values and conceptions of self (Clark, 2013; Sefton-Green & Livingstone, 2016; Hollingworth et al., 2011; Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2019). The expansion of parental involvement to remote-learning warrants exploration of parents’ adaptations of their role in their children’s schooling within the context of already arduous stains of parenting in the digital age (Jeffery, 2022) and with attention to class differences.
Methodology
The study is a comparative, phenomenological study of Israeli Jewish parents’ experiences of the move to remote-learning and their view of their changing parental role. Data was gathered in a qualitative interviews with twenty-five parents (fourteen middle-class and eleven low-income) recruited from a suburban civil municipality and a major city. Both locales have mixed socio-economic make-up (rank of 7 out of 10) and educational systems with mid-level peripheral status which marks the distance from central national resources (rated 5 for the municipality and 6 for the city) (ICBS, 2022). These locales thus provide insight into a middle-range of national socio-economic status as well as educational resources. All parents had at least one child in full-time remote-learning during the pandemic (fourth grade or higher). Though recruitment efforts sought out parents, only mothers answered our calls, perhaps reflecting the gendered nature of parental support for remote-learning. Parents completed a demographic survey and a statement of consent (See Table 1 for demographic details).
Similar to other countries, the Israeli education system responded to the pandemic with school closures, remote-learning, and hybrid-learning. School closures occurred in response to contagion peaks three times–March 2020, September 2021, and January 2021- necessitating the move to remote-learning. After each closure, schools reopened according to the rate of contagion in the particular municipality and with priority for elementary education and for high school matriculators (11th and 12th graders). Upon reopening, schools adopted a hybrid model during which part of each school week was conducted remotely. Over the 2020 school year, students studied remotely between 36 and 59% of the scheduled school-year weeks in 2020 and between 27 and 67% in 2021 depending on grade level (CRI, 2021). Though efforts were made to compensate for households lacking internet infrastructure and hardware, participation gaps were evident across socio-economic groups, Jewish and Arab society, the ultra-Orthodox, and families with over three children (Ilan, 2020). These gaps point to the importance of understanding the classed nature of parental involvement for remote-learning and its implications for educational justice.
Parents were recruited through WhatsApp groups with an interest in parenting of two kinds – groups formed by parents of school classes and groups run by community organizers related to the Welfare Department. Both types of group are voluntary and their culture of use includes various types of offers or requests for participation (Przybylski, 2021). Only parents who expressed interest were contacted. Parents recruited from the Welfare Department group were offered a small honorarium to compensate for their time.
Prior to the interview, parents were sent a demographic survey over GoogleForms. The survey was intended for the gathering of descriptive information prior to the interviews (Przybylski, 2021), particularly, but not exclusively, background information for comparison across social classes. The survey included information about parents’ work status before and during COVID, educational level, home-ownership (three parameters used to define class), number and ages of children at home, children’s extra-curriculars before COVID, home internet access, number of devices at home, and ages when children received smartphones. While the aforementioned objective parameters were used to categorize class status, the study adopts a cultural approach to class, viewing it as a fundamental organizer of experience and thus requiring attention to participants’ subjective experiences of class, including as regards childrearing and education (Golden et al., 2018).
Interviews last one-and-half to two hours, covering but not limited to: reaction and response to school demands during remote-learning, difficulties and success in involvement in remote-learning, parents’ digital skills and competencies, parents’ role in children’s digital activity, coordination of children’s educational needs, and balance of employment obligations and remote-learning. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. On the completion of each interview, the researcher completed a post-interview report, a ‘bracketing’ technique often used in phenomenological research to deal reflexively with pre-conceived notions and to explore and reflect on emerging findings (Nazir, 2016). Post-interview reports served as a means for securing significant themes and comparing later between interviews. Interviews were subject to a context-attentive ‘engaged listening’ (Forsey, 2010), as well as a rigorous and multi-level analysis based on the conventional constant comparative method (Creswell, 2013). First each interview was read on its own, allowing for themes and categories to emerge. Ten interviews were read by the researcher and a research assistant to identify initial categories. Categories were then used for comparative analysis across interviews. In this final comparative stage, close attention was paid to whether categories reflected the voices of numerous mothers, ensuring that indeed analysis both represented a general trend and reflected internal variation.
Table 1
Demographic details
Name | Education | Marital status | Number of children |
|---|---|---|---|
Low-income mothers | |||
Olga | MA | Married | 2 |
Diana | BA | Single | 1 |
Dalia | High school | Married | 6 |
Sofi | High school | Single | 2 |
Anya | BA | Single | 3 |
Sasha | High school | Single | 1 |
Ilana | High school | Divorcee | 4 |
Sharona | High school | Divorcee | 3 |
Tsofit | High school | Married | 3 |
Angela | BA | Single | 1 |
Tzuria | High school | Married | 6 |
Middle-class mothers | |||
Dana | Unknown | Married | 3 |
Limor | BA | Married | 3 |
Miri | BA | Married | 2 |
Sveta | BA | Married | 2 |
Naomi | BA | Married | 3 |
Ayelet | BA | Married | 2 |
Eilat | BA | Married | 2 |
Tzlil | Unknown | Separated | 3 |
Aya | MA | Divorcee | 2 |
Ela | MA | Married | 3 |
Calanit | MA | Single mother | 1 |
Gali | MA | Married | 2 |
Liat | MA | Married | 3 |
Mika | Unknown | Married | 2 |
Classed Practices of Parental Involvement
In interviews with parents, there was almost an absence of exposition on the digital skills needed for learning, the school’s role in teaching these skills, or their own role as parents in facilitating the learning of digital skills. Digital skills seemed a veritable non-issue for both middle-class and low-income parents, part of a shared belief that digital skills are acquired spontaneously. Parents across classes drew divisions between remote-learning and children’s activities in other digital spaces and shared a belief in parental responsibility for keeping tabs on both. Yet a comparison between how middle-class and low-income parents spoke about this time reveals different parenting approaches; middle-class parents espouse what I will term a digital well-being approach while low-income parents espouse a what I will call a superdigital citizenship approach, in the sense that it aspires to citizenship beyond or more than in the digital realm. Digital well-being connotates the possession of the skills needed for digital media use as well as for dealing with the overabundance of digital stimuli (Helsper, 2021; Gui et al., 2017), while digital citizenship refers to the ability to claim digital rights and participate in digital realms (Emejulu & McGregor, 2019; Pangrzio & Sefton-Green, 2021). Though all the parents were concerned with both to varying extents, I have termed their parenting approaches according to their focus and goals. The middle-class approach is concerned with maintaining what parents see as a healthy balance between their children’s digital activity and school learning, while the low-income approach is concerned with ensuring their children have access to what they see as varied and different resources and opportunities for learning and social connection available on- and offline, particularly in school.
The following sections present a class comparison of parenting practices – first concerning remote-learning in particular and then situating parental involvement practices in parenting practices across digital spaces.
Parent-School Relationships During Remote-Learning
Middle-class mothers expounded extensively on the difficulties of remote-learning and the superhuman efforts they made to support their children. Low-income mothers shared an experience of deep difficulties as almost impossibly insurmountable. Listening closely, one hears that these mothers hold variant ideals about their relationship with school and the division of labor and respond from within these already established structures.
Digital Well-Being: Keeping on Track Within the System
Aya, a middle-class mother of two reflects on her children’s remote-learning, criticizing synchronic learning:
Even if a kid is by himself in front of a screen, you can still do something experiential, joking around, all the things that…happen in class dynamics just don’t happen. There’s no joking around, no experiences, no teasing, no little jokes, mischief. So [I’d like to see] something not didactic. Okay, you need math, you need – look, they decided not to teach anything else, no civics, no geography, no Bible, they erased all those subjects and only taught math, language, and English.
Aya puts a fine point on what is going on – a focus on traditional subjects at the expense of both social-emotional learning and the humanities. Though she is critical of that this use of edtech goes against what she believes would be good for her children (Jeffery, 2022), throughout interview she expounds on her efforts to get her children to complete their homework in these particular subjects.
Mika, another middle-class mother described helping her fifth-grade daughter keep up with her math homework in particular. She articulates very explicitly that her decision to do so is intended to keep her daughter on the track expected by school
In the end my criterion is really as conservative as it gets – math [laughs]…not because I think it’s the most important thing in life, but because I think it’s the most important thing in the system and to survive the system, sometimes you have to play by its rules and bet it at its own game…in sixth grade they start pressuring them about getting into middle school and so you need math.
Mika sits with her daughter, makes sure she does her math homework before other subjects, and when she sees she has difficulties keeping up with her grade level finds a private tutor. Liat, another mother, expressed the same concern and spent hours watching YouTube videos on fractions and teaching her son math. These mothers cater their already intensive mothering role to the demands that remote-learning make of their children. Their parental involvement actively supports the realm of teaching-learning practices on a daily basis, which the mothers consider crucial for ensuring future advantage.
Gali too is concerned her daughters keep up with schoolwork and is concerned for their well-being. She says the most important ‘assignment’ for them as teenagers is obtaining psychological ‘developmental through interaction with their peer group.’ Yet, when it comes to remote-learning, she makes no such demands of the school, prioritizing scholastics over social-emotional learning and deprioritizing remote-participation in a youth movement – a nonformal educational framework that focuses on the peer group and social education, explaining:
It meant either a war to go into the youth movement on Zoom or, like, she couldn’t handle spending more hours in front of the screen. She spent the morning until one [at school] and at three she didn’t feel like going to the youth movement, so I let it go.PI: But you could have done the opposite?Yes, but I didn’t because learning, it seemed important to me to maintain continuity. She’s going into seventh grade next year so it seems really really important…because her fifth and sixth grade report card is important for registration [to middle school].
From these parents’ stories, it almost seems that they are concerned more with their children’s scholastic futures than with their well-being. Yet, it is misleading to consider these excerpts out of context of the entire interviews. Aya, Mika, and Gali were all extremely concerned with their children’s well-being and talked extensively about how they monitored their mental and physical heath on a daily basis. As Gali said ‘I simply worked on it,’ as if it was another job. Remote-learning though was not, in their perception, a realm for maintaining psychological development. Rather, by increasing the presence of screens and digital spaces, it was the source of tension around well-being. Yet these mothers took the task of psychological well-being upon themselves, aligned their parental practices with the school’s scholastic focus. they remained aligned with cultural ideals of proper development and scholastic achievement for their children.
Within the parent-school relationship, middle-class mothers saw their role as ensuring that their children reaped advantage in terms of grades, future school spaces, and positive teacher-student interactions. Their intensive activity played along with the rules of distributive justice, at the expense perhaps of any semblance of associative justice. Even as the school realm impinged on their ideals of well-being, they did not make demands of the system, but rather intensified their own role in order to ensure their children could utilize school resources to the best possible outcomes. Their involvement with remote-learning and alongside it, kept their children on the correct track scholastically and developmentally that is also held as the cultural ideal of proper student. Turning to the low-income mothers, we will see how they work from a concern for just distribution of opportunities (Sabbagh et al., 2006), which in their mind entails a need for physical contact with the school, teacher, and peers.
Superdigitial Citizenship: Reliant on the System
The low-income mothers painted detailed pictures of extensive difficulties they and their children faced during remote-learning. Tsipi and Diana both told of an initial confusion about remote-learning that stemmed from their acceptance of their children’s participation in digital spaces. Tsipi related, ‘In the beginning I didn’t really understand. I said you’re at home, how fun! In your room, on your computer. You’re on it all day anyway. She said, it’s not the same, not at all, it’s really hard.’ Diana too, who applauded her daughter’s digital skills, described her daughter’s difficulties with remote-learning as ‘a slap in the face,’ declaring,' it’s a fact, even a child who from a young age knows what technology is and knows all those things, still learning is something else.’ Both worked from the assumption that their children’s extensive participation in digital spaces made them proficient in the digital skills needed to do anything in those spaces. Reflecting back, Diana realizes that she did not grasp the distinction between technical digital skills and digital learning skills. Yet as we shall see, her conclusion is not about different skills for learning online; rather it is that her child needed something not available remotely. Diana is a single-mother and provider, who worked throughout the pandemic, leaving her daughter at home alone. When she realizes her daughter cannot learn remotely, she turns to teachers for help and finds that they can only offer compromises about attendance and homework completion – compromises that compromise her daughter’s opportunities for learning.
I didn’t know what to do, so I approached the teacher and explained that my daughter cries and doesn’t want [to go into Zoom]. Sometimes the teacher would write me your daughter is there, because I wasn’t at home. I was at work. And then I find out from the teacher that my daughter puts her phone so you can only see the ceiling and doesn’t want to be seen…It was really hard for me to hear that and I didn’t know how to help her because suddenly she doesn’t want to learn…We simply got to an arrangement with her teacher that she go into one Zoom class a day or two days on and two days off. We found all sorts of ways but still it was hard for my daughter…It’s not the same thing [as school]. There’s no comparison.
Diana is critical of remote-learning, because it reduces the learning places her daughter can take advantage of. Her daughter then loses out within the redistribution-recognition dilemma (Gewirtz, 2006), whereby recognition of her categorical needs as the daughter of a working single-mother, actually have the effect of reducing her access to school goods.
Mothers like Diana expressed a deep belief in the importance of school and the place of teachers in their child’s learning experience. They worked hard at what they saw as their parental role – making sure their children attend school. Dalia, sole income earner and mother of six children, explicates on the unfeasibility of the parent-school relationship in remote-learning, exclaiming, ‘I didn’t even have a chance. I’m not the mother who breathes down her child’s neck to study. I’m not the type,’ adding that she insists though that they go to school through graduation. In other words, she realizes her parental involvement practices do not fit with the culture of remote-learning. Her ‘chance’ at successful parenting is dependent on school for providing for her children the basic opportunity of a high school education. Parents such as these women, believe that their children need the physical presence of the system in order to have access to two spheres of justice - space and time for learning and the opportunity for teacher-student interaction.
The parent-school relationship is a precarious sphere, interlocked with the other five spheres of educational justice and situated within classed structural restraints. Remote-learning itself gives this sphere greater prominence, exacerbating an already disparate logic between how middle-class and low-income parents navigate within it. Middle-class parents, already intensely involved in the daily aspects of learning, upped the ante to ensure their children reap the benefits of school. They released any demands for associational justice in efforts to keep their children on track, yet remained culturally aligned with school. Low-income parents, reliant on schools for creating opportunities for their children, felt further distanced from access to resources and impeded at performing their parenting role. Attempts at claims for associational justice often backfired with recognition of their specific situation, further distancing children from school goods.
Parenting across Digital Spaces: Remote-learning and Children’s Digital Activities
All parents regardless of class situated remote-learning in the context of other digital activities. Whether they lamented their children’s increased screen time, the need for more hardware, issues of privacy, or fear of other risks that digital spaces pose, they drew divisions between these and remote-learning and clearly situated their own involvement in remote-learning in the context of their engagement with their children around these issues. Though these divisions seem similar at first glance, middle-class and low-income parents hold different motivations for drawing them and develop different practices for parenting across them.
Digital Well-Being: Cultivating Judgement and Self-Expression
Aya, a middle-class parent who used Google FamilyLink to limit her children’s cellphone use related that she had to double her son’s allocation to allow for the time spent online doing schoolwork, and subsequently faced difficulty encouraging him to pursue other offline activities or even regulating his online activities. In the past she could simply shut off his phone, but with remote-learning, she no longer could. Miri and Ayelet faced a similar dilemma. They had chosen alternative schools for their children that reflected their own child raising mores – creative exploration, slow and exact developmental progress, experiential learning. These schools discouraged cellphone use until high school. Yet with remote-learning, they found themselves allowing increased screentime and even purchasing cellphones for their children to enable better communication with teachers and classmates.
These middle-class mothers lamented that remote-learning challenged existing parenting practices and values about digital spaces that they had been working to instill. Their dilemmas reflect the discourse of harm or moral panic around the potential damaging impact of social media (Hollingworth et al., 2011; Aarsand, 2011), and they heightened practices they believed would encourage balance between offline and online activity (Jeffery, 2022). Their concern to keep digital spaces in check reflects the middle-class ethic of expression empowerment whereby parents restrict use of digital spaces to ensure that their children are developing well-round and allow for use to ensure self-expression (Clark, 2013).
Just as parents take an active role in ensuring their children keep up with the requirements of the school system, they also take an active role in pursuing the cultivation of balance. Eilat explains, through her ban on TikTok, how she both regulates and encourages her daughter’s digital skill development:
I have anxiety about that app – all the challenges posted there and what I hear and see…I don’t think it’s beneficial. If I saw she could get anything out of it I would say great. But if she wants to upload videoclips she can do it on YouTube. Come on, first film clips, let’s see they’re good, upload them…But she doesn’t have a technological problem. She’s proficient, she knows better than me, they discover everything so quickly.
Eilat sees her role as a balance between protecting her daughter from dangers and immorality in choice of spaces and encouraging her to discover new spaces, develop digital skills, and be creative in digital spaces. She is driven at once by the discourse of moral panic and an ethic of expression empowerment. Though she does not employ an ‘education repertoire’ or an interpretative response that is related to education (Aarsand, 2011, p. 323) when talking about digital spaces, she does assume a type of technical skill learning – but this learning is autodidactic, not requiring teacher or parental involvement. Other parents such as Mika, Limor, and Aya mentioned almost casually helping their children learn to find information for school reports, identify reliable sources, and make PowerPoint presentations. Though these parents may be more involved in or worried about the acquisition of basic digital skills than they let on, they outrightly share Eilat’s concerns about cultivating skills for good judgement in digital spaces, and described extensively practices for cultivating these skills, mostly through talk.
Tzlil related how she asked her children at dinner time about their digital activity. Miri spoke about watching YouTube videos about how to deal with dangers on the Internet. Dana, Rut, and Gali all constantly spoke to their children about the dangers of the Internet – shaming, stealing identity, intimate pictures, etc. As Gali says,
I work for them. I work at it. Communication is really really important, because that’s how you know where your children are. It’s not that I know everything and that’s okay, it’s okay they have their own – but I really work at it. At making it happen, talking, being someone to turn to, raising all sorts of issues…we can talk about dangers, about WhatsApp, about situations….
Gali’s job includes constant communication with her children to guide their media use (Mascheroni et al., 2018). Ela too relates a success story whereby the constant channel of communication she maintains with her son, allows him to both identify the dangers of participating in comment discussions and still to express his opinion without deteriorating into what is considered derogatory ‘trash talk.’ In other words, these parents see cultivating judgement and self-expression as an ever-present part of their concerted cultivation parenting role (Jeffery, 2021), without being ever-present in their children’s digital activity.
Remote-learning bridged two learning places – the digital and the educational. As a digital practice, remote-learning upset rules and regulations that many parents had put in place to regulate screentime and what they saw as the dangers of digital spaces. As an educational practice, it also set the standards for proper learning. Middle-class parents took upon themselves the responsibility to ensure their children’s adherence to these school standards and to household standards of digital activity. They maintained a division between school and the digital as much as possible and used the division to foster a well-being defined as an individual responsibility for judgement as well as self-expression in the here and now and for their children’s futures.
Superdigital Citizenship: Opportunities for Sociability and Skills
Anya, Ilana, and Sofi lamented over struggles to get their children to participate in remote-learning, resigned themselves to their children’s favored digital activity. Yet they did not lament the digital activity per se, only the loss of schooling. Many of the low-income mothers valued digital spaces as providing opportunities for fine-tuning valuable digital skills and for making social connections. They drew a very clear division between digital spaces and schooling. In the words of Ilana, ‘the discourse is totally different, it’s not learning.’ Whereas for the middle-class parents, remote-learning upset the values and practices for regulating digital activity, for low-income parents remote-learning is an impossibility. The loss of one type of opportunity does not necessitate forsaking other learning opportunities provided of digital places.
Dalia, Diana, and Anya expressed joy and amazement that their sons were able to learn languages (English) or improve proficiency (Russian) from multiplayer online gaming. Sharona, who knows her daughter is active on TikTok and sometimes even watches and dances with her, encourages her daughter to make films and share them,
I tell her great, way to go! The truth is she knows how to stylize videoclips really nicely. She invests a lot of time in it, she sits, loves doing it, wow…I don’t know how [she and her friend] do it, it’s not normal! Fantastic, they are simply so smart, do amazing things, simply amazing girls!
Sharona is proud that her daughter has gained skills for online cooperation and creative participation. She recognizes that these skills were learned through investment and that they reflect knowledge and proficiency that not everyone has, defining her daughter as capable. Not surprisingly, she encourages her daughter to continue this activity, to take advantage of the platforms for fulfilling her potential. These parents value children’s activity in digital spaces as opportunities for learning, even if not for school learning. Their wonder at their children’s proficiency discloses their perception of their parenting role - while they may not hold an exhaustive view of how and what their children can gain from these spaces, they embrace the ways their children find to benefit from digital spaces (Mascheroni et al., 2018).
At the root of their approach to superdigital citizenship is a perception of learning broadly defined extending over the scholastic into the social, constantly available, and not necessarily occurring in linear progression. In this perception, learning is never ideally structured, and always requires that children (and adults) take active advantage of opportunities that come their way. For this reason, these parents are actively concerned that their children are exposed to a wide variety of opportunities on- and offline and take advantage of them. In addition to their receptiveness to online opportunities, these parents were concerned their children did not lose out on offline opportunities, which they saw as opportunities for sociality rather than for self-expression. Dalia, who we met above insisting her children complete high school, also insists her children take advantage of the playing fields:
Friendships develop differently in the Internet world. But seeing a person with your eyes, breathing the same air – that has no replacement. So I still think nothing replaces the playing fields. My kids know that. You see half now are here with me and half at the playing fields. They like being outside and being inside. It’s all a question of how you guide them - hands down.
Dalia is concerned her children experience a type of face-to-face interaction as she mentioned about school, but on the playing fields where she believes it leads to a type of connection. Anya differentiated these connections from those online, saying that online connections were ‘not a stable thing…not exactly friendship.’ Dalia furthermore, attributes her children’s appreciation of this resource to her own insistence. Both the playing fields and school are resources she and other parents insist their children have access to even as they enable their children to tap into the ever-important resources of digital spaces. These parents spoke little about dangers of digital spaces or maintaining a balance for mental health, but about making sure their children balanced time on and offline in order to reap benefits of various types of connection. Unlike middle-class mothers like Gali who expressed developmental concerns about adolescents acquiring social skills, these mothers spoke about the connection itself as a resource. They embraced what Clark (2013) characterized as an ethic of respectful connectedness, which refers to using digital spaces for expanding connection.
From this perspective on learning as widely and eclectically available on and offline, these parents see their role as exposing their children to opportunities and encouraging participation, but ultimately leaving responsibility for taking advantage of them to their children. Diana sums up this perspective with regard to opportunities in digital spaces and outside of them:
Today it’s easier, why? Because there’s Internet and Google and all the media and technology that we didn’t have…This generation is really smart, and they have this and don’t use it. It kills me that my daughter and young people don’t use what’s available. So I say keep going forward, it’s good for us. There are disadvantages, don’t get me wrong, but much more good things than disadvantages…I think learning, no matter where you are is really important…It’s never too late to learn and it’s fun to learn and you need to learn, it improves you and opens doors…Right now it’s hard for you, but the day will come and life will give you opportunities…Learn, learn, learn….
Diana and other low-income parents see their role as exposing their children to opportunities, providing chances over and over again. Theirs is not necessarily a linear track of going along with the educational system, though the system can provide important resources of opportunities. Additional resources are available in digital spaces and in other offline spaces. These resources are for connection, skills, and participation and not exclusively channeled for self-expression.
Parents across classes perceived a division between schooling and digital spaces and employed practices to preserve this division. The pandemic intensified both sides of this division – remote-learning as an integral part of schooling and the presence of digital spaces in children’s daily lives. As parents spoke about this time, they crossed over between the two sides, painting a picture about what they expect their children to gain from each side as well as about their role in navigating each side and the relationship between them. Middle-class parents were concerned to create digital well-being for their children - a balance of school, self-expression, and digital participation; low-income parents were concerned to create a superdigital citizenship for their children – an ability to take advantage of multiple opportunities and resources across spaces. Parents across classes developed practices for negotiating the division based in disparate classed logics about what constitutes opportunity, resource, learning, development, and well-being – the building blocks of perceptions of justice.
Conclusion – EdTech in the Age of Digital Parenting
The pandemic was a natural laboratory for understanding the implications of increased edtech pedagogy, highlighting parental involvement as an unavoidable facet. The prevalence of parental involvement, often unexplored as regards educational technology proved to be a salient sphere for the negotiation of opportunities, the distribution of resources, and the ability of children to access and engage with remote-learning. In this respect, this article sets out to emphasize that parental involvement is crucial sphere of educational justice that overlaps and engages with other spheres. This study explored specifically the category of class, seeking to understand how cultural classed practices of parenting, shaped by ideas about parenting in the digital age, reproduce advantage or provide opportunities for mobility not only in schooling in general, but specifically in the realm of remote-learning.
The question of class begged attention not merely on the structural level as a mediator of access, but also on the cultural level of ways of use and significance of use (Selwyn, 2004). Classed practices of parental involvement are key factors of cultural justice, reflecting how what parents believe about and do regarding their children’s digital engagement can fit or misfit with schools’ perceptions of what constitutes proper parental support of children’s engagement with remote-learning. These classed practices of parental involvement reflect habitus - deeply rooted social differences in perceptions and practices of parenting that relate differently to role of technology in children’s development and learning. The way parents approach edtech in their children’s lives is situated in a matrix of perceptions of school learning, perceptions about digital spaces and skills, concerns about educational resources and learning opportunities, images of children’s futures in an increasingly digital age, and ideals of their own parental role. Parental involvement was also instrumental in determining the distribution of (remote) learning places and teaching-learning opportunities from edtech often reproducing advantage, but also included also complementary educational work (Griffith & Smith, 2005) regarding digital spaces that shaped the type of learning places they become, providing potential for mobility. Yet for the most part, the latter did not find expression in any sort of discussion with schools about bridging children’s digital activities and remote-learning, losing out on any sort of opportunity for moves towards associational justice. Variations in parenting practices reveals that parental involvement is a salient sphere of educational justice, accountable in part for children’s chances to align with the cultural demands and ideals of schooling and educational advancement.
There are practical and theoretical implications stemming from recognition of digital well-being and superdigital citizenship approaches, which could be informative of how class advantage is reproduced and formative of means for increasing opportunities for mobility. Considered from the lens of cultural justice, we can see the fit/misfit of classed parenting practices with schools’ perceptions of parental involvement in remote-learning. Yet, if a stance seeking associational justice were adopted, we would see that parents are already highly involved in their children’s engagement with edtech, and much of this engagement could be tapped into and inform schools’ approaches to supporting children’s digital learning.
Though low-income parents may actually have only moderately adequate digital skills and competencies, they are extremely willing for their children to be active in digital spaces and are willing to have schools guide their children. They perceive learning broadly but are not necessarily able to scaffold school learning at home nor believe that this support will encourage independent learning. Superdigital citizenship shows us that in education’s search to promote 21st century skills, there are families and children who desire non-digital resources and 20th century face-to-face opportunities. At the same time, these parents deeply appreciate that their children are active, creative subjects of digital spaces – an appreciation that often goes unnoticed regarding lower-income children by schools (Rafalow, 2020). These parents are confident their children can gain digital citizenship through access to digital spaces and so value children’s participation as a means for acquiring skills needed for participation, connection with others, and even to be creative subjects. Their concern is for their children’s citizenship outside of digital spaces, for the right not to learn in digital spaces so as to access resources that only school and the classroom can provide.
Middle-class parents may feel competent in their own digital skills and their children’s future digital skills, yet they view digital spaces as replete with dangers that may interfere with their child-raising agendas. While their view of learning may fit nicely with that of school, they are anxious that the means for learning fit into their own practices for balancing healthy development across on and offline spaces. Digital well-being points to a need for edtech pedagogies to include an infrastructure for coordinating, regulating, and maintaining this balance.
Recognition of these two approaches suggests further attention to issues of educational justice. The current study can provide only insights into how parental involvement can be implicated in issues of educational justice, specifically in a digital age, that we might use to focus our attentions in other contexts. For instance, the current study does not attend to differences in pedagogies of educational technologies, nor does it explore particular national or cultural perceptions of parenting, schooling, or digital engagement. Additionally, the very context of the pandemic could have created parental concerns which shaped patterns or practices that might be different in other circumstances. Nonetheless, insights from this study suggest that as parents form their responses and involvement with edtech pedagogies from within visions of parenting in the digital age and of children’s access to opportunities and resources, parent-school relationships are ensconced within the changing digital sphere and issues of justice regarding access, digital capital, and significance of use. For edtech to improve education and extend the possibility of educational justice, it will have to be shaped in the nexus between technology and structural constraints of everyday life. Parental involvement in remote-learning will necessarily have to be considered and coordinated within the varying rubrics of parenting in the digital age.
Acknowledgements
Much appreciation to Michal Millerman and Lior Sharir for research assistance in this study. Part of the research was conducted during affiliation with Beit Berl College.
Declarations
Ethics Approval
This study complies with ethical standards for qualitative research and was approved by an IRB. All interviewees gave informed consent prior to the interview. Names and occupations have been changed to protect participant confidentiality.
Competing Interests
The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.
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