Family as Mediation - A Caribbean Perspective

"Through daily interactions, routines and most importantly relationships, family enacts and reproduces its values, which include ideas and practices around media engagement and use. It is through relationships that approaches of mediation are devised, implemented, contested and embraced."

In discussions about children's use of media, and particularly the risks associated with their engagement with media, the role of parental mediation becomes important. In the Caribbean, where households often include family members spanning several generations, the management of children's use of media takes a different form. This paper advances the view that conceptualising "the family" as a significant aspect of the mediation process is intrinsic to understanding and researching this phenomenon in the Caribbean region. Author Anthea Henderson explores the family-as-mediation idea by reviewing literature that intersects family demographics with mediation and by discussing the importance of parenting styles in relation to sociocultural norms of the Caribbean family.

As Henderson explains, in Latin America and the Caribbean, studies have been conducted to explore the breadth and use of digital technologies, with an interest in outlining how issues of broadband access influence economic development and civic engagement. The Caribbean region's information and communication technology (ICT) environment is almost fully liberalised, with several entities providing a range of free-to-air broadcasting, telecommunications, and broadband service. Yet research that explores the ways in which the liberalised digital media environment has transformed use in the context of the home has not been sufficiently examined in the region. The digital environment calls for new approaches to parenting so that the management and monitoring of the use of these tools can take place in a way that provides young people with useful engagement without the concomitant dangers (e.g., loneliness, addiction, low levels of contentment, poor academic performance, and aggression). This is why parental mediation - the range of interactions parents have with their children in relation to their media use - is important, says Henderson.

The literature specifies types of parental intervention in children's media use, with some being more effective for children of particular ages or for different kinds of media. For example, researchers have distinguished active mediation, in which parents talk about media, from restrictive mediation, in which parents set rules about media engagement, to coviewing - practices of shared, simultaneous media use. Studies have also unearthed a number of demographically related factors of mediation. Perspectives vary on the matter of the impact of digital media on the institution of family; a broader picture of the impact of media on the family must also consider the productive ways in which media is included in the process of "being and doing" family.

The paper next contextualises the region, exploring the sociocultural landscape in which broadcast media liberalisation occurred in the early 1990s. In the Caribbean, kinship networks that span more than one household and are often matriarchal are a common feature of family structure. Grandmothers, aunts, and multiple siblings - sometimes with their own children - share space in the household, particularly in lower- and working-class communities. Thus, responsibility for parenting children is often shared across generations. A family systems approach is useful when applied to the Caribbean context, as it provides an opening to acknowledge the implications of societal formation in post-slave and postcolonial settings.

An exploratory qualitative investigation carried out in Jamaica was carried out using focus groups of parents from the Kingston and St. Andrew areas to ask: What drives your media programming choices? How do you monitor what your children are watching or listening to (Henderson, 2013). Findings indicate that parents are using a number of techniques including monitoring, controlling, and restricting to manage their children's use of media (televisions, laptops, personal computers, video game consoles, landline and mobile phones, and tablets). However parents in one focus group made it clear that they didn't think restrictive mediation, by itself, was an effective method of guiding children's use of media. In the study, some parents acknowledged that the responsibility of mediating their children's engagement with media was complex, frustrating, and sometimes even futile. Nevertheless, Jamaican parents are also displaying an appreciation for the need to facilitate children's right to information while at the same time protecting minors from harmful content.

Henderson suggests areas for future research, including exploring in what ways the Caribbean family is a significant shaper of mediation processes within the home. In particular, to what extent are family demographics a factor in parental mediation in the Caribbean? How do parenting styles influence parental mediation in the Caribbean? The second research priority, she says, is guided by the need for more robust conceptualising of the Caribbean family - with its diverse forms - in an era of expanding digital media access and use. Questions that would be included are: Do Caribbean families think of themselves in normative terms? What kinds of cultural values influence parental mediation in the Caribbean? To what extent does family system influence parental mediation in the Caribbean? "Further study is needed to explore the contours of family relationships in the Caribbean, and to show how mediation practices are exercised in the regional context, since the parent-child dyad is just one of the ways in which mediatory practices are enacted in multi-generational households."