ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ways European parents mediate the access and the use of mobile devices by their children (9–16 years old). It draws on theories that explore domestication of mobile media among young people, parenting styles in contemporary Western societies and parental mediation. The chapter integrates parents’ and children’s reports taken from the European Net Children Go Mobile study of children’s’ online uses of mobile communications. The chapter addresses how children report their relationship with mobile phones in the family context, parents’ motivations and concerns related to their children’s access to and use of mobile media. Children’s growing autonomy and the social idea of ‘good parenting’ are explored, as are the differences and similarities that emerge from parents’ motivations and concerns related to the mobile media, and whether parents consider that mediation practices have changed from the desktop era towards a convergent media ecology. Finally the chapter looks at parental styles and how parents tend to present themselves in their mediation of mobile media and how they tend to report other parents’ mediation.
