Family Collaboration in the Digital Age: Parent Learning Partner Roles Are Linked to Child Expertise and Parents’ Work

Abstract

Our quantitative study investigates how parents' use of technology in their work relates to their roles as learning partners for their children. We also examine whether parent learning partner roles are associated with children's opportunity to experiment with digital production activities. Based on earlier ethnographic studies we predicted that there would be variability of the number of roles played across our sample, and that parents active in the technology industry would play more roles, especially those potentially catalyzed by some level of expertise or knowledge, such as teaching, modeling practice, collaborating on technical projects, or lending resources. Our findings were consistent with these hypotheses. For both mothers and fathers, the level of technology use at work was associated with the diversity of learning partner roles. Counts of the diversity and density of parent roles was significantly associated with the breadth of children's experience with digital production activities. Implications for equity are discussed.