Safeguarding podcast – Parenting for a Digital Future with Sonia Livingstone OBE

By Neil Fairbrother

In this safeguarding podcast we discuss with Sonia Livingstone OBE her book “Parenting for a Digital Future”. How can parents derive maximum benefit for their children from the phenomenon of the risk-infused online space and digital technology in general? Is “screen time” relevant? Is it true that today’s children, born into a world with an iPad holders on prams, are digital natives and are their parents digital immigrants and either way, what does that mean?

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There’s a lightly edited for legibility transcript of the podcast below, for those that can’t use podcasts or for those that simply prefer to read.

Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation’s safeguarding podcast with Neil Fairbrother, exploring the law, culture and technology of safeguarding children online.

Neil Fairbrother

The unregulated online world presents both opportunity and threat to children and their families. Internet access is affordable to most as the cost of devices and data plans has tumbled, essential services have all moved online and the app store concept has spawned myriad apps, addictive social media platforms and online games, which now permeate society to the point where “screen time “has become a social issue.

How can parents derive maximum benefit for their children from the phenomenon of the risk-infused online space and digital technology in general? Is it true that today’s children, born into a world with an iPad holders on prams, are digital natives and are their parents digital immigrants and either way, what does that mean?

To guide us through this complex topic I’m joined by Sonia Livingstone OBE, who together with Alicia Blum-Ross has recently published the results of extensive research into this area in a book called “Parenting for a Digital Future”. Welcome back, Sonia, as this is our second podcast together, how has COVID changed your world?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

It’s oddly challenged many of the assumptions I made about how to live my life. Before COVID I used to get on a plane every couple of weeks to go to an international conference or workshops. So suddenly I’m at home. I can concentrate on my writing and on my students, which is rather nice.

Neil Fairbrother

And that benefits the environment.

Sonia Livingstone OBE

Absolutely, much less flying.

Neil Fairbrother

Would you please give us a brief resumé of your background so that our new listeners from around the world, understand it a little bit more about you?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

So I began as a psychologist, a social psychologist, and an academic, and I’ve spent the last few decades now researching in an incredibly kind of multi-disciplinary space. So engaging with sociologists, educationalists, anthropologists, and increasingly kind of technologists and lawyers, as I try to research and understand how it is that children and young people engage with that increasingly digital world that, you know, used to be something of a luxury and a puzzle and has now become infrastructural to everyday life.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Thank you for that. Now, the book you’ve recently published with your colleague Alicia, is titled “Parenting for a Digital Future” and the subtitle of the book is “How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives”. What was the inspiration for this research? And what is the purpose of the book?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

As I said, I’ve spent my career focusing on children and young people’s perspectives on the digital world. And that is really where my heart remains, but in the process of doing that, of course, I’ve engaged with lots of parents and caregivers and grandparents over the years and I became aware of two things really. Firstly, that many of us researchers, but also kind of policymakers, really only think about parents as a kind of route to understanding their children, or a way of getting information about their children, rather than seeing parents in and of themselves as people trying to kind of make sense of parenting in a digital age and “parenting” as an activity.

The second thing I became very aware of is that as all of us have thought about parents and parenting and digital parenting, there’s remarkably little consultation with parents and quite a kind of what sociologists call a deficit view of parents; a sense that we can’t really talk to them, we can’t really reach them because they’re far away and they’re scattered and they’re hard to reach and they’re failing. They’re doing many things wrong. We need to kind of reach them harder and persuade them of more and get them to act better.

So this kind of contradiction of not listening to parents and yet coming to negative judgments of them, seemed to me kind of tacit kind of in the background of a lot of talk about children’s digital lives. And so the book is really to say, this is time to listen to parents, to kind of see their digital parenting in the context of their whole lives and listen to their own rationales for why it is they do things rather than kind of coming to pre-emptive judgments.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now you mentioned parenting just then and early on in your book you describe parenting as being a new concept or a relatively new concept, but we’ve always had parents. So how is parenting a new thing?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

It’s a weird idea isn’t it? So I realized, especially when I was talking about the book to people who were kind of outside the Academy and outside the kind of children’s digital policy and practice world, and they kept saying “Parenting, what do you mean by “parenting”? Aren’t you interested in what parents do? What is this parenting?”

We realized that it is a way of describing and almost kind of making problematic and almost everyday activity. And then reading around the literature I realized there’s this whole field called “parenting culture studies”, which folk have been developing, which is if you like the study of how parents have themselves become so central to policy and practice.

They’ve always done it. They’ve always parented. They’ve always brought up the children and worried about their hopes and fears, but they haven’t always been an object of policy and an object of intervention and a kind of focus of analysis. So parenting kind of makes, you know, it is with scare quotes. It is about bringing the mundane activities of parents into the kind of field of study and analysis.

Neil Fairbrother

It’s become a verb.

Sonia Livingstone OBE

It’s become a verb, as have an astonishing number of other things that used to be kind of nouns and vice versa, actually.

Neil Fairbrother

One of the mothers that you interviewed, I think called Leila, called her 10 year old daughter Nareen “my engineer”. Are today’s children, in fact, digital natives and are parents in fact, digital immigrants?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

This was an interesting case because of course, Leila herself is a genuine immigrant to this country, I mean in the traditional sense. One of the reasons she came, when there were many deep reasons, of course as as we try to unpack in the book, [was] the digital future seemed kind of part of the promise of coming to Britain. So she was a kind of a migrant to British culture and also a migrant to the digital world.

And she kind of encapsulates one of the arguments of the book, which is that our hopes for digital technology or that they can kind of sort out all the problems, the challenges of migration, the big transformations that we’re living through in our lives. So for her, Nareen is, you know, both the reason that she came to this country and then Nareen’s facility with fixing the computer is a sign that things are working, that things are going right. So she’s thrilled that Nareen you know, is going to make her way towards the digital future and that this enormous kind of sacrifice and upheaval she’s lived through in her own life is going to pay off.

But she’s one case among many and a number of the other cases we have in the book are parents who know a lot about technology and the children who don’t. And so there were the reverse cases and it’s the mix that I want to draw attention to because the knowledge about how to use the technologies is spreading unevenly and sometimes the kids get there first, and sometimes the parents get there first. We talked to some very kind of geeky parents who were very keen to kind of draw their children into their own geeky world and space and skill them up towards something that the parents had learned through work or through interest or whatever.

Neil Fairbrother

Yeah, you describe in quite rich detail, the familial context, the lives of the families that you spend time with, their lived experiences during a typical day. What was the purpose of including those vivid descriptions of such a vast range of people’s lives?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

I think there were three purposes.

One, to go back to the sense originally that we have this kind of rather negative view of parents in society, and we’re kind of critical of the men that we judge them. So one purpose was to recognize their diversity, that parents are not all the same. We can’t put parents in one bucket and say, this is how they are. So we wanted to capture the range from rich to poor from you know, kind of artistic to more techie, to, you know, all kinds of different parents.

The second was to really explore the way in which our offline lives and our online lives are intertwined. And I think we’ve said for a long time that we can’t have this simple binary of online/offline, and yet when you read accounts of how children are engaging with the internet or what digital parenting is like, it seems very focused on the moment of engaging with the screen and doesn’t often enough, I thought, step back and kind of see where the screens fit into people’s lives.

And then the third thing, which kind of really follows from both of those is to say that a lot of what people bring to their engagement with technology is motivated by other factors, comes from other spaces. So we can’t always explain how a child interacts with a screen by looking at what they do with the screen. Sometimes the explanation is that they’ve got problems at school, or they are part of a culture which is a subculture in Britain and has its own kind of logics, or that they are a child with special needs and disabilities which we can kind of chart in their everyday life and then see why that gives them a particular way of engaging with the screen. So it was really kind of important to stand back in order to get a better perspective on their screen engagement.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now screen time, I mentioned in the introduction and you refer to it yourself a lot on social media posts and in other spaces as well, and there’s a whole section on screen time in the book, in which one parent Nina said that limiting it “…is sort of as weird as having some kind of philosophical argument against teaching children to ride a bike.” What did she mean by that?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

One of the disjunctions that I really found between the barrage of advice that parents get, which is about screen time very often, but also about online risk as we’ve discussed before, is this kind of sense that the advice to parents is you’ve got choices. You can control it. You can count how much screen time there is. And what parents know in their everyday lives, which is the technology’s already embedded in almost everything they do from the first waking moment to the sleeping moment and that sense of it being optional has long gone, in a way.

I think of King Cnute kind of ordering back the waves as if he had that power. Parents feel that they’re being told they have that power to kind of limit and restrict and ban certain kinds of screen times. And instead, the question is, you know, if we’re all swimming in a mediated world to continue the watery metaphor the question is, you know, where do we want to go with it? What kind of activities, what works, what do we want to have? It’s a different set of questions.

What we found in a way is that parents are already engaging with those other questions. So they kind of know… they kept telling us: “Oh, I know I’m bad for letting them be online for four hours a day…” but actually the decisions they had to make day to day, hour to hour, were less about time and more about why they were engaging in this way, or how are we going to deal with the fact that there’s some threat here, or, you know, can we share this as a family? They’re already into those judgements about the type of engagement and they’ve given up on that King Cnute moment that we’re offering, you know, kind of often advise them from on high in our society.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now you make two linked arguments in the book, I think. The first one is that digital technologies have become a prominent focus for family negotiations. And the second one is that the need for those negotiations has arisen, not just because of the digital technologies in the home, but also due to the appearance of the “democratic family”, a cultural phenomenon. What is the democratic family? How does that differ from previous family units?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

It’s an interesting question: what is the family? And of course, we’ve lived through a societal transformation in the past few decades in which we’ve stopped thinking about the family in a way and we think about families. We recognize now that families come in all kind of shapes and forms and that’s been quite liberating, I think for many in recent decades. And yet behind a lot of digital parenting advice is this kind of normative expectation of a nuclear family, a family in which parents have time and energy for their children and they use that in ways to kind of control and monitor and police their screen activities with a kind of benevolent, but controlling, gaze in a way. And it felt to me like a very kind of odd and backward vision of the family.

So if I go back to the move from family to families, what was it about? It was about challenging all those ideas that mum and dad know best, that children have to do what they’re told “because I say so”, that parents kind of exert the authority and they do, but not in an authoritarian way, not in the kind of Victorian father way that I think is the legacy that is still there in many parents’ heads. And we asked parents to talk about how they’d been brought up and a number of them brought up that vision of the authoritarian parents, who said you do it because I say so, and I’m the boss in my house. And then the children try to construct their lives in ways that are invisible often by running out and being away all day.

And, you know, that’s the myth of family life, but it was truer then than it is now to now and especially during COVID. Families come in these many shapes and sizes, but they’re kind of under each other’s feet and living together, and parents don’t want to be that police figure, that boss figure. They want to share. They want to cuddle up on the sofa and share a movie with their kids, or they want to understand better what is the fascination with this game in order to make a judgment about whether it’s beneficial for the child or not. And that means listening to the child and that means negotiating. And so the democratic family is a way of recognizing that parents have their sphere of authority, but they also are trying to share and respect the emerging agency and identity of their children. It just takes a lot of negotiating, which parents are absolutely worn out by. But I think they’re also committed to it.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now, the families you researched represented a wide range across the socio-demographic spectrum, from wealthy professionals to single parents with special needs children. But out of all of that randomness of life, you’ve managed to tease out three distinct genres of digital parenting or approaches to digital parenting, which are Embrace, Balance and Resist. Can we explore those a little bit? What is Embrace?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

I should mention that the project is funded by the MacArthur Foundation in the US which is an educational foundation, really committed to exploring the idea of “connected learning” that we learn through building connections amongst ourselves and that learning and growing up is a social and kind of relational affair, as well as individual cognitive process. And they were very interested in how technologies can build those connections. So we began the work, especially talking to parents who were kind of, as we thought of it, voting with their feet for a kind of connected digital world to see what that could offer their children. So we began with the parents who most often did what we ended up calling “Embracing”. They were kind of embracing how technology could offer them new pathways or workarounds from old problems that would put their children kind of in the vanguard and allow for collaborative and creative digitally mediated connections.

But doing that, we found many parents sometimes, and some parents a lot, resisting all of this talk about a digital future, and bringing up your children for jobs that haven’t been invented yet. And they were worrying about the loss of that carefree golden age kind of childhood, where children ran about in fields and got muddy knees. So there’s a lot of ambivalence.

And so “Balancing” is… most parents balance in one way or another, but they kind of strike a different balance. Balancing is kind of how parents deal with their hopes for, but also their fears about the digital future as we titled the book and their sense of commitment to what’s being lost as we move into an increasingly digital age. And Balancing also is a way of kind of capturing that negotiation we were just talking about because Balancing is not reaching a point of balance and stillness, it’s like, as we say, kind of standing on a rolling log, I mean, it’s a constant balancing process. Somebody described it to me recently as parents doing digital acrobatics, which I rather liked.

They are doing a lot of acrobatics and they’re doing all these calculations, you know, is this good enough? Is that long enough? Should I try this? Is that working? Where is this going? Does the fact that they’re playing this game mean that they’re going to be a coder in the future? You know, it’s a lot of balancing and a lot of negotiating and some do it with more embracing and some with more resisting, but that seemed to capture the common features amid all the diversity of our different parents.

Neil Fairbrother

You used Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social and economic capital to help in your analysis. What are these and how did parents, and indeed perhaps children, make use of them in the context of digital parenting?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

So the traditional way of thinking about all the differences among parents or families, especially in Britain, has been in terms of social class and we began in a way like many others thinking well shall we interview some middle class parents and some working class parents, and then we’ll have a mix and a balance and just didn’t work. And it might not have worked partly because we were basing the research in London, which is a kind of a global city. It’s full of migrants and different kinds of ethnic groupings. It has more kind of super rich families. It has more really poor families. I think it has an incredible mix perhaps compared with some other parts of the country.

And so we began to pull apart how it helps to have more economic resources and how it helps to have more kind of cultural resources and Bourdieu separates those two kinds of resources. They both matter. Normally they come together, the middle classes have more money and they have more education. That’s the tradition. But what seems to happen in these global cities especially, is that you get some richer people without necessarily the education behind it.

But especially what we found in London was quite a lot of people who have an education and kind of have creative or artistic or skilled or knowledgeable ways of engaging with technology and with their children’s education, but they didn’t have very much money. And they were just a really fascinating kind of case for us in noticing how people make the most of their cultural resources, even though they often had very little income to kind of put behind it.

So it wasn’t just middle-class versus working class, but it really was in the end what matters in how parents can really give their children the opportunities is their own education and kind of cultural know-how to draw upon and help their kids get ahead in the digital world, you know, as well as at school and so on.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now the parents that you interviewed across the socio-economic spectrum seem to encourage their children to take up coding in preference to say ballet. And we’ve recently seen a public backlash against a UK government campaign featuring a ballerina ostensibly anyway called Fatima, which was promoting “cyber” as a preferential career to one in the arts, in the creative industries, or traditionally creative industries. Is this focus on coding actually a good thing for society and for indeed children, isn’t it a bit like when the Model-T Ford was launched, encouraging children to become car mechanics?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

I don’t know that we didn’t, maybe we did encourage lots of children to become car mechanics! I’m sure it really helped those who found work in fixing cars and even designing cars. I think for coding, I mean, we heard it from so many parents “Oh, isn’t that exciting school is teaching coding” or with puzzlement, “They’re learning coding, what on earth is that?”

I think coding is wise in the sense that many jobs will require greater digital skills and a facility with digital know how in the future, but it’s been so oversold. And so parents really have been encouraged to imagine that by learning coding, their child will, you know, spawn the next Microsoft rather than end up kind of debugging programming, you know, in some kind of you know, much less well-paid, precarious job.

So there has been this over-selling about coding is your way to the digital future, to the jobs that haven’t been invented yet. We have to completely remake the education systems so that they… and what we found was, you know, beyond the kind of the overselling and the hyperbole about coding, is the educational establishment is not bringing the parents into the picture. So actually parents understand kind of what it means if they child learns car mechanics or engineering and what career that might lead to, but they’re encouraged to put their kid in coding club and they don’t know what it might lead to.

It’s actually a bit more like ballet than it might seem because like ballet too very, very few people are ever going to make a living as a ballet dancer, even though many kids learn it. There is that mismatch. Perhaps forget becoming the new Bill Gates or Tim Cook, but is there benefit in the here and now in learning coding? And I think that’s a question that people are not explaining to parents and actually is incredibly unknown. The research is unclear.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. You’ve researched families with special needs children who mostly seem to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum. And I think the characteristics of autism first penetrated the mass public consciousness with the Tom Cruise,Dustin Hoffman film Rainman, I think back in the eighties, where the central character’s extraordinary abilities in mathematics were exploited in a gambling casino. Are parents of special needs children right that the digital offers children who might otherwise struggle to find a career path to adapt to society, does it provide them with a pathway to become independent and successful adults?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

Not as much as in providing a better and more tailored educational provision in society and creating a range of pathways for those young people. I mean, the idea that the digital is the one place where they could all look and find their forte is naïve and anyway, the pathway doesn’t really exist. But there are some, you know, there are some interesting instances where I mean, Microsoft, again is the example, but there are others where they have had a hiring program that specifically said, we think we can create a kind of working environment for young people on the autism spectrum. So there are some.

Maybe tech broadens the possibilities, but the range of possibilities for young people on the autism spectrum are still so narrow that in the main, our interviews with those parents were disheartening in the extreme because they really struggled to imagine any kind of future. But technology and sometimes the way of thinking in the technology is what they saw hope in. And sometimes the working life around it, being able to work independently, being able to work from home and not having to kind of mix within a highly structured and normative kind of institutional setting, sometimes that seemed to offer some promise.

Neil Fairbrother

And we’re all working from home now so it’s become normalized for people to work from home. And so do you think that might offer hope for people with autism that they could work from home?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

I think it will help in some things, yes, because fitting into normative expectations of office life or factory life or workplaces is one of the areas of tension and difficulty. But on the other hand working from home is creating a lot of invisible labour isn’t it? I mean, somebody is doing the support, whether they are keeping the kids quiet and out of the way, or providing the supportive environment for that young person with learning difficulties, it’s become invisible. And I think for those families, a lot of what they were doing was already incredibly invisible and unsupported. So my guess is the overwhelming tendency will be things will get worse now.

Neil Fairbrother

In previous work that you’ve undertaken, in particular with the EU Kids Online Project, you identified a matrix of 12 categories of online risks that face children. On the X axis, there was Contact, Content and Conduct, and on the Y axis were Aggressive, Sexual, Values and Commercial. And in between those, there were 12 descriptions of various risks, but these online risks didn’t really feature much in the book or indeed in parents’ concerns. There seem to be much more of a kind of parental FOMO, parental fear of missing out, where parents were more concerned about the risk of their children, not being online and not having access to the digital tech than they were by the threats within it. Is that the case?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

I think it is, but I think push any parent to talk about their anxieties and a flood of anxieties emerge. So there’s kind of what’s front of mind and then parents can and do worry about anything that can happen to their child. I think the screen time discourse has kind of wrapped up a lot of those risks. So there’s a funny equation, I think, that goes on that says, well if I minimize screen time, then all of those things about seeing pornography and being bullied and being exposed to race hate or whatever it might be, you know, they all get kind of managed at once. So focus on screen time and we’ll keep all of it somehow at bay, and let go of screen time and then anything can happen and many bad things might happen.

So screen time seems like the quick fix in a way for, for busy parents to take control, but there were worries. And I think what I’d say is that, of course they read the newspapers, they know the kind of list of online harms that we’re all now debating, but they really engage when it affects their child, when they feel their child has been bullied online for something, or their child has been playing violent games… so they can’t engage in the whole array of risks, but as it arises, that’s what they try to address.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now you make six recommendations at the back of the book, at the end of the book, you make six recommendations that could support parents as they take steps towards realizing their visions for their children’s future in a digital age. I’d like to go through them very quickly, but before we explore them, who are these recommendations aimed at?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

Well, each in a way is aimed at a different constituency. So some are for educators, some are for industry, some are for government. But we did want to draw attention to all the other actors, all the kind of professionals who work with parents and around parenting.

So we kind of wanted to bring into visibility the GP that you might take your child to when you worry if they’re playing too many computer games, or the health visitor or youth worker who might have a way of kind of steering a child towards some more kind of tailored or constructive digital or indeed non-digital activities, all the kind of folk in a neighbourhood or a community who advise parents, all those media pundits who are kind of addressing them and speaking to them with all kinds of motivations, the market in a way, which is selling a lot of solutions to parents.

So, you know, there’s lots of actors who are addressing parents in this space and, you know, if I boil all our recommendations down to one, it is listen more carefully to what parents actually want and need in their diverse circumstances.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Very quickly, let’s see if we can crash through the six recommendations because we are running out of time. So the first one was “To provide support for parents that encompass the digital environment.” What do you mean by that?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

A lot of organizations have a lot of great advice, but much of it is directed either to the child or sometimes to schools, not so much to parents and not so much to parents in ways that recognizes their diverse experiences. So not the parent or especially not that incredibly wealthy middle-class parent in the advert, in the white kitchen with the happy smiles and endless time.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Your second recommendation was “To offer parents a realistic vision in public and media discourse.”

Sonia Livingstone OBE

Hmm. Yes. And so stop saying “Police your child”, “Check up on your child”, “Ban screen time”, “limit screen time”, you know, maybe make more modest, more constructive, more realistic suggestions.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. The third recommendation you made was “To recognize the contributions of parents in educational settings.”

Sonia Livingstone OBE

We have a whole chapter on parents’ sad or confused faces as the door to the school or the learning centre closes and the parent on the outside has no idea what their child is learning, but when the child comes home, the parent is trying to guess, because they want to continue the education. They want to buy or create activity that will extend that learning and put the child in the right mindset when they go back. So that parent is always on the wrong side of the door.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. The fourth recommendation was “To increase attention to the design and governance of the digital environment.”

Sonia Livingstone OBE

So this is the sense that first and foremost, developers, innovators, service providers imagine who? Imagine an adult user, imagine an individual, rather an invulnerable user and where their services end up, where their products end up, is very often in the hands of a child or a family or a, I mean, [here’s a] super simple example. We keep thinking about apps as if they are used by a child or a parent. And yet, as we discovered in lockdown, devices are shared, apps are shared, resources are shared. So is it age appropriate? Is it, you know, is there an appeal to the parent? Recognize what family life looks like from the outside.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. The penultimate recommendation was “To make room for parents’ voices in policymaking.”

Sonia Livingstone OBE

Yeah. Where are they? I really don’t mean elite expert CEOs and so on who say, “…and by the way, I’ve got a child who’s 11 or 14”. That’s not what I mean. I mean, there has been effort to include children and young people, sometime as a voice in policymaking, the parents are still largely on the outside.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. And your sixth and final recommendation was “To ensure that policy and the design of technology is based on evidence.”

Sonia Livingstone OBE

More research is needed Neil, it always is.

Neil Fairbrother

But you would say that anyway, wouldn’t you?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

But it’s shocking how little evidence there is, especially for any of those kinds of longer term things, you know, is coding beneficial for kids.? You know, actually the jury is out in terms of evidence. Let’s get the evidence and then let’s roll out coding clubs across the country. You know, we often advise them to, as I keep saying, to kind of police and control their children’s digital lives, but the evidence is all about encouraging them to have conversations and evaluate media with their child rather than… so, you know, focus on the evidence and then make the recommendation.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. One question for you Sonia before we wrap up, as we really have run out of time. Is the digital future a bright future?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

Oh, I five answers came to mind simultaneously. I think children’s future is bright because I love talking to children and actually in this book, I love talking to parents too, but I am quite worried that a lot of the design and innovation in the digital world still doesn’t meet their interests and listen to their voices.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Sonia, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been very generous with your time and knowledge as usual, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. And where can people find your book?

Sonia Livingstone OBE

Well on my website sonialivingstone.net, it’s on the Oxford University Press website. It’s on Amazon. I keep blogging about it at parenting.digital, and I shall carry on doing so, as well as other people’s work. Neil, thank you so much, it was a pleasure to talk to you.