• Foreword: The Parent App and the Parent Trap


• Part I: Digital media and family communication


• Ch. 1 Risk, digital media, and parenting in a digital age


• Ch. 2 Communication in families: expressive empowerment and respectful connectedness


• Ch. 3 How parents are mediating the media in middle class and in less advantaged homes


• Ch. 4 Media rich and time poor: The emotion work of parenting in the digital age


• Part II: Digital media and youth


• Ch. 5 Identity 2.0: Young people and digital and mobile media


• Ch. 6 Less advantaged teens, ethnicity, and digital and mobile media: respect, restriction, and reversal


• Part III: Cautionary tales


• Ch. 7 Cyberbullying girls, helicopter moms, and Internet predators


• Ch. 8 Strict parents, gamer high school dropouts, and shunned overachievers


• Ch. 9 Conclusion: Parenting in a digital age: The mediatization of family life and the parent app


• Bibliography


• Appendix A: Methods


• Appendix B: Parents, children, and the media landscape: resources


• Appendix C: The Family Digital Media contract


• Acknowledgments

Lynn Schofield Clark is Associate Professor in Media, Film, and Journalism Studies, and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. Her books include Religion, Media, and the Marketplace (Rutgers University Press, 2007); From Angels to Aliens (Oxford University Press, 2005), and with Stewart M. Hoover Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Columbia University Press, 2002).

Clark argues that families experience digital and mobile technologies in their children's lives, especially during the preteen and teen years, quite differently depending on whether they are middle class or less advantaged. Based on over ten years of interviews hundres of parents and children, The Parent App explores these differences and provides the kind of guidance backed by thorough research that parents today desperately need.