ABSTRACT
Ten years ago, children and media scholars had some familiar concerns. Outside of school and sleep, media occupied the greatest portion of children’s days, and the growing popularity of the internet and video games only heightened fears about media content (Rideout, 2007 ). Research on parental mediation of children’s media use, now on multiple platforms, seemed more important than ever before. Parents were confronted with a media environment unlike anything that came before. In addition to thousands of fi lms and television programs targeted at children, thousands more titles sprung from the video game industry and the internet. New concerns about children’s online safety made cultural debates all the more real. Faced with the daunting task of mediating all this content, parents looked for help from media companies, who off ered media ratings, blocking devices, and a host of technological methods of mediating children’s media use. Most of these measures emerged from a regulatory environment that had loosened restrictions on everything from ownership rules to content regulations (Kunkel & Wilcox, 2012 ), eliminating most of the old rules about what could air on television and when.
