Parental Mediation of Tablet Educational Use at Home and at School: Facilitators or Preventers?

The digital media age has dramatically transformed how children and parents perceive and react to media. Parental mediation concerns the set of strategies that parents employ in order to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks that the modern digital media induce. The majority of existing research on parental mediation is quantitative in nature, and there is a lack of in-depth understanding of not only the mediation strategies but the overall parents' stance towards the educational usage of tablets both at school and at home. This study presents the results of 54 interviews with Greek parents regarding these attitudes. Our aim was to identify the reasoning behind buying a tablet, the mediation strategies applied, parents' attitudes towards educational apps, their awareness and the sources of information about the educational apps, and whether they were ready and willing to support tablet-based learning at home and in school. Parents responses revealed that they have conflicting views on the educational value of tablets, they are misinformed or uninformed either by ignorance or by their own will and they have several concerns regarding excessive usage, access to unsupervised content and less physical activity. Parents mainly use restrictive mediation practices and, they feel outsmarted by their children. It seems that there is a growing gap between parents, children and the educational use of tablets at home and at school which needs to be addressed.