Parental Failure and the Double Standards of Screen Time Discourse on Popular Parenting Blogs

Understanding screen time discourse is vital in grasping people’s relationship with media comprehensively. This research seeks to add to this body of knowledge by highlighting the double standards present within parenting blogs’ narratives on screen time. Utilizing a qualitative analysis conducted on a dataset of over 200 coded articles (n=220) from parenting blog giants such as Parents.com and SheKnows.com, I argue that popular parenting blogs simultaneously platform content that pushes parents to constantly manage and mitigate their children’s screen time use, while at the same time implicitly encouraging parents to utilize apps, audio, content, and devices to do so. In supporting this claim, I explore the state of screen discourse on parenting blogs, various policing tactics encouraged by parenting blog content, as well as what this paper calls “narratives of parental failure,” which refers to the content & narratives depicting where parents deviated from the perceived idealized norms around screen time management and usage that were established by said platformed parenting content. I then conclude this piece by discussing the implications of these findings to our broader understanding of media, parenting, and socialization, as well as avenues future research in this area should explore.