Children have increasingly access, and at younger ages, to information and communication technologies (ICT) in different contexts, especially at home. This is the result of the investment made either by the State - through policy measures, as was the case with the e.escolinha programme, implemented in Portugal between 2007 and 2011 (Diogo et al, 2011; Silva et al, 2011) - and by the families, who have increasingly come to make it available to children (Almeida et al, 2008; Rodrigues & Mata, 2004).
Behind this public and private investment are beliefs about the need to promote the digital literacy of the new generations, as well as beliefs about the role of these technologies in schoolwork, underpinning the assumption that these technologies have in itself the potential to reveal this new digital generation (Bennett et al., 2008; Michael, 2011; Prensky, 2001). According to this perspective, the mere presence of these technology in most children’s everyday life would provide an effortlessly and spontaneous learning and, therefore, an automatic integration into the new social order, characterized by Castells (2007) as the information and the network society.
According to a critical approach about the impact of technology in the construction of social change (Lyon, 1992), we try to understand as it is built the relationship of children with ICT and in particular how the family background of each child affects this relationship, while context of socialization and of dynamics of internal operating. In this sense, we return to the concept of coordination by Kellerhals and Montandon (1991), who define it as the way an agent of socialization, namely the family, mediates the influences of other agents, considering the mission assigned to it and its participation in this process.
We will consider, in this paper, the way how the uses of ICT, in general, and on school work, in particular, by the children of the 1st cycle of basic education (1st through 4th grades), are coordinated in the family (definition of rules and monitoring uses) and how this coordination is carried out according to the owned resources (school and digital) and to the dynamics of the internal organization of families (division of family labour). We aim, thus, to understand to what extent the construction of the children's relationship with ICT is marked by external (social inequalities) and internal inequalities to the family context (gender inequalities in the distribution of family work), and as both are linked as well.
Regardless the results, that might point to some eventual specificity of the Portuguese context, we assume, however, that this issue - that relates public European and national public policies towards the use of ICT, namely in the school and family context, and their social effects, as well - is of European and international relevance.
