To Grant or Not to Grant? Use and Timing of Media Tools in Families with Teen and Pre-Teen Ager

Around the world, families with preteen children experience significant challenges in managing access to digital screens. In particular, determining the correct age at which to provide their children with a personal digital device is not an easy task. The age of arrival of smartphones and access to digital platforms is decreasing fast, and the covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend (Rideout et al. 2019; Adachi et al. 2021; Mascheroni and Siibak2021). Families are subject to strong social pressure towards anticipating the delivery of a personal smartphone: the more precocious its possession is, the sooner its presence becomes relevant for peer-inclusion (Fiore, 2021; Vaterlaus, 2021). Also, parents receive conflicting guidelines on the issue from experts in different fields such as education, psychology and health sciences (Straker et al., 2018). The goal of this panel is to gather experiences, analyses and reflections on the relationship between parents and their children with regards to the age of access to media tools and applications. We invite you to submit interdisciplinary research highlighting how, and with what reasons, the use of media tools is granted, denied or postponed within families. In particular, we aim at highlighting if and how families are dealing with this issue collectively, through formal groups or informal sharing of parental knowledge.