This qualitative study explores young children’s digital media practices in a home setting in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet country. The study provides rich insights into young children’s digital media practices and their parents’ mediation strategies which have not been researched before. Practices are the ways people interact with or incorporate objects and actions into their everyday lives and are influenced by social and cultural worldviews. I draw on the definition of digital media practices from Merchant (2012, p.772) as “the ‘doings’, ‘sayings’ and ‘relatings’” that constitute the social actions of everyday life.

The ongoing changes in the education system of Azerbaijan, such as the recent embedding of digital technologies in primary education, made Azerbaijan an attractive research setting for this study. Given the considerable impact of parents on their children’s education, the role of the home context presented an exciting opportunity to explore influences on parents’ views on and involvement in their children’s digital media practices. This study responds to calls for research into young children’s digital media practices in different countries and cultures in the Global South ( Nikken, 2017; Shin & Li, 2017). 

Parental involvement in young children’s digital media use plays a crucial role in positively fostering children’s digital media practices (Connell et al., 2015; Nikken, 2017; Plowman et al., 2008). Fathers are often found to play video games with their children instead of mothers who prefer reading books with them (Connell et al., 2015; Padilla‐Walker et al., 2012). In previous studies, researchers have primarily included mothers when conducting family visits (Livingstone et al., 2015). However, there is a need for more research revealing and explaining fathers’ engagement in their children’s interactions with digital media (Tang et al., 2018). Azerbaijan is a patriarchal society where most of the duties related to child-rearing are left to mothers (Najafizadeh, 2012), which heightens the importance of inquiring about fathers’ involvement in children’s interactions with digital technologies. I will explore fathers’ opinions on their children’s uses of digital technologies, as well as their involvement in their children’s digital media practices through revisiting own childhoods (Cole, 1998).

I aim to explore the following research question.

What are the ways in which fathers in Azerbaijan are involved in the mediation of their young children’s digital media practices?

My study is guided by Tudge's (2008) contextualist ecocultural theory drawing on the everyday practices and interactions among individuals, cultures, and activities (re)shaping children’s daily lives. I also draw on Cole's (1998) concept of prolepsis, which constitutes a considerable part of the theoretical framework drawn for this study. Cole’s concept has roots in the field of developmental psychology, and even though my study is far from this field and is carried out on a small scale, I find prolepsis a good fit for the study to elaborate on fathers’ involvement in their children’s digital media practices. Cole (1998) applies the concept of prolepsis to the practice of childrearing and, in this context, explains it as a process of imagining their child’s future and then channelling the child’s present to meet the expectations of this imagined future. This phenomenon is undoubtedly informed by the culture of parents, rooted in their own past experiences and upbringings, and therefore, the parents’ beliefs and the projection of the desired future for their children can often become a ‘materialised constraint’ on the present experiences of the child (Cole, 1998, p. 184). Cole (ibid) only mentioned mothers when explaining prolepsis. Scrutinizing fathers’ views on their children’s digital media uses through the concept of prolepsis can help explain why the fathers were not inclined to develop their children's digital skills early on.

Given the complexity of real-life contexts (Thomas, 2011), I used multiple case study as I believe that knowledge is co-constructed by the researcher and researched, and by employing a case study, it is possible to reveal multiple interpretations and provide detailed and thick descriptions for each case (Stake, 2006). Five families, each with a five-year-old child, participated in multiple case studies over a period of 15 months during 2018-2019. The study generated data through a total of 15 family visits in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Each family visit consisted of various activities, including participatory methods with mothers and children separately. In addition, a new participatory method - the ‘living journals’ was developed to explore further children’s digital media practices within their home settings. The living journal method borrows elements from Tobin and his colleagues’ Video-Cued Ethnography (Tobin et al., 1989) and Plowman and Stevenson’s (2012) mobile phone diaries method. The method facilitated a remote exploration of children’s daily lives: mothers were invited as proxy researchers, thereby decentring the researcher in the data generation process. During two weeks at different times of the year – school term and holiday break – I asked mothers to send me pictures or videos of their children, which they were to capture at pre-arranged times and prompted at certain intervals. I compiled those pictures and stills from videos to create custom-designed paper journals for each child in print and digital formats and later used them as prompts in acquiring all family members’ opinions on the activities depicted in the journals. Mothers, together with the participant child, and fathers separately commented both on the completed journals relating to their own child, as well as those created by other participant children. The journals existed in both physical and digital formats and were a source of visually rich multimodal, multivocal, metatextual, and multifunctional data. Parents and children consented to share their visuals in publications and conference presentations. Children’s ongoing consent was approached with great care and attention, considering its full complexity and holistic nature (Kustatscher, 2014). The analysis in my study was synchronised with the data generation and was iterative in nature (Patton, 2015), mainly drawing on the constructivist approaches (Miles et al.,2014).

The living journals method revealed fathers’ views on and the extent of their involvement in their children’s digital practices. Fathers expected their children’s future to be 'digital'. However, they were still hesitant to project this vision of the future on their current activities and decisions on the mediation of their children’s daily digital practices. The fathers introduced games to their children, which tended to be the types of games designed for adults or allowed their children to use their phones to some extent to play games or watch their fathers playing games. Since fathers expected mothers to take care of their children, they saw the mediation of their children’s digital media practices as part of general childcare. Cole (1998) explains prolepsis as parents returning to their childhoods, projecting their childhoods on their children’s future, and acting on them in the current moment. All the participant fathers had been introduced to computers and phones in their early adulthood, and four of them projected their own experiences on their children’s future. Being content with their own current competence in digital technology, they saw no issues with restricting their children’s access, with the underlying logic being that if they learned to use computers in their adulthood, so could their children, and there was no need to get started on this journey early. They seemed determined to try and prevent their children from using digital devices at a young age. Fathers were mainly authoritative figures within families who initiated or sometimes participated in setting the rules for their children’s access to digital media. Mothers were found to be in charge of overseeing the day-to-day implementation of such established rules with more direct control over how their children engaged with digital media. To use a metaphor, fathers held legislative powers and mothers held executive powers.

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