PARENTS’ MORAL DISCUSSIONS ABOUT STRATEGIES FOR MONITORING CHILDREN’S MEDIA EXPOSURE

Media technology is part of a rich interplay of socio-cultural artifacts and practices. Parents greet each new medium with a mixture of fear and hope, and they increasingly acknowledge that media present new challenges for their roles as parents. Through ethnographically-informed discourse analysis of interviews with parents in dualearner families, this paper investigates parents' discourse on children's media use in the home. Analysis reveals that media use is a sensitive arena, one in which parents struggle to present themselves as moral agents when discussing how they attempt to control their children's media exposure. Parents employ multiple strategies, such as contrasting one's own practice with others to portray themselves as "doing the right thing", adhering to an ideal moral image of parenthood. A particular focus is put on how the collective voice of culture with its practices, preferences, and ideologies seems to permeate the individual's articulation of accountability vis-à-vis media.