Our previous chapter discussed the mediating role of children within families and households. In this chapter we go on to explore another area of children's lives which is increasingly becoming a key part of contemporary family relations but also requires specific attention on its own: the Internet and social media. Children and young people's lives have been transformed in the last decades due to the emergence of the Internet. One in three users of the Internet worldwide are children and adolescents under 18 years of age, and children are accessing the Internet at increasingly younger ages (UNICEF, 2017). Children and young people's use of social media sites has increased exponentially in recent years (O’Keeffe et al., 2011), and smartphones in particular have allowed for a more individual, personal and unmonitored access to online material. This has resulted in a variety of adult responses, on the one hand embracing the Internet as a source of educational and social opportunities and benefits, and on the other focusing on the risks involved and the need for better safeguarding against issues such as cyberbullying, online harassment, exposure to inappropriate content and targeted marketing. However, the access of children to the Internet and online devices is also highly unequal, and so is the digital literacy skills of both them and the adults around them. The balance between risk and opportunity is thus highly complex and the responses of adults significantly diverse, leading to many possible scenarios in relation to kid power in the context of the Internet and social media.

The image of ‘digital natives’, which we introduced in Chapter 4, has been used to describe children as having a better and more intuitive understanding of the Internet, a different language and a different skill set than their ‘digital immigrant’ parents (Prensky, 2001). This description often portrays ‘young people as powerful social actors positioned to challenge the status quo’ (boyd, 2014: 178) and, as also discussed in Chapter 4, could suggest that the Internet and social media might result in a reversal of the traditional power relationship between children and adults (Livingstone, 2013). However, the dichotomous and rather simplistic digital native/immigrant discourse is increasingly contested and replaced with a more complex understanding of the relationship of both children and adults to the Internet and social media (Livingstone et al., 2018).