Parents and Platforms

Research Focus

This lab investigates how digital media environments shape contemporary parenting cultures. We examine how parents, as both creators and consumers on platforms, navigate and shape platform dynamics. This impliescontextualizing parenting within a system of platform capitalism, influencer culture, and the increasingly intensified pressures of contemporary parenting culture. Our work transcends conventional boundaries such as theonline/offline divide, by investigating how platform dynamics also manifest in offline practices, sense-making, and decision-making. By doing so, our research explores how platforms create opportunities, such as connectionand support, but also vulnerabilities related to privacy, commercial exploitation, inequalities, normative pressures, and other concerns. Our ultimate goal is to provide care-oriented governance recommendations.   

Related projects 

• Selling Parental Perfectionism on Social Media: Influencers as Contemporary Sources of Parenting Information and Their Impact on Parental Norms, Mental Wellbeing and Compensatory Consumption — dr. Emma Beuckels
• Mag dit online?
• Mothering in the digital age: exploring the role of momfluencers as digital infant feeding agents — Ellen Mertens
• Understanding parental decision-making in the digital age: How social media influencers affect food choices of parents for their children — Gitte Demaret
  

Lab Head

Emma Beuckels 

Contact: Emma.Beuckels@UGent.be