ICT and gender: Parental mediation strategies

Information and communication technologies (ICT) continues to be a highly gendered area of life in all socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, and a source of significant social inequality in enduring ways. Parental mediation strategies can regulate the benefits and risks of the ICT for children, and have a significant and lifelong impact on children's self-confidence and positive attitudes toward digital technologies. This paper aims to explore how does gender, of both parents and children, affects parent mediation strategies of children's media use, adopting a critical discourse perspective in which gender differences in ICT use are understood as a result of gender-technology and power-knowledge relations. We present a gender perspective on the results of the research ‘Growing Up with Screens’, conducted in Portugal which aims to explore the mediation practices of parents including the first generation of digital native parents with children aged 3 to 8 years old.