Supporting children’s mental health through familial online relationships

This proposal aims to support our research programme on supporting children’s mental health through familial online relationships. Within this broader trajectory, this proof of concept study will ask: How do young people make sense of their parents’/caregivers’ online sharing? Longstanding research has highlighted the critical role of everyday interactions and relationships in producing and maintaining nurturing environments that support children and young people’s development and mental health. Whilst research in the area of family digital practices is burgeoning, the focus has almost exclusively been on problematising children’s practices; when parents are the object of study, the focus has been primarily on ‘sharenting’, rights, ethics and privacy (Lazard, Capdevila, Dann, Locke & Roper, 2019). This proof of concept study aims to explore how young people’s experiences of well-being and mental health are affected by adult led social media practices along with the affordances of different platforms within the wider family ecosystem. Attention will be explicitly directed to supporting children’s mental health rather than taking a deficit approach focussed on harm and mental illness. The future research funding bid, which will be underpinned by this proof of concept pilot, will investigate the dynamics of family online practices, harnessing elements of existing online practices to support constructive and protective engagements within the family on and offline through the development of bespoke technology.

This project explores how children make sense of their caregivers use of social media, and how that impacts on their wellbeing.