Texting, teens, and parental challenges in practices of family socialization

Abstract

This article examines how parent–teen texting enables family members to construct family relations and negotiate behavioral and communicative norms while being apart. The analyses of family texting focus on how teenagers and parents deal with issues of teenage independence and how this involves situated negotiations of teenagers being constructed as either able or unable to live up to family norms and the family's communication culture. Based on the analyses, I argue that digitally mediated interactions complement co-present contexts of family socialization and influence the relation between power- and solidarity-oriented aspects of everyday socialization practices, for instance, by blurring the boundaries between parental care and control.