International Perspectives – Parents talking algorithms: Navigating datafication and family life in digital societies 

From personalised advertisements of tutoring services and Halloween outfits, to content curation on platforms prioritising certain kind of personal stories or local and global news, parents often find themselves negotiating algorithmic influences on their family lives. Yet, amidst this, people develop new skills and lay theories about how algorithms might work, and indeed, occasionally exercise agency in the face of powerful platforms. In my new book, Parents Talking Algorithms: Navigating Datafication and Family Life in Digital Societies, I explore these dynamics through in-depth, think-aloud interviews with 30 parents across England, raising children aged between 0 and 18. My book presents findings about how algorithmic search environments are understood, and embedded within often gendered parenting practices. I write about parents’ developing algorithm literacies, their mis/understandings of social media algorithms in their children’s lives, and the ways in which they un/able to champion their children’s best interests amidst datafication. My book presents findings about how parents deal with algorithmic content recommendations to their children, how they navigate algorithmically selected news about the world in which they are raising their children, and how they imagine their children’s datafied futures. In this blog, though, I highlight three key themes at the heart of the book.

Unfixity

My findings show that parents’ feelings about algorithms matter, not just in terms of overt reactions to algorithmic shaping but also in how their emotions about parenthood interact with these systems – for instance, their approaches to the ranking of search results, or their emotional responses to parenting related content on social media feeds. But, crucially – these feelings, and beliefs, are unfixed. Their reflections about data, algorithms, and datafication change and evolve across the life course. As children grow, parents’ feelings change and evolve. Transitions—both formal (becoming a parent, migrating, starting school) and informal (e.g., changes in domestic policies and practices)—alter families’ relationships with data. New interfaces, technologies, institutions, and platforms often embed themselves into family life during transitional moments. A parent of an infant might feel a certain way about algorithmic shaping today, but might, as indeed many in my fieldwork did, expect to feel differently when their infant is a teenager. A migrant parent might interface with the collection of data by public agencies in a way that another parent might not. A parent of a teenager might reminisce and retrospect about their days as the parent of a primary-aged child, to show a developing progression of not just understandings but also feelings around algorithms. 

(Hesitant) Aspiration

We know by now that many people feel resigned and disillusioned about technology. But my book uncovers glimpses of careful, hesitant hope as parents spoke about their children’s datafied futures. Nandini, a minority ethnic mother of two children with disabilities, offered a striking metaphor. She asked whether systems that automate include an “additional comments box” where children’s unique stories might be represented. The “additional comments box” represents a desire for mechanisms that prioritise care, individuality, and humanity—ways to intervene and override harmful automated decisions. Yet, the framing of this space as an “optional extra” reflects, perhaps, feelings of giving up, where systemic overhaul seems unattainable, and patchwork fixes are the best one can hope for. Parents like Nandini are calling, tentatively yet powerfully, for systems that recognise complexity and safeguard the vulnerable. This hesitant aspiration wants to resist the tendency to render invisible or over-scrutinise already marginalised groups. These beliefs reveal parents’ divergent, differently resourced, and deeply contextual individual interpretations and preparations. But equally, they reflect collective aspirations. As we spoke, parents not only reflected on their own children but also on the broader implications for society, imagining, in muted or articulated ways, what they might expect of those who design and control technological systems.

Agency

As Livingstone (2023) notes, drawing on Sen’s capabilities approach, people’s individual reactions to the media or their individual uses of digital technologies raise questions of collective, societal importance. As someone whose career began in audience research and who has been interfacing significantly with family sociology, my interest in agency within datafication contexts runs throughout this book. Parents’ agency often shows up in small, fleeting acts—tweaking privacy settings, questioning data use in nursery apps, or curating their child’s content consumption. These “quick wins” reveal how parents navigate and resist algorithmic shaping, even within constrained environments. Yet, unanswered questions remain. Is this agency sufficient or sustainable? Can instances of thinking critically about personal data– where, such thinking is often work in progress – evolve into broader, collective capacities to challenge the overwhelming power of platforms? Does a focus on agency take away a focus on scrutinising platforms and public and private institutions? And who can access these moments of agency amidst the structural inequalities that shape life in datafied societies? My book left me asking some of these questions, which, I think, calls for a longer-term examination of how parents can lead lives they value in contemporary datafied societies. 

These are times when personal data is collected and analysed at unprecedented scales, algorithms drive recommendations, push political opinions, automate welfare decisions, and track our every action. These processes impact people in unequal ways. Parents Talking Algorithms reminds us, that, to truly understand the impacts of datafication within family contexts, we must pay close attention to parents’ lived realities, their everyday strategies, feelings, and negotiations. It reminds me that one-off projects might not reveal all we wish to know how about how algorithms are shaping family life or how families respond, adapt, and sometimes resist. I hope the findings in this work can make the case for not solely a people-centred approach to platform societies, but also a longitudinal one, where we might begin to ask difficult questions about agency, its limits, and its possibilities.