Perspectives of Newcomer Parents on Children’s Digital Usage at Home in Canada

• In Event: Multimodal and Digital Literacies in Transnational Contexts: Diverse Representations of Equitable Multilingual Education

Abstract

Contemporary childhood exists in a rapidly changing literacy context in the digital age, where digital devices and technology are progressively used at home. Being literate in both physical and virtual contexts is increasingly important (Rowsell & Pahl, 2021). Digital literacy can be conceived as the literacy practices undertaken across multi-media, as children access, use, analyse, produce, and share digital texts and artefacts.
Parents’ perspectives towards digital literacy can impact their children’s meaning making practices at home (Kumpulainen et al., 2020). And children’s home literacy practices can in turn affect their school literacy learning (Gillen & Kucirkova, 2018). Unfortunately, many new immigrant parents indicate that they do not support their children using digital devices at home and some parents believe that technologies take away from their children’s academic learning (Downes et al., 2020). Consequently, we need to provide deeper insights about immigrant parents’ perspectives of their children’s technology usage at home (Gallagher et al., 2019), especially in our current post-pandemic situation where we see increasing emphasis and opportunities in remote learning.
In this presentation, I look at two newcomer parents’ views on their young children’s digital usage at home. This is part of my doctoral research.
Theoretically, my research is framed by contemporary literacy studies (Coiro et al., 2008). I also draw on Livingstone and Blum-Ross’s (2020) work, Parenting for a Digital Future, to understand and analyze newcomer parents’ perspectives on their children’s digital usage.
My doctoral research is a qualitative case study that involved using an online survey with 39 newcomer parents and conducting semi-structured interviews with 6 newcomer parents. This presentation draws on data from two interviews: one with a parent from Jamaica and one with a parent from the Philippines.
The two newcomer parents share similar perspectives on their children’s digital literacy practices. They believe that digital literacy is important for their children’s future and allow their children to use digital devices at home for a substantial amount of time for various purposes, including connecting with family, entertainment, catching up with popular culture (i.e. following and watching YouTube videos), and educational uses (i.e. reading digital books and playing educational games). However, both parents expressed a preference for usage related to educational purposes (Coulter & Sheppard, 2023). They both often wonder if they are being good parents in regard to their children’s digital usage (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). Additionally, the parents frequently feel that they cannot keep up with their children in terms of multimodal digital literacy practices and digital culture. This suggests that digital spaces and digital literacy have reshaped the power dynamics between parents and children in the context of literacy learning and practices.
My findings are of particular interest to researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of early childhood education and literacy teaching. To better support culturally and linguistically diverse children’s development of literacy skills in school in the post-COVID era, this research provides new information for educators and policy makers to further understand perspectives on digital literacy and technologies.

Author

• Yina Liu, University of Alberta