MeToo Mommy Cultural Reproduction Through Parental Mediation of Sexual Knowledge and Media Consumption

#MeToo, Mommy: Cultural Reproduction through Parental Mediation of Sexual Knowledge and Media Consumption A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Sociology. ________________________ ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. v Abstract .............................................................................................................................. vi List of Tables .................................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................. 1 LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................ 5 #MeToo: Development and Contemporary Iteration ......................................................... 5 Privilege and #MeToo..................................................................................................... 6 A Brief History of American Childhood.............................................................................. 8 Parenting in a Technological Age ...................................................................................... 9 Parental Mediation ........................................................................................................... 11 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS .............................................................................. 17 The Development of Theorizing Childhood ...................................................................... 17 Interpretive Reproduction ................................................................................................. 18 The Orb Web: Interpretive Reproduction Modeled ...................................................... 19 Cultural Capital ................................................................................................................ 21 Concerted Cultivation and The Accomplishment of Natural Growth ............................... 23 METHODS ...................................................................................................................... 26 Sample ............................................................................................................................... 26 Data Analytic Technique................................................................................................... 31 Measures ....................................................................................................................... 31 Coding Scheme.............................................................................................................. 33 Ethical Considerations...................................................................................................... 35 Limitations ........................................................................................................................ 35 DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION ....................................................................... 37 Family Culture in the Aftermath of #MeToo..................................................................... 39 Basic Understanding of #MeToo ...................................................................................... 40 Positive Understanding of #MeToo .................................................................................. 41 Negative Understanding of #MeToo ................................................................................. 42 Reconsideration ................................................................................................................ 44 Discontent with Childhood ........................................................................................... 44 Discontent – Too Restrictive ......................................................................................... 45 Discontent – Not enough Restriction ............................................................................ 45 Differences and Similarities: Human Connection, Technology, and Content. ................. 47 Mediation of Media Consumption .................................................................................... 49 Active Mediation ........................................................................................................... 50 Co-Viewing Mediation .................................................................................................. 51 Restrictive Mediation .................................................................................................... 52 Collective Thought vs. Individual Action: Tensions between #MeToo Involvement and InHome Conversation .......................................................................................................... 53 Collective Definitions: Age-Appropriate Topics in Conversation .................................... 56 Implicit Family Value Systems .......................................................................................... 58 Organizing Sexuality Into Family Values ......................................................................... 60 iii Valuation of Eradicating Sexual Assault Due to a Personal Experience ..................... 60 Children’s Questions and Reported Experience ........................................................... 61 Older Children – Developmental Maturity and Access to Media................................. 62 Class, Privilege, and Cultural Reproduction.................................................................... 63 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 65 Appendix A: Interview Questions .................................................................................... 68 Appendix B: Post-Interview Demographic Survey Questions ......................................... 69 References ........................................................................................................................ 71 iv Acknowledgements Thank you to my family, without whom I would not be here today. Your emotional, financial, and all-encompassing support is what has made me who I am. Words cannot thank you enough. To each participant interviewed - thank you for your words, your shared experiences, your time, and your honesty. v Abstract As media pervades modern culture and everyday lives, children have more access to sources of information that are less mediated by parents and guardians. At home, with friends, or at school, kids access information beyond parental mediation. This trend let to this research surrounding children’s access to potent political topics as well as parental discourse about these issues. In the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, I examine how parents navigate and mediate their children’s consumption of media, how they reconsider their own childhood media consumption, and how family life in white, middle class families has been affected by #MeToo since its height in October of 2017. Ultimately, this research investigates how sexual knowledge is communicated within families amidst a changing socio-political context in the United States, and its implications on generations to come. vi List of Tables Figure 1: The Orb Web Model ......................................................................................... 20 Table 1: Demographics by Participant .............................................................................. 29 Table 2: Socioeconomic Status Markers and Political Affiliation by Participant ............ 30 Table 3.1: Coded Variables by Participant ....................................................................... 39 Table 3.2: Home based Conversation Codes by Participant ............................................. 40 vii INTRODUCTION As media further penetrates culture and individuals’ everyday lives, children have more access to news sources, media, and popular entertainment that are less moderated by parental figures in their lives. Whether at home, with friends, or at school, kids have access to knowledge found on YouTube, news sources, television, and popular movies outside their parents’ mediation. Additionally, access to increased technology and media sources is not limited to children. Contemporary adults have seen shifts in technology, the ways in which humans communicate and interact, and changes in the ways that media is consumed and regulated within social groups and families. A 2017 article in The Atlantic asked the value-laden question, “have smartphones destroyed a generation?” The author cites rising levels of depression and falling levels of social interaction as evidence that, for children, smartphones have decreased quality of life, happiness, and development (Twenge 2017). Responses to this article flew from other news sources with abandon after the first was released - titles including, “No, Smartphones are Not Destroying a Generation: The Kids are Gonna be Alright” (Cavanaugh 2017) and “Yes, Smartphones are Destroying a Generation, but Not of Kids” (Samuel 2017). The immense response demonstrates a profound social focus on this problem - people in the US are focused on changes in technology and media, for better or for worse. Twenge lays out an argument for why children and teens attached to their smartphones are increasingly less happy than past generations by operationalizing the variable of “less happy” by measuring depression, suicide, and social isolation rates. Generational change is normally slow but post the “twin advent” of smartphones and social media, long-increasing trends of individualism have turned around and youth depression has spiked (Twenge 2017). While Twenge argues that smartphones are the culprit, Samuel points a finger right back at social media and parents. In “Yes, Smartphones are Destroying a Generation, but Not of Kids,” Samuel takes a data-analysis approach to understand increased media and technology patterns of age groups across generations. Finding that it was first parents, not their children, who began to turn to social media after 2008, Samuel argues that it is parental disengagement that leads to increased teen unhappiness and media usage (2017). Distracted parents change their parental approaches - they have shorter interactions with children, are more abrupt and engage in less critical discussion, and increase behaviors such as punishment and criticism (Samuel 2017). Whereas Twenge places the blame for children’s media use on their own generation, Samuel turns around to understand where this behavior came from. So, how do interactions between parents and children with regard to media play out? And how do these interactions influence the production and reproduction of culture and behavior cross-generationally? The contemporary socio-political climate warrants a conversation about access to knowledge especially relevant. Events such as Donald Trump’s election, The Women’s Marches, and #MeToo have brought discourse about sexual harassment and abuse to popular media in ways that are different from previous eras. Though they are bipartisan and complicated, societal conversations surrounding sexual assault have been more publicly prominent than ever (Burke 2017; Gibson and Guskin 2017; Pflum 2018). This socio-political climate in conjunction with technological shifts in the structure of access to knowledge lead me to wonder how far discourse about sexual assault reaches. Knowing that many children have an increased access to technology and media in their 2 lives, I began to question how constructions of childhood and parenting interact with cultural reproduction across generations. Specifically, do themes encompassed by the #MeToo movement enter children’s peer cultures? Could this even matter? I thought it might - the #MeToo movement’s ability to successfully teach a younger generation about the importance of consent, sexual assault, and the ways that power and privilege can infiltrate relationships rests on whether or not it makes its way into youth culture. My thesis looks to examine parental mediation with their kids in the aftermath of #MeToo in order to understand whether ideas conceived within the #MeToo movement are communicated within the family, and enter children’s cultural knowledge. Family and the media are two institutions that interact with one another at macro, meso, and micro sociological levels and influence individual viewpoints and experiences across demographic lines. Further, these institutions’ interactions affect societal trends in behavior, political views, and understandings of current events in individuals who occupy the role of parent and child at differing points in time. In this study, I investigate the following research questions: 1. In the aftermath of #MeToo, how and why do parents with privilege mediate their children’s media consumption and sexual knowledge, as well as reconsider their own childhood media consumption? 2. How do reconsideration of childhood media consumption and #MeToo involvement, understanding, and experience, interact to inform the ways that parents with privilege mediate their children’s internet risk and sexual knowledge? 3 Further questions invited by these lines of thought include, how does #MeToo affect family life? Has #MeToo as a social movement enacted measurable change in the institution of the family and if so, to what extent? Is it too early to tell? How do gender, age, and family memory complicate the ways that social movements enact micro change in the institution of the family? In sum, how is #MeToo complicated by the ways in which it is incorporated into family life? I argue that in the white middle class families in this study, the tension between parental #MeToo involvement and the lack of conversations within the family about the topics and themes #MeToo brought to public discourse often operate as ways in which the context for sexual assault, harassment, and abuse is reproduced in youth peer cultures. In this thesis, I will outline #MeToo as a social movement, and ground my research in past scholars’ focus on parental mediation and parenting changes in a technological age. I draw from Corsaro’s (2011) theory of Interpretive Reproduction, Bourdieu’s (1977) ideas about cultural capital, and Lareau’s (2011) theory of concerted cultivation and natural growth to analyze the data I collected. Ultimately, I investigate how parental understanding of and involvement in the #MeToo movement, as well as generational reconsideration of media and technological change, impacts mediation and parenting techniques in the family. 4 LITERATURE REVIEW #MeToo: Development and Contemporary Iteration What history has shown us time and again is that if marginalized voices - those of people of color, queer people, disabled people, poor people - aren’t centered in our movements then they tend to become no more than a footnote. I often say that sexual violence knows no race, class, or gender, but the response to it does… Ending sexual violence will require every voice from every corner of the world and it will require those whose voices are most often heard to find ways to amplify those voices that often go unheard (Burke 2017). Tarana Burke created the #MeToo movement in 2006 in order to help black women and other women of color from poor communities find pathways to healing after sexual assault (Burke 2017; Garber 2018; Gill and Orgad 2018; Me Too Movement 2018). Eleven years later, on October 15, 2017, actor Alyssa Milano tweeted having stumbled across Burke’s phrase, stating “if you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet”. Her tweet yielded thousands of responses, testimonials, and outcries across twitter and other social media sites for the next few days - largely by white women condemning powerful white men (Burke 2017; Brockes 2018; Pflum 2018). Burke endorsed the 2017 emergence of the viral hashtag movement, but called out the lack of space for participants to process or think about the aftermath of public disclosure of personal details and story on publicly available social media platforms as well as the expanded breadth of the movement originally intended to be specifically anti sexual violence (Burke 2018; Garber 2018; Me Too Movement 2018). Burke calls other gender discrimination problems vitally important, but distinguishes that her original movement was specifically focused on healing, de-stigmatizing surviving, and the eradication of sexual violence (Garber 2018). 5 Gill and Orgad discuss the visibility of #MeToo as indicative of the shifting engagement with sexuality and power, and the implications on the intersection of sex and power (2018). #MeToo represents “the intensifying incorporation of the media and especially social media into intimate lives… as well as the popularity of feminism and the important work of preceding feminist and social movements” (Gill and Orgad 2018:1317). Though #MeToo represents this incorporation of media into daily life and emerging societal openness surrounding sexuality, this project looks to find out if these themes play out in an interacting institution - the family. My research focuses on a sample of white, middle class parents and their understanding and involvement of #MeToo in order to understand if and how the mobilizing power of this demographic brings ideas into the private institution of the family. Privilege and #MeToo. The online visibility of #MeToo was in large part due to Alyssa Milano’s original tweet and other white women’s privileged ability to extend their stories and messages on social media. The movement is explicitly tied to the media and workplace violence in the media industry, due to its rise after Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual violence by Ashley Judd. Contextually, this workplace centered focus has excluded women facing domestic violence, and their stories are invisible upon a search for the hashtag on any popular social media site (Gill and Orgad 2018). Critiques of the contemporary #MeToo moment include questions about its favor of a respectable and believable type of white femininity, exclusion of disabled women, and promotion of binary male/female gendered violence (Gill and Orgad 2018). Powerful white women are centered in the contemporary #MeToo moment, due to their lack of potential sanctions faced in the workplace and social sphere (Zarkov and Davis 2018). Cobb and Horeck 6 outline #MeToo’s tensions well, warning that although the moment “feels like a watershed moment, it is important to proceed with caution and determination… so far the emphasis on charitable legal funds, changing the face of those in power (e.g. more women CEOs, etc.) and better corporate policies remains contained by a post-feminist sensibility that ‘is not disruptive’ and is ‘capitalism, neoliberalism and patriarchy friendly’” (2018). Much of the discourse around #MeToo reproduces systems of power in place. And, though Burke’s original goals were not to dismantle systems of power but instead to focus on healing and support for victims of assault, it is important to consider the effects that the movement has on reproducing the contextual culture for assault to occur. Mainstream #MeToo discussion has focused on both individual victims and individual perpetrators who have behaved in sexist and violent shows of abuse towards women. The emphasis on individuals here is what is important to understand, due to the lack of industrial and systemic focus. Conversations about “monstrous capitalist, patriarchal and sexist system that has produced, sustained, and rewarded ... ‘bad apples’ over decades” are strikingly absent (Gill and Orgad 2018). Focusing on individual “bad apples” instead of the system that produces them allows privileged people to set themselves apart from those who engage in the behavior that sexual violence rises from. The lack of discussion about systemic patterns proves important in my research privileged parents who don’t see problems in their own children don’t necessarily see the need to discuss systemic change in ways that are classed and raced. Further, any critical discussion of the role in normalizing violence against women played by films and other media objects produced by the media industry was set apart from popular and visible 7 #MeToo discourse (Gill and Orgad 2018). Macro sociological study tends to focus more on these large scale systems that form and influence daily interactions. It is this tension between collective understanding and individual action that explicitly connects back to and inspires the research questions guiding this project. The rhetorical removal of systemic patterns and subsequent placing of blame on individual behavior focuses group conscious away from potential systemic change and into a more angered movement approach. My research looks to understand whether parents who are involved in and understand the #MeToo movement explicitly connect its underlying themes and calls to action through mediating conversations with their children as well as reconsideration of their own childhood consumption. I call into question whether parents transfer ideas about systemic change, or mediate their children’s media in ways that do or do not allow the underlying calls for change come to be represented by #MeToo. A Brief History of American Childhood To understand children’s position in society today, it is crucial to briefly outline the historical conception of childhood and theories that have widely been used to conceptualize children. Mintz outlines American childhood as occurring in three distinct periods, premodern childhood, modern childhood, and postmodern childhood (2004). Premodern childhood, occurring during colonial times, saw children in a hurry to attain adult status. Modern childhood, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, was a time when American children were seen as innocent, malleable, and in need of special care and protection. By the 1950s, modern childhood norms defined the experiences of most American youth, and post-modern childhood norms began to develop. Children began staying in the home longer, and adolescence was invented as a middle-ground 8 between young childhood and adulthood. Shortly after, dominant norms about family gender roles changed, divorces became more prominent, and working mothers meant more unsupervised time for children and teens. Postmodern childhood sees the explicit participation of children in their own peer cultures and as competent users of technology from a young age due to these circumstantial changes. Parenting in a Technological Age Contemporary parenting is filled with heightened senses of fear and paranoia. Shifting parental conceptions of children must be understood through cultural changes and the construction of fear and risk and views about how long children need parental guidance (Gabriel 2017; Janning 2019). Part of this heightened paranoia is related to economic anxieties about “giving children the best start in life ... to ensure that ... children can climb to a higher class, or at least not fall out of the one they were born into” (Miller 2018:1). Middle and upper middle class parents are the ones most likely to access the resources and give the time to “intensive parenting” which has become the norm for ensuring parents raise successful children (Miller 2018:1). In raising children, tensions and anxieties between public and private life are of the utmost concern. The technological era wherein families engage with 24-hour news cycles, social media, and tech gadgets that connect people from miles away only lessens the distance that the family has from public life. My research examines how parents incorporate this technological era, where information flows easily into the hands of children and adults, into daily familial life. I investigate how parenting techniques with regard to technology are related to a social movement largely mobilized via technology and social media platforms. 9 Childhood is marked as a time of innocence - a life stage that requires management by adults to shelter them from the capitalist marketplace as well as sex and violence (Janning 2019; Buckingham 2011). Media, especially news and social media, but extending to films and other media objects, may depict and hold representations of sex, violence, and inequalities that parents define as outside the realm of age-appropriate consumption. The child, constructed as innocent in philosophical and social discourse since the eighteenth century, is bounded in its definition in relation to adults by a lack of sexual knowledge maintaining contemporary definitions of child and adults (Gabriel 2017). Again, families with more resources are more likely able to manage children’s innocence through techniques that require time, energy, and capital. My thesis aligns with these ideas by looking to understand how parental content management applies to ideas that a movement deems important for society to change - even as it brings to the forefront of social conscious themes are outside the realm of “age appropriate” for young children’s knowledge and discussion. Does the loosening of age-appropriate restrictions on social media extend to conversations within the family? Families act as socializing agents for the children in the family. Applied technologically, parental habits in media consumption shape those of their children (Janning 2019). Rises in social media use by Americans aged 18-49 preceded that of those aged 12-17 (Samuel 2017). That goes to show that children followed the lead of the most influential adults in their lives - heavily incorporating social and other media use into their lives in the years following the advent of the smartphone and in the years after Americans of parenting age did. Furthering this idea, I investigate whether the culture 10 and knowledge present in adult social media realms is reproduced into youth peer cultures. The frequency of discussion about technological use between parents and their children varies in a number of ways. Research from the Pew research center says that “mothers are more likely than fathers to report talking frequently with their teen about appropriate online and offline behavior” (Anderson 2016). The same study says that parents who are less affluent will more likely engage in these conversations than parents in higher income backgrounds (Anderson 2016). Race matters as well - 52 percent of Hispanic parents report frequent conversations about online behaviors, while only 32 percent of white and black parents report the same (Anderson 2016). Do parents with more privilege due to socioeconomic status and race rely more on implicit family values to guide their technological mediation? Through its focus on white middle class families, my research investigates how the demographic that collectively engaged with #MeToo in public discourse incorporates knowledge into a family value system in disruptive or nondisruptive ways. I investigate whether cultivated socialization and the access to cultural capital in middle class white families lessens the frequency of conversations about technology and mediation due to implicit value systems in place. Parental Mediation A national survey of 1511 children and 906 parents found that school aged children encounter a number of online risks (Livingstone and Helsper 2008). As discussed in the last section, parenting is often associated with reducing childhood runins with risk, in order to extend innocence. Due to the media and communication environment of the present day and its increasing difficulty and lack of governmental 11 regulation, the role of mediation falls onto parents to deal with in the private sphere of their home (Livingstone and Helsper 2008). Thus, technological risk is a relatively new form of risk that parents interact with and use strategies to minimize. My research in this thesis investigates how parental mediation is impacted by outside knowledge and understanding of sexual risk and its fore fronted consciousness in a larger socio political context. Parental mediation of the Internet occurs though strategies developed by parents which are guided by their personal and familial values, and can be understood as one way in which families reproduce their values while facing outside sources of knowledge and meaning (Livingstone and Helsper 2008; Kirwil et al. 2009). One study helpfully defines mediation “to capture the parental management of the relation between children and media… it extends the parental role beyond simple restrictions to encompass also conversational and interpretive strategies” (Livingstone and Helsper 2008:581). Further, mediation “involves the regulation of children’s internet use by parents in order to maximize benefits and … minimize the potential negative impacts of the internet” (Kirwil et al. 2009:199). Studies on parental mediation in regards to television began in the latter half of the twentieth century as parental concerns shifted towards the content and time that their children consumed through this new media. Later research shows that the same techniques apply to mediation of knowledge obtained through newer medias such as the internet and video games (Kirwil et al. 2009). Research identifies and articulates parental practices surrounding mediation using a wide variety of vocabulary and terms. Many of the more widely used categories of mediation fall into the “restrictive mediation” and “instructive mediation” categories 12 (Kirwil et al. 2009). Restrictive mediation refers to a regulatory rule making approach, while instructive mediation refers to an active, social and discussion based approach consisting of discursive interpretation and translation of content to children (Kirwil et al. 2009). The literature further breaks these categories down into three groups of mediation strategies. First, active mediation which is the social and discussion based type. Second, co-viewing mediation, wherein parents consume media beside their child. And finally, restrictive mediation, where parents engage in rulemaking without discussion or explanation (Nathanson 1999; Nikken and Jansz 2006; Livingstone and Helsper 2008). These practices are typically designed by a parent to influence the response a child has to media through the different methods (Livingstone and Helsper 2008). As advances in technology made way for parents to embed controls within the technology their children use to access media, the literature identified another type of mediation - technological solutions (Warren 2001; Livingstone and Helsper 2008; Kirwil et al. 2009). With this form of mediation, parents use parental controls and time limits embedded within technological devices. This technique may occur instead of, or in combination with a discussion or verbal reminder of a content or time limit. Livingstone and Helsper found that in the US in 2004, 87 percent of school aged children were internet users, and 49 percent had access to broadband (2008). The authors explicitly addressed the question of whether television mediation strategies extend to the internet, and whether these mediation strategies are effective in their goals (2008). In their research extending prior television mediation to the internet, they found several key differences in parental behavior surrounding internet mediation. Importantly, and 13 extending on the idea of restrictive mediation, they found that parents implement social rules and technical restrictions (Livingstone and Helsper 2008). Technical restrictions were, as of the time of the study, unique to internet use. Parental monitoring, or “checking up on the child’s activity covertly or overtly after use” is also unique to internet mediation (Livingstone and Helsper 2008:589). Co-viewing becomes complicated when applied to the internet, due to the lesser presence of internet sites contextually in the home. Co-viewing is thus broken down to active co-use, where a parent must integrate discussion or make evaluative comments about internet use (Livingstone and Helsper 2008). Mediation fundamentally occurs in order to reduce the risk associated with media usage. Livingstone and Helsper found that the risk of pornography, violence, privacy, and contact risks online was moderately high - between 30 and 56 percent of teen aged participants in a nationwide survey encountered these risks in their online experiences (2008). An important aspect of mediation to consider is whether or not it achieves its goals, including socially desirable consequences, leading children to become skeptical towards media content, and reducing harmful behavior (Nathanson 1999; Livingstone and Helsper 2008). Generational differences in technological understanding and use affect the ways in which mediation occurs and achieves its goals. Co-use and technical restrictions were found not to reduce teenage risky behavior on the internet (Livingstone and Helsper 2008). Overall, they found that parents are more likely to use social over technical forms of mediation, and active co-use over technical restrictions and monitoring practices, though the reduction of risk is not statistically successful (2008). My thesis 14 extends this research to understand whether these types of mediation are impacted by a movement largely mobilized through the institution of media. Further, I look to understand how the institutions of media and family interact with one another to mobilize ideas and social change. Across television and Internet studies of mediation, scholars highlight determinants of how parents mediate their children’s consumption. Determinants of mediation include gender of the parent, gender of the child, socioeconomic status, education attainment, and parental use of the internet on a daily basis (Livingstone and Helsper 2008; Kirwil et al., 2009). Parents who use the internet monthly, as compared to those who use it daily, watch their children’s internet use more closely (Kirwil et al. 2009). Further, those parents with younger children, particularly those between the ages of 6 and 14, are more likely to actively mediate their younger children’s media through discussion, switching to less active mediation as a child ages (Anderson 2019). Mediation levels vary in terms of gender as well, with more mediation generally occurring for young girls’ media than for boys (Livingstone and Helsper 2008). Further, mothers are more likely to actively monitor media consumption than fathers. 60 percent of mothers, as compared to 50 percent of fathers, said that they checked up on their children’s media consumption and restricted access as a form of punishment (Anderson 2019). Across socioeconomic status, some research has pointed to a divide in levels of mediation, but Pew Research Center data shows no difference in mediation due to household income or education levels in parents (Anderson 2019). Though discussion surrounding media may differ across socioeconomic lines, the amount of mediation stays relatively equal. In my research focused on privileged parents who generally have high incomes and educational 15 attainment, investigates the ways that mediation intersects with reconsideration in the aftermath of #MeToo. Adding to this discussion, I investigate how the absence of conversations surrounding sexuality and content in privileged families speaks to a disconnect between collective action and individual action. 16 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS The Development of Theorizing Childhood Early sociological models depict childhood as a time of linear cultural membership, lacking complex social interaction and composed mostly of internalization and imitation of the adult world around them. These traditional theories of childhood saw children as outside an adult world, and in need of shaping, or socialization, by external forces to become functioning members of society. Socialization is the process by which individuals, in this case, children, adapt to and internalize societal norms and patterns used in interactions (Corsaro 2011). Socialization can occur in multiple institutional spaces - for example, that of the family, education, or media. These models view the child as socialized by adults in society and trained to become a competent and contributing member to societal order, de-centering the child from the discourse and removing their decisions and impact on interactions they may have. (Corsaro 2011). In sum, these earlier models model childhood as separate from adulthood, and youth culture as reflective of adult culture in ways that mold and teach children until they are ready to interact with society at an adult level. However, later theoretical models of childhood consider the innovative and creative aspects of children’s participation in society. In my thesis, I focus on childhood as a time of constant interaction with the adult world, using a theoretical lens that conceives of the child as an active rather than passive figure in society and the creation of culture. 17 Interpretive Reproduction Corsaro refers to the process of children’s creative and innovative engagements with society as interpretive reproduction. This refers to the ways in which children “create and participate in their own unique peer cultures by creatively taking or appropriating information from the adult world to address their own peer concerns” (Corsaro 2011:21). Children do not “simply internalize society and culture but are actively contributing to cultural production and change” (Corsaro 2011:21). He breaks Interpretive Reproduction down into three types of collective action, as follows: (a) Children’s creative appropriation of information and knowledge from the adult world; (b) children’s production and participation in a series of peer cultures; and (c) children’s contribution to the reproduction and extension of the adult culture. These activities follow a certain progression: Appropriation enables cultural production, which contributes to reproduction and change (Corsaro 2011:43). In this model, children learn from the adult world, and produce and participate in learned culture with their peers, thus creating new culture within their own peer group extending upon adult culture. In my research, I investigate the ways in which cultural knowledge is reproduced cross-generationally between parents and their children. As a reminder of the research questions guiding this project, I restate them as follows: 1. In the aftermath of #MeToo, how and why do parents with privilege mediate their children’s media consumption and sexual knowledge, as well as reconsider their childhood media consumption? 2. How do reconsideration of childhood media consumption and #MeToo involvement interact to inform the ways that parents with privilege mediate their children’s internet risk and sexual knowledge? 18 This thesis explores these questions in order to understand how parent-child interactions surrounding media play into ideals about childhood as a time of innocence, and how these interactions do or do not enable children to access media content with underlying content defined as “adult” or inappropriate. The theory of interpretive reproduction helps to frame the ways in which children interact with one another in peer groups and culture, and bring questions back to an influential adult contact - parents and family. Exploring these interactions through the lens of interpretive reproduction helps to facilitate an understanding of the ways in which adult and youth cultures interact, and how youth culture may explicitly or implicitly reproduce an adult movement aspiring for change. In privileged families, there may be a tendency to be able to organize certain topics deemed unimportant out of family discourse, though they are present in both adult and children’s peer cultures. Thus, I also investigate gaps in familial conversation where cultural ideas are not shared across generations within a family. The Orb Web: Interpretive Reproduction Modeled. The Orb Web Model of interpretive reproduction represents the view that children reproduce, engage, and participate in their cultural surroundings (Corsaro 2011). As emphasized in the previous section, children collectively produce their peer worlds as they engage and participate in culture from the adult world (Corsaro 2011). The Orb Web Model is Corsaro’s visual model of interpretive reproduction to capture its “productive-reproductive characteristics” (Corsaro 2011:27). 19 Figure 1. The Orb Web Model (Corsaro 2011:27) Corsaro’s web consists of spokes that represent social institutions, or cultural fields, such as the family, education, media, and community. The origin point at the center of the web represents the family, where a child begins their cultural experience. Between the spokes, culture is woven and represented through webs that weave through the various institutional spokes – as Corsaro puts it “the webbing or spirals of peer cultures are collectively spun on the framework of the cultural knowledge and institutions they come in part to constitute” (2011:26). Crucial to this framework, and my research, is the conception that children do not simply pass through these cultural webs, they produce them and keep them as a part of their life histories that contribute to change and experience in adult society (Corsaro 2011). 20 In my analysis, the Orb Web Model acts as a framework to understand how individuals’ lives are continuously wrapped up in social institutions, specifically family, media, and social class. Parents, whose primary “origin point” consists of their own family and childhood experience, are now at a point where they have a developed web of experience that points back to their own childhood and adolescence. Instead of passively absorbing the knowledge and norms that institutions like the family and media are made up of, they engage in reconsideration, mediation, and understanding of media and family in ways that may or may not diverge from their past experiences. Hence, the Orb Web Model represents a shifting web of experience, where interactions between institutions are crucial in constructing reality, both for parents and their children. Cultural Capital Bourdieu relates education and social class through the importance of cultural capital - “the symbolic and interactional resources that people use to their advantage in various situations” (Conley 2013:521). Cultural capital, whether embodied, objectified, or institutionalized, helps individuals to navigate their interactions and serves as exchangeable currency for opportunity and experience in various social settings (Bourdieu 1977). Cultural capital is used to deal with institutional and social situations in life, and is often learned within and due to the familial circumstances an individual is born into (Bourdieu 1977; Nash 1990; Conley 2013; Gabriel 2017). Examples of cultural capital include the ability to engage in bureaucratic systems, make eye contact throughout the duration of a conversation, or the confidence to approach an authority figure and the appropriate language to use with them. Class-based cultural capital is learned beginning at a young age. Children born into families with higher socioeconomic status and valued 21 cultural capital learn implicit values that serve their success in institutional settings later in life, have the resources to obtain objects that mark higher social class, and are more likely to access institutionalized markers of class as adults (Bourdieu 1977). I investigate the ways in which cultural capital impacts the ways that parents mediate their children’s consumption and knowledge of media and adult content. Childhood competence is “relational, learnt largely from adults and historically variable” (Gabriel 2017:65). Children learn to interact with others from the adults in their lives, and the social cues and cultural necessary for success varies across history and class. Cultural capital from the home relates to advantages or disadvantages in applications outside the home. This approach and vocabulary allow for an analysis of interactions with an emphasis on the mutuality of an individual-society relationship, incorporating the social environment as “part of the relational system in which young children develop” (Gabriel 2017:65). In understanding individual interactions as part of a large structural system that rewards certain forms of cultural capital more than others, I can analyze the impact of parental mediation of their children’s media as a case where children learn values and actions that may serve them elsewhere. Using Bourdieu’s framework helps to understand individuals’ relationships “within the context of broader social structures rather than just the immediate interpersonal relationships” (Gabriel 2017:66). My thesis looks to understand how #MeToo and the broader social structure of it as a movement looking to enact change impacts relationships and daily interactions at the familial level. Cultural capital is an engaging framework to view familial socialization of their actors to create common values and mediate consumption in the broader socio political context of #MeToo. In the 22 privileged demographic that I examine in this thesis, children spend their days in educational institutions learning and end their days by coming home to the family, often consuming media and engaging in conversation and dialogue with parents who are able to spend time at home with their kids. These contexts allow for development of cultural capital that is often rewarded by academic and workplace institutions that children will engage in later in life. I investigate whether cultural capital relating to speaking about sexual assault and gender inequalities represented by the #MeToo movement is reproduced in the home, and mediated through consumption of media that demonstrate these underlying adult themes. Concerted Cultivation and The Accomplishment of Natural Growth In a 2011 study, Lareau investigated how childhoods differ between different social classes due to parenting strategies and ways that parents are able to give their children growth, developmental, and educational opportunities. Lareau identifies two main types of child-rearing. The first is concerted cultivation wherein parents “develop” their children through planned activities and discussions in order to cultivate cultural capital, entitlement, and success. Middle-class parents are most likely to engage in the patterns that make up concerted cultivation, and value developing cultural capital that will lead to success for their children later in life (Lareau 2011). The second type of child-rearing is the accomplishment of natural growth, where children have more control over their free time and the activities they engage in. Parents who engage in the accomplishment of natural growth are less likely to have the time to devote to conversation, and instead rely on firm directives when placing rules on their children's actions. Working and lower-class parents make up this group, as they face economic 23 constraints to access basic needs, and overcoming these make up their primary parenting tasks (Lareau 2011). Lareau cites dominant standards that professionals widely agree upon for parenting techniques that promote educational development. These include, “the importance of talking with children, developing their educational interests, and playing an active role in their schooling” (Lareau 2011:4). Lareau calls these generally accepted guidelines a “‘dominant set of cultural repertoires’ about how children should be raised (2011:4). These guidelines permeate society and the ways in which many parents then behave in their parenting styles. Further, the class that most rapidly shifts their behavior as these dominant sets of cultural repertoires in regards to parenting change are middle class parents, who are most worried about how their children will succeed (Lareau 2011). Laurea says, early in her book, that “discussions between parents and children are a hallmark of middle class child rearing” (2011:1). Middle class parents “engage in a pattern of concerted cultivation deliberately to stimulate their children’s development and foster their cognitive and social skills” (Lareau 2011:5). So, middle class parents create and sustain their children’s activities, peer groups, and educational circumstances in such a way to be sure that they will have the cultural tools necessary to succeed in institutional settings. Middle class children earn entitlements that “play an especially important role in institutional settings, where middle-class children learn to question adults and address them as relative equals” (Lareau 2011:2). Compared with working-class and poor families, who view accomplishment of natural growth of their children as an accomplishment without the addition of cultivating extra skills and cognitions, middle-class children will face different outcomes from their 24 childhood experience. Lareau calls this the “transmission of differential advantages” (2011:5). These advantages may include things like verbal skills, the ability to speak with authority figures, or sustained eye contact during conversations. Lareau mentions that the “types of social competence transmitted” in working-class families is “valuable, but… potentially less valuable” than those learned in middle-class families (2011:5). Here, she speaks directly to Bourdieu’s idea that cultural capital can be used for economic benefit. Extending upon these ideas in my study, I examine how the presence or lack thereof of mediation of consumption and discussions about socio political context intersect with middle-class family life. Data from the Pew Research Center says that more affluent parents are less likely to engage in conversations about media consumption and technology (Anderson 2016). This idea is in opposition to Lareau’s findings, that say that it is poorer families who usually do not engage in active conversation. I investigate whether there is something else at play here - is there a reason why privileged parents might approach media consumption and mediation outside of their regular parenting patterns? These ideas are important for my thesis because I am interested to understand the ways in which parental understanding and involvement of #MeToo impacts the ways in which conversations about media, social change, and sexuality are carried out in the home. My sample consists of white, middle-class parents with school-aged children. Conversations about sexuality and media representations could present an opportunity for parents to cultivate opinions and transmit cultural capital helpful in preventing sexual violence in their children. In following sections, I outline the study that I undertook to answer these questions. 25 METHODS I conducted 14 semi structured interviews with parents who are currently raising children between the ages of 7-15. I used a convenience sample - I contacted potential participants through my personal network, posted on social media sites, and asked participants to recommend others they knew who fit the demographic. All participants primarily live in the United States, where children begin first grade around the ages of 6 7 and can legally learn to drive at age 16. This age range allows for focus on children who have access to peers and peer environments through attending school and other activities, but have not yet reached a point of greater freedom gained in later high school with access to cars and unsupervised peer environments. Interviews with participants lasted between 20 and 90 minutes, and consisted of a set of 29 questions. I obtained informed consent from each of the participants and recorded each interview. I designed interview questions to address the variables in the research question: understanding, involvement, and experience in the #MeToo movement, mediation of children’s media, and reconsideration of childhood media consumption. Each interview was followed up with a demographic survey consisting of questions about education, individual and spouse employment, race, political affiliation, and income. I transcribed each of the 14 interviews, and coded and analyzed them using the data analytics technique, measures, and coding scheme outlined in detail in a following section. Sample I interviewed 14 participants ranging in age from 31 to 52. Nine participants identified as female and three as male. All 14 participants identify as white. Participant 26 household incomes range from $10,000 - $150,000/year +, with the majority making over $80,000 per year. Table 1 displays the demographic qualities broken down by participant. Table 2 displays socioeconomic status markers and identified political affiliation. Noting that my sample represents only white, middle class families is important. In his book on the making of elite, Khan emphasizes the benefits to studying people with power: In shining the light upon elites, I hope to remind readers that poverty is not an aspect or property of poor people but a relationship that the poor are in with the rest of society. The same can be said of elites. Elites are elites not because of who they are but because of who they are in relation to other social actors and institutions (2011:205). Khan focuses on the elite to understand how shifting conceptions of class work to obscure sustaining inequalities, and to examine these inequalities and the invisibilities of hardship that occurs at the elite level. Another team of researchers, Armstrong and Hamilton, examined the inequalities in American higher education through a longitudinal study of a group of white women with a variety of socioeconomic statuses. They handle the homogeneity of their study with language I would like to include in my own: Explaining variation is at the heart of the sociological enterprise. Thus, the homogeneity of our floor… was initially disappointing. We were concerned it would limit our analysis… However, the homogeneity of the floor created a natural experiment of sorts by “controlling” from any of the likely sources of variation in college experiences and outcomes… The homogeneity of our sample allowed us to train our gaze primarily on social class. (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013:272). The homogeneity in my project allow for an analysis and investigation of variables that impact familial conversations surrounding sexuality and media consumption without conflation of variables that may cause variance outside of those in my research question. Though my analysis could have taken another direction had I had racial and more class 27 variation in my sample, I take this opportunity to examine the ways in which parents with privilege engage with their children, and how these interactions may help or harm collective thought and individual action and experience. My project examines middle class white parents to understand whether their #MeToo mobilization is at odds with micro sociological interactions in the family. I focus on white, middle class families in order to examine the ways in which the group who predominantly mobilized the #MeToo movement on social media platforms bring the themes and underlying ideas for social change back into the institution of family, to consider whether online collective participation in mobilization predicts daily action and the incorporation into youth culture. 28 Table 1. Demographics by Participant Participant ID Age Gender Child's Age Child's Gender Relationship Status Race 1 38 Female 7 Female Married White 2 46 Female 10 Female Married White 3 40 Female 8,7 Female, Female Married White 4 48 Female 15,11 Female, Male Married White 5 31 Female 15,12 Female, Female Married White 6 44 Female 14 Male Married White 7 52 Female 12 Male Never Married White 8 45 Male 11,8 Male, Female Married White 9 41 Female 12,15 Female Married White 10 43 Male 8,10 Female, Female Married White 11 48 Male 12,15 Male, Female Married White 12 37 Female 7 Male Married White 13 38 Female 7 Male Married White 14 34 Female 9,14 Female, Male Divorced White 29 Table 2. Socioeconomic Status Markers and Political Affiliation by Participant Participant ID Level of Education Obtained Partner's Level of Education Obtained Employment Partner's Employment Political Affiliation Income 1 Bachelor's Bachelor's Stay at home mom Working - Paid Employee, Government Democrat 80,000 89,999 2 Bachelor's Bachelor's Working - Self Employed, Service Working - Paid Employee, Management, Professional, and related Republican 150,000 or more 3 Master's Master's Working - Self Employed, Working - Paid Employee, Management, Professional, Government and Related Democrat 4 Bachelor's Bachelor's Working - Paid Employee, Working - Paid Employee, Management, Professional, Sales and Office and related Independent 100,000149,999 5 Bachelor's Bachelor's Working - Self Employed, Working - Paid Employee, Management, Professional, Farming, Fishing, Forestry and related Republican 100,000149,999 6 Master's Bachelor's Full time PhD Student Independent 150,000 or more 7 Bachelor's Not relevant Working - Self Employed, Not relevant Management, Professional, and related Independent 150,000 or more 8 Master's Master's Working - Paid Employee, Working - Paid Employee, Management, professional, Management, Professional, and related and related Democrat 100,000149,999 9 Master's Master's Stay at home mom, Unemployed Working - Paid Employee, Education Democrat 90,000 99,999 10 Doctoral Degree Professional Degree Working - Paid Employee Management, professional and related Working- Paid employee, Sales and office Democrat 150,000 or more 11 Master's Bachelor's Working - Paid Employee, Stay at home Mom Management, Professional, and related Democrat 90,000 99,999 12 Master's Bachelor's Management, professional, Management, professional, and related and related Democrat 100,000 149,999 13 Bachelor's Bachelor's Working Limited Hours, Consulting Management, professional, and related Democrat 100,000 149,999 14 Some College Not relevant No Degree Stay at home mom Not relevant Democrat 10,000 19,999 30 Working - Self Employed, Production, Transportation, and Material Moving 150,000 or more Data Analytic Technique Measures. To reiterate, I investigate the following questions: 1. In the aftermath of #MeToo, how and why do parents with privilege mediate their children’s media consumption and sexual knowledge, as well as reconsider their childhood media consumption? 2. How do reconsideration of childhood media consumption and #MeToo involvement interact to inform the ways that parents with privilege mediate their children’s internet risk and sexual knowledge? I argue that in the white middle class families in this study, the tension between positive parental #MeToo involvement and the lack of conversations within the family about the topics and themes #MeToo brought to public discourse often operate as ways in which the context for sexual assault, harassment, and abuse is reproduced in youth peer cultures. Defining variables is important in relation to my research questions and for analysis using these terms. I break #MeToo down into three sections: understanding, involvement, and experience. The #MeToo movement, in its contemporary, mainstream, and viral iteration occurring in 2017 was about individuals sharing their stories about sexual abuse and harassment on social media in order to show the world the immense numbers of people who have experienced them. To measure understanding of the #MeToo movement, I asked participants if they have a general understanding of #MeToo, and if so to explain their understanding to me. Understanding is defined as whether a participant knows about #MeToo in combination with the way they situate their opinion 31 with the movement. I coded participant answers for positive or negative opinions of #MeToo, and whether they supported or did not support underlying themes about equal gender rights and social media movements. For example, on parent who did support #MeToo said “I feel like it’s such a beautiful moment,” while a parent who did support the movement said “it did not, to me, feel like it was at all productive to the people that actually truly... need support.” Positive language indicated the presence of positive opinions toward #MeToo, while negative language did the opposite. When parents answered questions about #MeToo using neutral, fact and event based information and language and did not express positive or negative opinions I coded their answer as basic understanding and neutral opinion of #MeToo. The second part of #MeToo is involvement. I define involvement as the level to which a participant recalls engaging with posts on social media marked with #MeToo. Involving oneself in #MeToo took a number of forms, including liking or commenting on others posts, posting about an experience. Participants could understand #MeToo without involvement, but likely could not be involved without understanding. The last piece of the #MeToo is that of experience. I define experience as an individuals’ lived story involving sexual abuse or harassment in combination with their personal definition of that situation having been within the realm of the #MeToo movements reach. Some participants have experience with #MeToo related events who did not choose to involve themselves on social media. Others did not have experience but did choose to offer online support. Breaking #MeToo down into these three sections gives analytic power to the gradient of understanding, involvement, and lived experience among the participants. 32 Coding Scheme. I coded the fourteen interview transcripts along several topics, connecting to the variables in my research questions. The first was mediation types. Using terms from previous literature, I coded for restrictive and instructive mediation. Restrictive mediation, consisting of rulemaking without explanation, I broke into categories of technological solutions and verbal rules. Technological solutions occur when parents use in-device technology to place time or content restrictions on the devices their children use to access media. Verbal rules occur when parents enforce strict, littleexplained rules using short conversations or verbal reminders (Livingstone and Helsper 2008). Instructive mediation is the more active, social, and discussion based form of mediation. I coded the transcripts for active mediation and co-viewing mediation under this heading. Active mediation involves ongoing discussions and open conversations between parents and children, while co-viewing occurs when parents view media with their children. Co-viewing mediation includes discussions about media – parents might pause a show or movie to explain a concept or a moment, but discussion about themes or meanings won’t continue outside of the media viewing experience. In coding, I found that some parents used multiple types of mediation in various cases or situations, or did not mediate at all. These variations will be discussed in the data analysis. Mediation most often occurred in the sample in terms of time and content. I coded for parent’s discussion of the types of content that they do or do not allow their children to watch. These included sexuality, violence, inequalities between groups or individuals, and behavior. I also code for when and how parents set time limits on their children’s 33 consumption. I coded for the presence of absence of time limits, and noted how much time children spent consuming media in a given “average” week. I coded the transcripts for the three #MeToo variables explained in the previous section - understanding, involvement, and experience. As explained, I coded participant’s answers about the #MeToo movement using these three variables. In the interview, I asked three corresponding questions about #MeToo, “Do you have an understanding of the #MeToo movement of 2017,” “Talk to me about your experience of the movement both on and offline,” and “Talk to me about your involvement with the #MeToo movement both on and offline.” Participants answers to these questions were coded into basic, positive, and negative understanding, involvement, and either having or not having an experience with sexual violence – though some did not answer either way. I also ask about conversations about #MeToo with a participant’s children, and coded the answers for the presence of conversations, or the lack of them. I ranked #MeToo involvement using a 1, 5, 10 scale - 1 being likes and passive support, 5 being comments likes and opinionated support, and 10 being posting a personal story with the #MeToo hashtag to a following on a social media site such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. For ease of reading, I will refer to 1 as little support, 5 as medium support, and 10 as high support. Finally, I coded the transcripts for participants reconsideration of their own childhoods as parents. To access data giving insights to reconsideration, I asked the question “since having kids, and mediating their media consumption, how do you think about the patterns of media consumption you engaged in as a child?” After seeing the collection of responses, I coded answers into multiple categories of reconsideration – differences in human connection, differences in news access, technological change, and 34 discontent with childhood. Answers that I coded for differences in human connection mentioned values about childhood play involving other children. Those I coded for differences in news access include answers about the changes in accessing news and the ways that they have impacted their childhood and their children’s childhood. I coded answers mentioning the differences in device and technology using technological change. Finally, answers that mentioned a discontent with the way that a participant's own parents had mediated their consumption, or ways that their own parenting doesn’t align with what they received as a child, I coded for discontent with childhood. Ethical Considerations I received Institutional Review Board approval through the Whitman College IRB prior to collecting data through interviews and surveys. All participant names, as well as their children’s names have been kept confidential. Participants all signed informed consent forms prior to their interviews, and were informed of the possibility of discomfort due to mention of sexual assault in questions about the #MeToo movement. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, I offered childcare for the duration of interviews so that, if necessary, children could be supervised out of earshot of conversation. In interviews, I was mindful of the ways that I asked questions and my reactions to answers in order to keep my personal biases as a liberal-leaning college student from affecting participant answers. Limitations With only 14 participants, my sample size is small. It is hard to generalize my findings to a larger population due to this size. Further, it is also primarily made up of 35 liberal identifying participants, who mostly did participate in #MeToo. By no means are all parents in the United States represented here, and I do not attempt to say that they are. However, my focus on identifying and isolating variables of race and class allows for greater understanding of the ways that middle class white families reproduce toxic culture in their family, knowing that they out rightly advocate for social change. Though implications of my thesis include whether or not #MeToo ideas and themes are accessible within youth culture, I am not directly studying this phenomenon. The lack of children’s voices in interviews means that I cannot understand parent/child dialogue in the home from children’s perspective in this interaction. I would call for future research to look at the child’s side of this interaction, in order to better understand how children reproduce the culture and ideas that they receive in conversation with adults in their lives. Other research shows that children, specifically adolescent girls, face everyday sexual harassment in schools and other spaces (Hlavka 2014). Although my data does not specifically highlight children’s understanding, in combination with other research, I can say that participant parents tend to underestimate the statistical prevalence of sexual knowledge and run-ins with harassment that their children may face outside the home on a daily basis. Parents voices are greatly beneficial to this research, as they can organize knowledge in or out of their children’s family-based knowledge. Understanding where their general understanding lies has implications on future education policy to disrupt patterns of knowledge not serving the public. 36 DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION In this section, I will discuss possible answers to my research questions. To reiterate, I situate my analysis to answer the following two questions. First, in the aftermath of #MeToo, how and why do parents with privilege mediate their children’s media consumption and sexual knowledge, as well as reconsider their own childhood media consumption? And second, how do reconsideration of childhood media consumption and #MeToo involvement, understanding, and experience, interact to inform the ways that parents with privilege mediate their children’s internet risk and sexual knowledge? In my sample, parents engage in conversations about sexuality and inappropriate media content for three main reasons. First, some parents organize the value of avoidance of harassment due to personal experience into their parenting techniques. Second, if a child reports an instance of harassment or asks questions about sexuality. Finally, with older kids who are allowed access to social media and are collectively defined as developmentally more mature and able to understand adult content. Otherwise, knowledge of sexuality through media consumption and discussion in the home is generally restricted through due to “age-appropriate” concerns and family values. The following tables identify the ways that I coded each participant with regards to the variables in the research questions. 37 Table 3.1. Coded Variables by Participant Participant MeToo MeToo MeToo Most Prevalent ID Experience Understanding Involvement Mediation Type Reconsideration 1 No Positive Yes: 1 Active Discontent with Childhood, Differences: Human Connection, Technological Change 2 No Basic Yes: 1 Co-Viewing Differences: Technological Change 3 Yes Positive Yes: 10 Active Discontent with Childhood 4 No Basic No Restrictive: Technological Solutions, Active Differences: Human Connection 5 Yes Positive Yes: 10 Restrictive: Technological Solutions Differences: Technological Change 6 Yes Positive Yes: 1 Active: Parental Monitoring Discontent with Childhood 7 Not disclosed Negative No Active Differences 8 No Basic Yes: 1 Co-Viewing Differences: Human Connection 9 Yes Positive Yes: 5 Restrictive Differences: Technological Change 10 No Basic No Restrictive: Technological Solutions Differences: Technological Change, Discontent with Childhood 11 No Basic No Restrictive Differences: Content 12 Not disclosed Positive Yes: 5 Active Differences: Content 13 No Positive No Active Discontent with Childhood 14 Yes Positive Yes: 10 Active Discontent with Childhood, Differences: Content 38 Table 3.2. Home-based Conversation Codes by Participant Participant ID MeToo Conversation in the Home Political Conversation in the Home Sexual Education in the Home 1 No Yes Yes 2 No Yes Yes 3 Yes No Yes 4 Yes Yes Yes 5 Yes/No Yes Yes/No 6 Yes Yes Yes 7 Yes Yes Yes 8 No Yes Yes 9 No Yes No 10 No Yes Yes 11 No No No 12 No Yes No 13 No Yes Yes 14 Yes Yes Yes Family Culture in the Aftermath of #MeToo Parents in the sample situated their understanding of #MeToo in ways that were neutral or basic, positive, or in one case, negative. As I coded the fourteen interview transcripts, patterns emerged from these groups speaking to the ways that the combination of understanding, involvement, and experience played out in regards to the ways that the families then mediated conversations about media and sexuality with their children. Generally, the parents in the sample adhere to collectively defined “ageappropriate” lines of conversation and follow their children’s line of questioning in order 39 to decide what topics to bring up in the context of family life. However, it seems that parents with a positive understanding of #MeToo in combination with involvement or experience are more likely to bring to the forefront topics about sexuality or #MeToo that other parents may be more comfortable steering clear from, or waiting for a childpresented catalyst to bring the topic to the family. In sum, #MeToo and its themes become complicated when incorporated into family life, especially in families with children in the younger end of the studied age range who have yet to have talks about sexuality more generally in the home. This complexity arises out of parents who, when talking about #MeToo outside conversations with their children, demonstrate a relatively nuanced understanding of the movement and its publicly accepted goals. Basic Understanding of #MeToo Participants who fell into the basic #MeToo understanding category have not attached either a positive or negative opinion to the movement or its goals, and are instead neutral in their stance towards it. Further, most participants who had a basic understanding of #MeToo were either not at all involved on social media, or had very little involvement in the form of passive “likes” on comments and posts. Parents in this category emphasized discussion with their kids only due to catalysts brought by the children, and had the privilege of not bringing in the value of premeditated avoidance of harassment due to their lack of experiences with violence in their own lives. Though parents were not explicit in talking about sexuality, many reference discussions they’ve had with children about “boundaries” in the absence of talk of sexuality. In these families, conversations about #MeToo are explicitly avoided, both by children and adults. 40 When parents with basic understanding and without involvement or experience do talk with their children, it is generally because the child is old enough to access social media sites, or have brought questions about sexuality to their parents. In these ways, children don’t access information about #MeToo, or media depicting sexuality or violence until they are older. If they do have knowledge about #MeToo, it is likely through other avenues or peer cultures. Sexuality is thus organized out of family discourse for young children in these cases. Positive Understanding of #MeToo Like parents in the basic understanding category, many parents with a positive understanding of #MeToo express sticking to age-appropriate conversations and following lines of questions brought up by children. However, parents in this category are more likely to address potent topics prior to their children bringing them up in questions or through media, especially ones who have experiences of #MeToo or are discontent with their own childhood learning process in regards to sexuality or other “taboo” and “adult” subjects. For example, participant 4 has spoken with her fifteen year old daughter about #MeToo, but not with her eleven year old son: So, my fifteen year old daughter, we’ve talked more about it. And more, honestly along the lines, because she is on social media and she’s sort of familiar with, you know, what she’s seen, more in line with her generation… there’s been a few sort of minor situations where people have been slightly inappropriate with her, and we’ve discussed it, and … we’ve actually blocked a couple people, but, just, the awareness, more of, this is what women of my generation had to deal with, this is what’s still happening, this is what’s coming out in the news, and… kind of keep your eyes open, like, watch what’s happening. And if you see something you’re uncomfortable with, come to me, come to your dad, talk about it, speak up for yourself, that sort of thing. 41 Participant 4, by saying that she speaks “honestly” about #MeToo with her daughter, thus says that she doesn’t speak this way with her younger son who is outside a collectively defined bound wherein discussion about sexuality is inappropriate. However, she does present her daughter with the space in the form of an invitation to come to her if she sees something she is uncomfortable with. These conversations about sexuality and themes encompassed by #MeToo come after sexual education that occurs at school and in the home. Other parents in the group express similar conversational patterns with their children wherein conversations about sexuality happen later in development. Further, concerns arise when children are on the cusp between innocence and maturity, leading parents to question at what point conversations can begin. Participant 5, who speaks openly with her 15 year old daughter about sexual harassment due to an experience her daughter recently went through, says about her 12 year old, “she’s at that age where you don’t really know if you can or can’t talk to her about that stuff.” To this mother, 12 represents an age where the collective definition of maturity is in flux – some children may be “ready” to talk about sexuality, whereas others are not, leading to a challenging decision for parents who don’t explicitly value premeditating their children’s questions with a conversation about sexual violence, harassment, or objectification. Negative Understanding of #MeToo Only one participant in the sample expressed a negative understanding of the #MeToo movement as it appeared online. Because of the small sample size, and likely its liberal leaning tendency, the analytical power of this section is limited. However, inclusion of the participants voice who expressed these opinions and experiences is 42 important and likely represents voices outside of the sample who are also critical of the movement. Participant 7 criticized the #MeToo movement for its inability to address the concerns of women who have experienced what she defines as “real rape.” She critiques the all-encompassing “bashing” of men, especially because she is raising a son. She feels that the movement’s power is lost because, in her view, it overwhelmingly places men into a singular category of “violent predators.” In her words: To put all women as victims or all men as oppressors is just, even if I wasn’t raising a son, I would be appalled by it. Because… it’s not healthy, it’s dangerous for a society to see half of its population as predators. But because I am raising a son, I find it incredibly worrisome. Participant 7 echoes long standing notions about the illegitimacy of “everyday violence,” as sexual harassment, calling into question many voices in the #MeToo movement (Hlavka 2015:341). Feminist scholars have often documented the silencing of women and children in relation to abuse and exploitation, prohibiting their voices from entering the public discourse (Hlavka 2015:341). Thus, Participant 7 is demonstrative of a sector of parents and individuals who believe that everyday violence is a part of life, and that male aggression should be valued in society. Participant 7 references a belief that the massive response to #MeToo de-legitimizes those who have experienced “real rape,” or the narrowly defined forced stranger rape. She believes that most of the everyday harassment and objectification has a place in society, and are a part of “normal” gendered experiences. Participant 7’s opinions have led her to engage in conversations with her son about the movement, but echoing parents in the other two understanding categories, on an “age-appropriate” level. Participant 7 is more likely to address her son’s questioning than 43 to bring up conversational topics on her own. However, when he does bring up issues surrounding #MeToo or other political movements in the media, they have lengthy discussions regarding the pros, cons, facts, and representations they view together. Reconsideration Near the end of each interview, I asked the open ended question, “how do you, after raising kids and having the opportunity to mediate their media, think about and reconsider the media consumption that you engaged with as a child?” I identified categories of reconsideration that emerged from the data. These include discontent with childhood, and differences in technological change, human connection, and content. Parents in the sample generally think about the differences between their childhood and the childhood they are providing for their own kids across these categorical lines – all with various implications on the ways in which they mediate their children’s media consumption in present day. Discontent with Childhood. For a participant to express discontent with their childhood means that they expressed a pitfall in their consumption of media or the ways that their parents mediated their consumption. Many parents in this category believe their received parenting was inadequate in protecting them from information, or, conversely, shielded them too heavily from access to content which often led to access outside of parental knowledge, or a lag in knowledge within their peer groups. This category by no means necessarily means that these participants are at all truly discontent with their childhoods in entirety, but often means that they do not mimic parenting techniques received in childhood in their own parenting today with regard to mediation of consumption. 44 Discontent – Too Restrictive. Parents in this category recall their parents being very restrictive, often sticking to movie-ratings to define lines of restriction and access and delivering strict ultimatums. Participants recall the lack of explanation of restriction as frustrating and focus on changing this in their own parenting style. Participant 1 recalls: It would always be like, “we don’t want you watching that.” [My parents] would never go any further. And I definitely try with my daughter to kinda explain further, like even with her little cartoon shows, like [I’ll say] I don’t want you watching that show, and when she says well why not, [I’ll say] because I don’t like how this character talks to that character, I don’t think that’s appropriate behavior, it’s not good and I don’t want you to learn that, it’s not okay with me.” Participant 1 has changed the ways that she mediates her daughter’s consumption due to the frustrations she experienced as a child. Lacking data about the socioeconomic status that participants grew up in limits an analysis about class mobility that could further help to explain the shifts in parental mediation techniques across generation. However, most participants who recall heavy restriction in their childhoods reproduce this restriction in their parenting styles, which I will discuss more in a following section. Discontent – Not enough Restriction. Another subset of parents in this category emphasize that they had too much time consuming media. These parents, now members of the middle class, express discontent in this realm and believe that time spent in other avenues is more valuable. Participant 13 recalls: I had way too much television. It was almost unlimited television. It’s not good now that I’m an adult. I realize you know, that wasn’t a healthy thing to do. And I know as a parent now that every hour that I don’t let him have media is an hour that he’s doing something in my opinion is more beneficial. Is an hour that he’s just open, he reads a book, or draws, or writes a book… I mean I think boredom is a good thing. He plays violin, and if he had three hours of media a day I don’t think that would happen. 45 Implicitly, Participant 13 recognizes the importance of developing cultural capital including skills that will be beneficial for her child in adulthood that she may not have developed due to her unlimited television time. Further, Participant 13 engages in Lareau’s concerted cultivation in her parenting here. Her son practices his violin and enjoys other activities that his mother believes will benefit him later in life – perhaps through scholarships to colleges, good grades in high school, or membership in an orchestra or band. She de-values media consumption and instead actively encourages her son to engage in activities that can produce cultural capital in ways that she did not. Participant 10 echoes similar discontent with his development of cultural capital in childhood, saying: I don’t feel like the time I spent playing with the computer was really helpful to me now that I’m 30 years away from there. And so, we really try and force [our daughters] to do things that aren’t screen related just because we sort of think there’s going to be better long term results. These parents are discontent with the lack of restriction they received in the parenting styles used to develop their childhoods. Participant 14 mentions the lack of “knowledge” that her parents had about mediating internet and television use, mentioning that due to their lack of “a clue,” she was able to access things that she is now “horrified” she saw so young. Pointing to the learned ability to mediate media, Participant 14 shows implicit awareness of the knowledge of mediation that she has that her parents did not. Participant 6 remembers learning about sexuality and other topics through books that her parents did not know she was reading: I consumed books that I think that I know my parents didn’t know what was in them… so I learned about a lot of things by reading them before they even told me or brought it up. And that in part has formed my idea to be the one who tries to introduce topics before they get them some other way. 46 Participant 6 regretfully recalls learning about certain topics through avenues outside of the family, recognizing a change in her own parenting so that her children won’t go through the same experience. Though not explicitly discussing #MeToo in regards to reconsideration, many of these parents show implicit buy-in to the collective valuation that children’s innocence should be protected – and are often discontent with the ways theirs were not. Connecting to #MeToo, parents’ desires to protect their children from adult themes in media and in political spheres often align. Differences and Similarities: Human Connection, Technology, and Content. Some parents focus on the differences in human connection in their childhood vs. their children’s childhood are critical of the lack of “people-time” that their children get due to their attachment to media in the home. Others justify their children’s media consumption by comparing it to the different ways that they connected with friends as a child. One mother justifies her daughter’s attachment to social media because it’s “just the way they communicate” and in her day it was the “hall telephone.” Some parents discuss the “results” and “long term results” that come from human connection – speaking to Bourdieu’s ideas about cultural capital as well as concerted cultivation. Parents believe that interacting with others will help their children gain skills that will be useful in the future. Things such as eye contact, sustained conversation, and other communication techniques developed in human contact and children’s play can help to sustain skills beneficial in institutional realms later in life. Other parents focus on the ways that technology has changed, and the implications for their children’s lives. These parents who think about technologies changes tend to be fearful of it – hence restricting their children’s consumption via restrictive mediation. 47 Further, these parents also generally had restrictive parenting techniques from their own parents. Their lack of technological knowledge contributes to their fear of the impacts that technology has on their kids, and they attempt to reproduce the culture of restriction that they experienced in their own childhoods. Finally, parents think about the differences in their own and their children’s media content in two different ways. Some parents expressed reconsideration of the themes embedded in content that they viewed as a child. These parents often do not want their children internalizing these themes – including things such as gender discriminations or violence towards certain groups. Another group of parents expressed the desire for their children to have more access to content to teach them about current events – specifically news media in radio format. Parents in the initial category think that “times have changed” and certain movie tropes don’t sit well with them like they used to. Participant 14 discussed her inability to watch rom-coms now, because of the way that they depict women and gender relations: I can’t watch rom coms for the most part anymore, because they’re so based in refusing to accept that a woman doesn’t want to date you, or ... stalking as romance, things like that that I didn’t see before, but I can’t un-see now. In another example, participant 12 is a mother who doesn’t allow Disney movies that she loved as a child, due to their representation of women and other minority groups: I [have limited] ... a lot of the Disney princess ones... they’re movies ... that I really liked when I was little, and more so with my younger daughter it’s become a thing of like how to empower her without exposing her to that at such a young age… They can be demeaning of women, the way that they portray women as like, just looking for prince charming … and caving in to men’s desires, the losing of the voice in little mermaid. That kind of stuff. Like that’s a movie that I love! I refuse to let my daughter see it. 48 Both these parents reconsider content that they used to enjoy due to themes that in the contemporary socio-political context, they see as unfit for their children to internalize. They construct their children’s access to knowledge through media that may produce ideas about masculinity and relationships that contribute to rape culture in society. Participant 10, on the other hand, wishes that his daughters were more exposed to news media in the ways that he was as a child: One thing that was very different about my life versus theirs is that I would watch the evening news everyday even as a 10 year old, and, I don’t think my girls are getting the same sort of exposure to the news that I had... NPR was always on in the morning growing up and then the nightly news every day. And we don’t, it’s not an organized thing that anybody does anymore. Participant 10 shows a discontent for the changes in content that his daughters are exposed to vs that of his own childhood. He expresses a desire for conversation about current events that he may have gotten, but his children do not due to shifts in the structural access to knowledge about current events. However, his lack of active mediation and introduction of these topics into conversation with his children is ironically in opposition to his desire for them to engage with current events and news. Mediation of Media Consumption Three main types of mediation as identified in the literature emerged in the transcribed interviews. To reiterate, these mediation types are active, co-viewing, and restrictive. I also coded for sub-types including parental monitoring as a sub type of active mediation, and technological and verbal solutions as sub-types of restrictive mediation (Livingstone and Helsper 2008). The three types of mediation that I identify in the data are not of course, ideal types. Many parents engage with multiple types of mediation, depending on the type of content, form of media, and age of their child. 49 However, most parents seem to fit largely into one category or another, and so analysis is based on their “best-fit” mediation style, with outlying tendencies explained when relevant. Active Mediation. Parents who use an active mediation style generally try to keep open lines of communication with their children. They organize conversations about media content and time limits into the family, and engage with their children about the reasons behind the decisions they make regarding the content they can and cannot consume. Generally, parents who used active mediation often talked to their children about the “behaviors” that characters in shows exhibit. Much of the active mediation in parents towards their younger aged children occurred to keep them from “acting like” certain characters, acting “snobby,” or being a “little brat.” Participant 1 notices a correlation between her daughters’ behavior and her consumption of shows that depict high schoolers and little girls who are “mean” to one another. For Participant 1, this has led to more active restriction about the ways to treat others, and that television is not always the best exhibition of behavior to follow. In the 14 participant sample, only 7 parents used active mediation in a majority of mediating situations with their children. Given that these families are all middle-class families, 50 percent of parents using active mediation does not align with the Lareau’s claims that discussion is used to dictate middle-class family life as discussed by Lareau. It seems that concerted cultivation does not necessarily apply to media discussion perhaps because media today is seen as such a natural part of life in many of the families in the sample. 50 Co-Viewing Mediation. Participant 8 describes a co-viewing situation with his children: When I do watch MSNBC and watch … interviews and hear news about what’s going on politically… then we talk about that. So, you know, whether it be about Justice Kavanaugh getting confirmed and… the issues around his nomination and confirmation, or whether it be about the border wall… it’s not just interpretation but also … my… analysis of it… I try to… give kind of the straight story to say here’s the situation but also then to say and then here’s my view on this so they can see where I’m coming from and what is… my opinion in the right way to act and to view these issues. Parents who most engage with co-viewing mediation use media as an opportunity for “family time,” enjoy watching “classic” films as a family, or listen to the news together for an opportunity to engage with current events. Many of these parents don’t allow their children to watch movies with higher ratings such as PG 13 or R without them present, but use them as an educational or cultural opportunity if consumed together. Parents in this category mention a desire to watch movies with their children, where they may choose to fast forward scenes with content such as sex or graphic violence, but enjoy the rest of the film as a family-based experience. In this way, these parents organize sexuality out of “family-time,” teaching children what is and is not appropriate in the context of media content. Further, these parents often viewed traditional television, YouTube, and video games as wasteful and needing to be restricted in terms of time or content. They valued spending time together and were sometimes upset when kids preferred to spend their consumption time engaging with YouTube or video games. Parents of younger children were also more likely to restrict certain movies, instead opting for movies that they have fond memories of from their childhoods – often Disney movies or other classical films. These parents valued the time spent sharing their favorites with their children, and 51 consider co-viewing an avenue for making sure that children are consuming appropriate content. They often survey content prior to viewing it with a child, or choose what to consume as a family in combination with their child. Generally, the parents in this category value knowledge about current events, and allow their child to listen to the news if they do. They will usually answer questions brought up by their children if and when they come up. Restrictive Mediation. For parents to follow a restrictive mediation technique is not to say that they do not have conversations with their children. Instead, they are more likely to engage in restrictive rules without in depth conversation explaining the reasoning behind them. In fact, restrictive parents can and do enact their restrictions verbally. These conversations have a more, as one parent called it “dictator-like” quality where children are left without the option to engage in rule-changing. Children are often left without an explanation of why they must follow the rules their parents set. Many parents in this category used technological solutions as a restrictive mechanism to limit the access their children have online in terms of time and content. These technological solutions include apps on phones that allow for a certain amount of time, age restriction blocks on televisions or Netflix, and website blocking through a WiFi routing device. Technological solutions remove the human engagement that is more present in active and co-viewing mediation styles, blocking access to content or lengths of time without engaging in conversation about the underlying reasons why. As discussed in the section on reconsideration, parents who practice restrictive mediation often felt that they had access to too much too soon in their own childhood. Conversely, some parents who practice this method recall restriction in their own 52 childhood and are thus fearful of the impact of media on their children because of their unfamiliarity with it. Restrictions are usually on the basis of inappropriate content, whether it be sexuality, relationships, violence, or language. Further, many parents restrict YouTube, due to unfettered access to inappropriate content, its “unending holelike quality,” and “spicy” pop-up ads. The fear of YouTube is often that of the unknown – children can access “anything” and may run into content outside of what is deemed appropriate for them. Most parents who do not talk with their children about #MeToo and sexuality also restrict their children’s access to media portraying sexuality and violence – making invisible the presence of these topics both in conversation and in media representation. Further implications of these mediation types will be further discussed in the following sections, but it is important to mention now the importance of class and privilege in these familial interactions. These tendencies point to the general privilege of the sample. Middle class white parents have the privilege to understand collective societal problems, and even act in a movement addressing them, but then look within their families and see them as not affecting their own family network, and keep the problems invisible to continue to protect their children from risks at an individual level. Collective Thought vs. Individual Action: Tensions between #MeToo Involvement and In-Home Conversation Multiple parents in the study did not speak to their children about #MeToo, or mediate their media in regards to sexuality or violence, due to their lack of seeing behaviors that warranted it. These parents were generally supportive of the goals of the movement and supported those who were involved with it. When describing the reasons 53 why they do not talk about #MeToo, they often say they want to keep their children’s “innocence.” As Participant 10 says, “They’re kind of young for these sorts of sexual discriminations to be happening yet.” Statistically though, girls will face sexual harassment, discrimination, or objectification well before they report it to an adult figure in their lives (Hlavka 2015; Tolman 2005). Though parents would like to protect their children from “adult” themes and ideas, sexual violence, harassment, abuse, and assault are prevalent in the lives of female adolescents in schools, homes, and other generally “safe” spaces. In a survey done by the American Association of University Women, 83 percent of girls report at least one instance of sexual harassment in school (Tolman 2005) Further, 1 out of 5 female adolescents experience dating or sexual violence during high school (Silverman et al. 2001; Tolman 2005). Parents who engaged in #MeToo at a low level who saw the themes and stories that women in their networks bravely shared, did not make connections to their and their children’s individual lives. The lack of connections made by parents between the collectivity of #MeToo and experiences in their own families directly oppose research that says that young girls justify male power and privilege and call assaultive behaviors they encounter “normal,” “routine,” and done “to everyone” (Hlavka 2015:344). Girls call everyday harassment normal – and they likely do not report it to their parents. And in families where adults often organize sexuality, sex, and violence out of conversation, children likely won’t bring up an occasion that is deemed normal in their own peer culture, even if it is defined as assaultive or harassment in adult culture. Due to the normalization of everyday 54 harassment, girls don’t want to make a big deal out of their experiences and don’t report them to authorities or parents (Hlavka 2015). Though the #MeToo movement attempts to portray the large amount of people who’ve been affected by sexual assault, and overwhelmingly does so statistically, it is only visible to each participant at the individual level. That is to say, individuals who went online since the original tweet in October 2017 see people they know telling deeply personal stories, not necessarily the massive numbers of experience. Without access to the vast statistical prevalence of #MeToo, individuals without personal experience are able to organize the problem out of their own individual life because they don’t see a problem in their closest network – the family. However, contrary to the eradicative goals of #MeToo, the statistics in this problem are worrisome. That is to say, many children who don’t gain access to knowledge about boundaries, consent, and sexual health either through their parents’ mediation or schoolbased education are statistically likely to encounter harassment before leaving adolescence (Tolman 2005; Hlavka 2014). Privileged parents may be doing a disservice to not only their kids, but their children’s peer cultures which reproduce the lack of knowledge about assault prevention responsible for cultural contexts that allow and normalize casual harassment. Further, this reproduction of culture may be most harmful to children born into lesser privileged families where they have a higher likelihood to encounter assault. Toxic masculinity, hegemonic ideals about female and male power and subjectivity, heteronormativity, and the legitimacy of patriarchy all work to legitimize sexual assault and “everyday harassment” in cultural contexts (Hlavka 2014). #MeToo, operating in a heteronormative culture, attempts to disrupt this culture, but even when 55 privileged parents engage with collective thought, they tend to remove their individual decisions and in-home actions from their desired social change. Social reform in the realm of sexual violence is “limited by everyday perceptions and constructs that shape individuals’ interpretations of coercion” (Hlavka 2014:340). Statistically low levels of reporting in combination with the reproduced culture demonstrated in privileged families contributes to the barriers at work against influential change. Collective Definitions: Age-Appropriate Topics in Conversation I guess [#MeToo] was sort of a catalyst to go over what’s private, what’s not, what’s ok, what’s not. You know, that kind of thing. So, we talked about it, I guess you could say on an age appropriate level we talked about it. We didn’t get into specifics about what people were saying about their stories and things like that. - Participant 2 Many parents in the sample reference the importance of “age appropriate” conversations surrounding any entrance that #MeToo, or media representing sexuality or violence had into familial conversations, speaking to a collectively defined conception of developmental readiness that children grow into. As a child gets older, they are allowed to see media and discuss topics that have previously been organized out of their knowledge bases. Many parents who did not discuss #MeToo with their children reasoned with the lack of discussion due to a desire to let their child keep their “innocence,” or “maintain ignorance is bliss.” Participants in the sample generally allowed their kids to watch movies or television shows that they are old enough for, as defined by ratings such as G, PG, PG 13 and R. Here, collective definitions of age 56 appropriate knowledge coincide with institutional definitions that organize media in or out of children’s access. Parents who have spoken with their children about #MeToo generally had children on the older side of the age-range studied, organized the avoidance of sexual harassment as one of their overarching parental values, or spoke with them due to an event or experience that the child had reported to the parent. Parents who were passively engaged with the #MeToo movement, had young children without a reported instance of harassment or objectification did not tend to speak with their children about consent, boundaries, or other topics organized into the movement. Parents accept that certain conversations will change as children develop and mature mentally and physically, and use questions from their children as well as collectively defined markers of growth and maturity to assess when these conversations should occur. Across the age range of the sample, more parents with children closer to the maximum age of 15 mentioned speaking to their children about sexuality, pornography, and the #MeToo movement explicitly. Older children who have access to social media are more likely to have had their parents engage in conversations about #MeToo with them. Participant 4 notes that, because her daughter has access to social media and has had experiences where others have acted inappropriately towards her online, she felt it necessary to give her daughter interactional tools and knowledge that she deemed helpful and appropriate for approaching the “risky” situation. However, the same participant did not speak with her younger son about #MeToo themes due to the understanding that the sexual element was 57 out of his realm of understanding. Age dictates the ways that parents often speak with their children about media representation and sexuality. Implicit Family Value Systems I just… never really saw an opening to really bring something like that up. I haven’t seen any behaviors from them that would make me concerned that they would be part of the problem and, you know, I’m not aware of anything directed toward them that would be you know, the other side of that issue… I just hadn't seen an opening to really get into something really heavy like that with them. - Participant 11 When asked about the kinds of content that they did or did not let their children consume in media, many of the participants referenced the fact that they did not need to mediate content because their children “knew” what kinds of content was and was not appropriate. P5 says her kids “know like what they should and shouldn’t be watching,” while P4 says “[my daughter] knows that there are certain things that she’s not allowed to watch, or that are inappropriate for her, or we should watch together. I think content, they get it.” Participants point to a sort of learned value system about what kinds of content are and are not appropriate, and children understand this and don’t require active and daily meditation surrounding certain things. P6 says: I haven’t set any explicit rules, but you know, I haven’t seen them, caught them doing anything that I’ve found terribly inappropriate that would’ve required a correction. You know, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. They’ve been pretty good about you know, just, sticking to things that are fairly reasonable. And P8 says about his children, “They know the difference between what's appropriate and what isn’t.” How do they know? Lareau says that middle-class parenting is defined by conversations and the development of social competence (2011). Bourdieu would call the 58 same implicit knowledge about what is and is not deemed appropriate cultural capital. Children who engage with their parent’s consistent discussion learn over time what kinds of things their parents define as inappropriate. This knowledge may come from a combination of many small events such as parents making comments about a YouTube video, or larger events, such as watching a family movie when a sex scene comes and a parent fast-forwarding it. Over time, families develop a familial value system where members implicitly know what is and is not appropriate in the context of the home. Especially in the school-aged demographic of this study, parents organize sexuality, violence, and negative behaviors out of familial conversations. As discussed earlier, a general feel amongst parents is that if they don’t see behavior or content consumption that implies a problem, such a problem does not need to be addressed. Participant 11 specifically prefers to address problems after they occur instead of before. When asked about why he chose not to address explicit #MeToo themes with his children P11 responded: I haven't seen any behaviors from them that would make me concerned that they would be part of the problem. And, you know, I’m not aware of anything directed toward them that would be you know, the other side of that issue. Parents reflect preferences for post-incident mediation both in regard to sexuality conversations, media consumption, and behavioral change. These family value systems reproduce adult culture when children engage in them. By organizing adult content as inappropriate in the context of family values and conversations, children learn not to bring up these topics with adults. Through the lens of interpretive reproduction, this means that children in these situations don’t have access to #MeToo themes, or culture through their parents. If they do access this information, it is outside the family. 59 Many of the same parents in the sample who don’t believe that mediation of content is necessary due to the lack of inappropriate behavior reported allowing their children to watch classic movies that represent poor behavior, gender misconduct, and violence without explanatory mediation. Though these parents report knowledge of #MeToo, they make invisible the connections between their lives and the problems reported online by millions of people. Individualizing the #MeToo movement, or deciding that it isn’t a problem and so doesn’t need to be brought up in the home, reproduces the lack of knowledge and discussion - making normalized binaries, violence, and harassment present in adult and youth cultures. Here, I agree with Hlavka, who says that, “by treating young people as agents and decision makers, we could crate spaces where they can work together with adults to appraise experiences of sex, assault, power, coercion, and consent prevalent in their lives” (2014:355). Touching on the ideas of interpretive reproduction, understanding children as agentic in the context of familial conversations and mediation could open opportunities for honest discourse even at age appropriate levels. Organizing Sexuality into Family Values Previously, I’ve laid out a few instances wherein parents do report talking to their kids about sexuality, and mediate their consumption of media in ways that allow them to understand what is going on in news and public discourse. Here, I expand upon each of the categories for a nuanced understanding of those parents who do not organize this generally “taboo” subject out of their familial lives. Valuation of Eradicating Sexual Assault Due to a Personal Experience. Mothers who have had a past experience of sexual assault are the most likely in the sample to 60 actively mediate “age appropriate” conversations about consent, boundaries, and #MeToo. They are also most likely to actively mediate media consumption more generally in their homes. These women value bringing social issues that have often been taboo “to the light,” and focus their discussions on “boundaries,” “consent,” and the importance of bodily autonomy. Participant 14 says: I have a relationship with my kids where there’s not any taboo subjects in our house… I was pretty young when my first #MeToo story happened to me, and I feel like it's really important for kids even my daughters age to understand consent, to understand that you know, she has the right to say no. Importantly, Participant 14 references her “first #MeToo story” and that she was “pretty young” when it happened. Participant 3 also shared that she was sexually assaulted in her youth, and has made conversations about sexuality explicit for her 7 and 8 year old daughters. Though these parents still generally express sticking to “ageappropriate” conversations, they are more likely to address potent topics prior to their children bringing them up or through media. They work to include sexuality dialogue in their family value systems, due to their own negative childhood experience. Without the privilege of not having a #MeToo experience, these parents are unable to organize sexuality out of their in-home conversations in order to feel that they are successfully “protecting” their children from risk. Children’s Questions and Reported Experience. When children bring conversations about an experience they have that a parent deems inappropriate, or asks questions relating to sexuality, parents are more likely to engage in conversation with them. Participant 14 said, “I believe that if they’re old enough to ask questions they’re old enough to get answers, age appropriate of course.” And Participant 5 recalls talking to 61 her daughter about gender inequality when she reported a “mild #MeToo experience” that happened at school. In these instances, children who bring the topic home will have more engaged conversations with their parents about sexuality and #MeToo. However, statistically, young people who face discrimination, harassment, or assault before 18 are unlikely to report to authoritative figures or to parents (Hlavka 2014). Thus, these conversations may not premeditate risk faced outside the home or in media consumption. Corsaro’s theory of interpretive reproduction says that children have agency and create and participate in their peer cultures by appropriating information to address their own concerns (2011). When children ask their parents questions about topics that are usually organized out of conversation, they force their parents to more actively engage with conversational topics that they deem important in their own lives. Further, without active engagement in conversations about sexuality and violence, adults may contribute to the reproduction of the culture that helps to produce sexual violence in adolescents’ lives. Older Children – Developmental Maturity and Access to Media. Parents with children in the sample who were 14 or 15 were more likely to have conversations about sexuality and #MeToo. One parent says sexuality, consent, and boundaries “matter immediately for teenage kids,” and talks to her son about them because he’s “a freshman in high school.” She recalls having “frank discussions about consent, believing victims, believing women, and how to help people.” Other parents say that their children encountered #MeToo on their own social media sites during the height of the movement, and so engaged in conversations with them due to their access outside the home. 62 Connecting to the collective idea of “age-appropriate” conversations, parents generally talk to their children when they identify them as developmentally mature enough to understand them. Class, Privilege, and Cultural Reproduction The Orb Web Model of interpretive reproduction explains how individuals reproduce their peer cultures across their lives, and is useful in an analysis of the interactions between parents and children in the sample. Participants have lived through their childhoods, adolescents, and into their adult lives, producing and creating peer cultures that weave among the spokes of institutions and fields throughout these phases. These experiences, in combination with memories and reconsiderations of these memories, influence the ways that they engage with their children in varying ways as shown in the data. Further, privilege plays an important role in these parent/child interactions. The middle class white parents who did not face experiences of sexual violence in their lives do not organize the eradication of sexual assault into their family, even as they see its importance in the #MeToo movement as seen online. Their privilege allows them to engage at a collective level without applying concrete action in their daily interactions with children. Thus, conversations about sexuality only happen for children if they or a parent explicitly organize them into their family discourse through questions or reporting of incidents. Childhood innocence is a privilege that wealthier families can afford, which in turn means that removing #MeToo and media representation of sexuality and violence from family discourse is a privilege that wealthier families can afford. Intensive parenting and the protection of children from risks both on and off-line takes resources, such as the 63 cultural capital in the form of knowledge about how to mediate a child’s consumption of media and the time and energy to engage in co-viewing or active mediation strategies. While these may be seen as short-term risk-aversive techniques, I argue that making sexual violence invisible in youth cultures reinforces the context for violence to occur. Of course, this structure works in combination with other forces, including patriarchal violence, heteronormative roles and discourses. Collective thought in #MeToo may not influence individual action in the majority of the parents in the sample, but the collective organization of violence and sexuality out of family discourse does have individual impact on young people and the cultures that they are building for their peers and futures. 64 CONCLUSION To reiterate, I asked the following questions in this study: 1. In the aftermath of #MeToo, how and why do parents with privilege mediate their children’s media consumption and sexual knowledge, as well as reconsider their own childhood media consumption? 2. How do reconsideration of childhood media consumption and #MeToo involvement, understanding, and experience, interact to inform the ways that parents with privilege mediate their children’s internet risk and sexual knowledge? I will admit, I came into this project hoping to find a vastly different outcome – maybe #MeToo was grandly successful! Maybe #MeToo had made individuals think differently about the content they consume, the patterns of inequality they perpetuate. I was excited to see the changes in thought that the movement had on interview participants. However, what I found indeed paints a different story. A movement founded on creating a space for survivors to heal and ultimately eradicating sexual assault faces a great challenge in a society where inequalities are the building blocks for so many institutions and power structures. This is all to say – social change is incredibly challenging to enact. #MeToo was first conceptualized in 2006 by Tarana Burke, and it wasn’t until 2017 that the movement entered popular discourse in media. At that, #MeToo’s popular mobilization largely through white women changed the movement and watered down many of Burke’s original goals to provide support and resources for women who experienced sexual assault. 65 For an online social movement like #MeToo to create lasting and measurable change, it must extend its reach into private institutions such as the family, where children who make up a future generation learn about behavior, how to interact with others, and gain other capital useful in contexts important in adult life. Further, sexual assault occurs in interactional settings, such as the workplace or between family members or acquaintances. Thus, a public, media based movement, functioning to bring the private matter of sex and assault into the public light, must turn around and inspire participants to bring its ideas back into private moments in order to create the change the movement strives for. #MeToo represents centuries of gender inequality, mistreatment towards women, and stories about sexual assault. This content, when defined by middle class white parents as “inappropriate” and organized out of the realms of what children should have access to in family value systems, is not explicitly represented in parental mediation of consumption. Instead, many parents in the sample engage in behavioral and catalystdriven mediation. Though parenting techniques shift in regards to reconsideration of childhood media consumption, mediation and attitudinal changes within the middle class family do not seem to radicalize at the same speed that media penetration is occurring within American society. White middle class families, in an attempt to protect children from harm that is historically classed due to conceptions that children who know about sex have been exposed to sexual violence, deem conversations about adult content inappropriate, even as they engage in them in other institutional realms. For social change to occur, it should reproduce cross-institutionally and crossgenerationally. Ideas that form in the media must intersect with more private institutions 66 such as the family, where children learn so much about the ways that they should interact with others. This cultural capital made in the home impacts future interactions peer cultures and interactions that they will have at an individual and collective level. The lack of critical conversation and media access within the family about #MeToo themes and values makes for a lack of cultural capital and knowledge in youth peer cultures about the importance of consent, boundaries, and gender-equality. Ultimately, the lack of adult intervention may lead children to reproduce cultural and social patterns that #MeToo desperately tried to bring awareness to. I would challenge a movement to radically combine collective thought and individual action as one, and bring together the discourses of adults and children to produce a culture that benefits the well-being and futures of survivors and children alike. 67 Appendix A: Interview Questions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. Can you state your name, age, and occupation? In what city did you grow up? Where do you live now? How old is/are your children? What is their gender? Do you have an understanding of the #MeToo movement of 2017? a. If no, I will give an explanation. Talk to me about your experience of the #MeToo movement. Talk to me about your involvement with the #MeToo movement. Did you talk with your child about #MeToo? a. Why, or why not? Do you talk with your child about politics more generally? Do you allow your child to consume media that aligns or doesn’t with your political opinions? Talk to me about the comfort levels of sexual education in your home, and whether it has happened or not. Think about the last week, how many hours per day did you spend consuming social media, news media, television, Netflix, news media, movies, and video games? Does your child spend any time consuming media? What kind of device does your child consume media on? Who does their most-used device belong to? Think about the last week, what is the typical amount of time your child consumes media each day? Do you place time limits on the device your child uses to access media? a. How do you place these limits? Do you place different time limits on different devices of types of media? Do you place limitations on the content your child consumes? a. How do you place these limits? What kind of content do you limit or not allow your child to view? Do you consume media with your child? How do you communicate with your child about any restrictions you put on their media consumption? Talk to me about a conversation you have had with your child about the media they consume. Do you place restrictions or otherwise monitor the media your child consumes while not in your home? If your child has other children at your home, what does their joint media consumption look like? Since having kids, and mediating their media consumption, how do you think about the patterns of media consumption you engaged in as a child? Are there any movies, shows, or other media sources that you don’t allow your child to consume that you did? How did your guardians restrict or otherwise talk with you about your media consumption? Did your guardians limit or inhibit your access to media that you wanted to consume? Did you consume media outside of what your guardians knew about? 68 Appendix B: Post-Interview Demographic Survey Questions 1. What is your name? 2. Are you now married, widowed, divorced, separated, or never married? 3. Choose one or more races that you consider yourself to be: a. White b. Black or African American c. American Indian or Alaska Native d. Asian e. Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander f. Other ______ 4. What is the highest level of school that you have completed or the highest degree you have received? a. Less than high school degree b. High school graduate c. Some college but no degree d. Associate degree in college f. Master’s degree g. Doctoral degree h. Professional degree 5. What is the highest level of school that your partner has completed or the highest degree your partner has received, if relevant? a. Less than high school degree b. High school graduate c. Some college but no degree d. Associate degree in college f. Master’s degree g. Doctoral degree h. Professional degree i. Not relevant 6. Which statement best describes your current employment status? a. Working (paid-employee_ b. Working (self-employed) c. Not working (temporary layoff from a job) d. Not working (looking for work) g. Not working (retired) f. Not working (disabled) g. Not working (other) ________ 7. Which statement best describes your partner’s current employment status, if relevant? a. Working (paid-employee_ b. Working (self-employed) c. Not working (temporary layoff from a job) d. Not working (looking for work) g. Not working (retired) f. Not working (disabled) 69 g. Not working (other) ________ i. Not relevant 8. Please indicate your occupation: a. Management, professional, and related b. Service c. Sales and office d. Farming, fishing, and forestry e. Construction, extraction, and maintenance f. Production, transportation, and material moving g. Government h. Retired i. Unemployed 9. Please indicate your partner’s occupation, if relevant: a. Management, professional, and related b. Service c. Sales and office d. Farming, fishing, and forestry e. Construction, extraction, and maintenance f. Production, transportation, and material moving g. Government h. Retired i. Unemployed j. Not relevant 10. Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or something else? a. Republican b. Democrat c. Independent d. Other ________ e. No preference 11. Information about income is very important to understand. Would you please give your best guess? Please indicate the answer that includes your entire household income in previous year before taxes. a. 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