'I had no credit to ring you back': Children’s strategies of negotiation and resistance to parental surveillance via mobile phones

Abstract

The monitoring of children in time and space, from a distance via the mobile phones, is a phenomenon never experienced in previous generations. Indeed, as frequently recited, the increased protection of children by monitoring them is a central characteristic of modern childhood (Rasmussen, 2003; Qvortrup, 1993) and the effects of this are not yet know. Equally our understanding of how children in middle childhood (8 – 12 years) negotiate and or resist this monitoring is unclear. This paper seeks to add to the emerging body of knowledge on the strategies employed by children in middle childhood to negotiate and resist the monitoring and surveillance of their physical selves in time and space using mobile phones. I suggest that the mobile phone can be transformed by children into a highly efficient device to enable them to both negotiate and resist surveillance thus increasing their autonomy and independent mobility. Children are not passive recipients of parental surveillance and power, rather they are increasingly playing an active role in negotiation with parents and actively resist monitoring of their everyday lives to both make meaning anew and produce culture.

Youth Responses to the Surveillance School: The Bifurcation of Antagonism and Confidence in Surveillance among Teenaged Students

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“…The independent and active mobility of children is an outcome of a very complex set of developmental (Ahmadi, 2007;Burgmanis et al, 2014;Rissotto and Tonucci, 2002), familial (Barron, 2014;Jensen et al, 2014), sociocultural (Depeau, 2001;Malone and Rudner, 2011;Valentine, 2004), and environmental characteristics (Alparone and Pacilli, 2012;Mitra and Buliung, 2014;Villanueva et al, 2013), as well as the policy context (Fyhri and Hjorthol, 2009;Rudner, 2012). Individual and family characteristics that are affecting CIM include children's age, maturity and gender (Johansson, 2006), family structure, socioeconomic status, ethnicity (Loebach and Gilliland, 2014;Weir et al, 2006), gender of parent, and parent employment (Valentine, 2004;Witten et al, 2013).…”