Into the Digital Future: Parenting in a Digital Age with Alicia Blum-Ross

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast provides has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the series here.

Alicia is the Head of Kids and Families Strategy at YouTube, where she focuses on helping children and their parents and caregivers realize their rights to more safely learn, connect, and play online. She was previously the Public Policy Lead for Kids and Families at Google, where she worked on issues ranging from online privacy to fighting online child sexual abuse and exploitation. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Technology Coalition, where she oversees the implementation of the Research Fund in collaboration with the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children. Prior to joining Google she worked as a researcher, advocate and educator both within and outside of academia – most recently in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Alicia is the co-author, with Professor Sonia Livingstone, of Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives and the co-editor of Enhancing Digital Literacy and Creativity: Makerspaces in the Early Years.

Laura Higgins: Today we’re speaking with Alicia Blum-Ross. She is a Public Policy Lead for Kids and Families at Google. This was a really interesting jewel of a conversation about both the findings of her book which talked to parents and their experiences, but also the responsibility of somebody working in a big tech company whose role is purely around keeping kids and families safe.

Jordan Shapiro: I would encourage our listeners to “listen underneath” on this interview. On the surface, there’s an interesting conversation about technology, the experience of childhood, the future of childhood and how technology impacts that. But there’s also a conversation running through this entire interview about the way that family has changed, the way that parenting practices have changed, and how the relationship between parent and child has shifted beyond just the technology question.

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Alicia Blum-Ross: I am Alicia Blum-Ross, I am a public policy lead for kids and families at Google.  I also am the recent co-author of a book called Parenting for a Digital Future, How Hopes and Fears About Technology Shape Children’s Lives with Sonia Livingstone, who I think you have spoken to before. I have spent my career working at the intersection of education, youth and community work, media studies and all things family-related and tech-related. So it’s been pretty exciting to move from the NGO and education world to now, two years into my very first job in the tech industry. And I think about both child safety, but also kids and families experiences across the universe that is Google and YouTube and all the many products and partnerships that we have across that.

A lot of my career has been around media literacy and working with children and young people directly to help them both understand the media environment around them, and now technology, the environment around them. But also, how to create and express themselves through media as well, and, increasingly through technology and all things digital in recent years.

Laura: So you mentioned that you co-authored the book with Sonia. Can you tell us a bit about the book, how you managed the whole process?

Alicia: I had done my PhD working directly with young people who were at risk, and doing youth media production. I’d been working at youth centers and through after-school programs in London, whereas Sonia has obviously had a huge long history in terms of understanding media impact and the effects from a psychology background. So I brought more of an ethnographic lens.

It was a great match in terms of disciplinary background and interests. And I think we had both converged on this interest in parents, partly because we felt for totally different reasons that parents felt really under-researched, to the extent they appeared at all in the literature, it was sort of as a way of getting to the kids. The parental mediation literature would introduce parents a lot, but it’s really about their kids’ media practices. [It] isn’t about their own interests or desires or passions or beliefs or struggles. So I think we both saw that gap.

It was interesting also that we were obviously both mothers, but our children are very, very different ages. I had quite young children. My twins were [about] 2 years old when we started writing the book. So it actually was fascinating for both of us also to be doing these interviews, where her children were in their 20s at that point. She would get all these advice questions from the parents that we interviewed, whereas I got a lot of sort of commiserations and more like, ‘what do you do?’ and ‘do you follow your own advice?’ Like, ‘how would you let your kids have that kind of thing?’

Laura: Were there any big surprises for you in the work you were doing?

Alicia: I think that a real honor and pleasure of the book was getting to spend so much time with such a diverse cross-section of families. Just getting to actually do that kind of deep listening with so many different families, really hammered home both how just totally diverse and completely individually, a lot of families were approaching these issues. But also for me as a parent, [it] hammered home that there wasn’t really a lot of right answers. And also, crucially, what people say they do and what people actually do in their homes, when they’re in a safer space, was pretty different.

There’s been many gifts of writing this book, and certainly writing with Sonia [who] has been just an incredible friend and mentor to me over many years. One of them has also been a gift of my own parenting, of actually feeling pretty cool about letting go of a lot of preciousness that I might otherwise have had. Because I had actually read all the literature.

Our bibliography is very long in the book, and you realize the research is massively inconclusive about any real long-term effects in terms of moderate amounts of digital media use, and then also just getting to hear from so many different families having such a range of experiences with their kids. I think [that] also allowed me to go “actually, it depends a lot on the other circumstances in the family.” And the technology itself is immaterial in some sense in terms of the long-term outcomes for the kids.

Jordan: One of the things that I loved about it, is that it wasn’t an advice book. It wasn’t, here’s how to parent, here’s what’s best. It was a much more of a meta account of how parents are responding to parenting through tech. I wonder if you could say a bit about some of the findings.

Alicia: So we didn’t write an advice book. And I think that currently, we didn’t feel well-equipped to write an advice book, but we do get asked for advice a lot. We try to to some extent, to give some insights based on what we learned. But I think that [others have] done an excellent job of that. Devorah Heitner, Anya Kamanetz—there’s some really great, well-researched and super thoughtful books already in that space.

I think what we felt we could bring to it as academics was the embedded-in-the-daily-life-of-families perspective, and then also that very in-depth discussion with the secondary literature and bouncing back and forth between the two. But also, I think one of the big things that we were trying to do in the book was also connect this to wider understandings of the world, and what’s sometimes called late modernity.

We are in a particular historical moment where there’s these great social changes that have happened over the last 20 to 50 years. And actually a lot of those great social shifts—the shrinking of the welfare state, the loss of social support, the fact that families are more likely to migrate and be further apart from family and from their families of origin and social support than they ever have been before. And that, crucially, this is the first generation that’s forecast to be less financially prosperous than their own parents. That’s a huge change.

One of the big findings of the book was actually that all of those great social shifts are so impactful on family life, but they’re largely invisible to parents. And what parents can see is that their kid is holding something glowing that seems to be taking a lot of their energy and attention. And that’s the thing that they focus on as being the great change from their own childhood to their child’s present. That was one of the big things that we were trying to do in the book is actually put that micro- interaction, that struggle over the screen, in the context of these great social shifts that actually, and arguably, are much more impactful in terms of family lives and prospects, but that actually the technology conversation becomes so focal. And so we’re trying to ask why and with what effect is that such a focal conversation for parents?

Laura: So you work for Google [as the] Public Policy Lead for Kids and Family. I’m guessing that keeps you busy, along with being a parent and an academic. What does a day look like for you?

Alicia: I’m in California, but I have colleagues all over the world, so it’s a pretty long day often. I’m doing a lot of work with colleagues in Europe and beyond, so I will start at 7-ish often with calls. And then obviously I have a lot of colleagues in Asia as well. So we’ll do evenings and try not to do both on the same day, but [that’s] not always possible.

I divide my time between, I would say, three main buckets of activities. I do a lot of advising with the products teams who are creating experiences for kids and families, like YouTube Kids or Family Link, working with them to help think through products and sometimes marketing initiatives or outreach programs. They might want to do something like Be Internet Awesome, one of our keystone outreach programs.

I’m the main point of contact for a lot of expert organizations like FoSI or ParentZone in the U.K. or Common Sense Media and others—Connect Safely—a lot of those NGOs. So that’s camp two of what I work on—doing that expert outreach and bringing folks in to help consult on various kinds of decisions that we might be making or partner on resources for parents.

Part three of what I do is a lot of government affairs type work. For example, we made some changes on YouTube recently around how we treat mature content and access to mature content. And so some of that was global and some of it was in relationship to the implementation of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which is a mouthful. But that’s an EU law, which is recently in scope. So I will either directly do meetings with government representatives or I will help my colleagues who work in the various regions to prepare for that and think about how they can come and explain what we’re doing on the product side and in the way that makes sense and is understandable.

Jordan: What are the big issues right now for kids and media that have to do with government and policy?

Alicia: Especially learning from Sonia, I think of the child-rights framing throughout the work that I do. And when we speak about child rights, we think about [how] children have the right for freedom from things like exploitation, whether that’s financial exploitation or sexual exploitation and abuse. And they also have the right to have freedoms, to do things like express themselves, be creative and participate in the world around them.

One of the things tricky about my job is that those things can often be in direct tension with one another. So, for example, because I work on child safety, I have a lot of work for Google this year on our work as part of the Technology Coalition, which is an industry organization dedicated to fighting child sexual abuse material. Those are really horrific examples that while they affect too many children, are still a small proportion of overall children that use the Internet. And, there’s a temptation when you work on these really tough child safety issues to say, ‘lock it all down,’  walled-gardens are the only way forward. Part of what my job is doing, is keeping in tension that natural instinct to really protect children and to really create very, very safe, very locked down, very ring-fence spaces for them.

At the same time acknowledging that there’s a lot of benefits, both in terms of child development, but also for society in general to allowing and enabling children to participate in these more creative civic, even just social activities, even it’s just like a very basic kind of hanging out with your friends kind of way. And that’s the really fascinating part of my job—trying to hold both of those competing rights in tension and trying to figure out a way to both get safe experiences, and create safe experiences, but also experiences where children can grow up and can gain independence and can grow and flourish. And it’s not always easy to get both in the same experience, but obviously we try.

Jordan: So it sounds like parenting. I don’t want them to break their arm, but I also want them to fall down the stairs a few times.

Alicia: A lot of the digital civility work has that resilience at its core. It is inevitable in the course of a life spent even partly online, that you will have difficult interactions, that there’s no way about it. Now how difficult those interactions are, there’s a big spectrum there, because at the worst end there’s something like grooming or sextortion or something that can be very deeply traumatizing, very long-lasting impact. Sonia talks about risk versus harm. So that’s something that’s probably low risk. Most children will never have that kind of issue, but very high harm.

Whereas something that is high risk but low harm, is likely to be experienced by more children. So, “I saw pictures on social media of my friends getting together without me and I felt really left out.” Pretty much everybody is going to experience some point where something unkind was said to me, or even if it wasn’t meant to be unkind I perceived it in an unkind way. Or, “I was looking at social media stars that looked like they had their lives to put together, and I feel like I’m such a mess.” That’s high risk in that, everyone probably of most ages, frankly, will definitely experience that. But it’s low harm in the sense of, most people and most children are fairly resilient and even if they have highs and lows, will more or less be able to kind of take that and understand that this is part of social life.

Obviously, some children are less resilient than others and need more support and scaffolding to understand how to take in and understand that the world can be hurtful and that they need to figure out how to gain other coping mechanisms, et cetera.

Laura: Regulation’s really front of mind for all of us who work in the tech industry. There’s a lot of discussion, particularly in Europe, but very much in the US as well, about regulation and duty of care towards platforms and all of those sorts of things. Do you think that regulation is necessary and helpful, or should we be allowed to do it more ourselves?

Alicia: So certainly in the US context, where you see these different states that are coming up with different standards, I think from an industry perspective, it is really helpful to think about, actually there’s elements of GDPR that could work super well, and how can we rethink standardization there? Because otherwise it’s completely impossible to function as a business when you have just these sometimes totally competing standards.

Just going back to the issue of child sexual abuse material, for example. In some countries, we have limits on how long we can retain the data for. And then other countries are requiring that we legally retain it for twice as long as the limit in the other country. And so, to the extent that we can get to a more standard framework that makes it much more operationally effective to be able to do [for] these large scale businesses. And obviously, Google has locations in many places in the world—it is really important to try to get that harmonization of different standards.

I think also one thing that thinking about children and technology really highlights is that, while the tech industry obviously has a huge role to play there, and I think it’s really important that we think long and hard about what our role is in family life. I also think it’s crucial to think about the other institutions in children’s lives that also have a role to play there. So, the fact that there isn’t a national digital literacy curriculum—there’s not a national curriculum in the US as such necessarily, but there’s so much more that we could be doing in terms of digital literacy and Common Core. Even the UK digital literacy curriculum arguably, there’s a lot more creative and critical media literacy that could be built into that too.

So I think we’re at the beginning of an era where that is also a government conversation. This is the world that children live in. These are the different kinds of ways in which they have to understand how data is collected and how that might be used, how advertising works, how algorithms function. I think there’s so many kind of critical pieces of knowledge that, we from the platform side can try to provide information and indeed more transparency around, but there’s also just a huge role for educators and people who speak directly to children and young people, to actually understand and be able to help kids understand those questions as well.

Laura: Crystal ball moment. What do you think will be the big innovations, things to look forward to?

Alicia: One thing that came out a lot in our book is that there was a lot of talk about “alone together,” and how everybody’s kind of locked up in their rooms with digital devices. And actually, when we did surveys of parents, we found, oh, there’s a huge spectrum of different ways, actually, that families keep in touch. Yes, they text, and yes, social media. But they also stop by and have potlucks and have dinner together and all kinds of stuff.

[During the pandemic we] have not had a lot of opportunity for that latter half—that popping by, getting together at school gates, etc. My hope is that we go back to that more diverse [experience] and I think people are absolutely dying for it. I think if there is an opportunity for it, I don’t think that we’ll find the very, very mediated relationships that we have right now. The joy of actually getting together over food is going to come rushing back as soon as people can do it.