Mothers’ roles in negotiating children’s access to multiple media: an interpretative phenomenological analysis

This research is an interpretative phenomenological analysis of mothers’ roles in negotiating children’s access to a range of media which have perpetuated the sexualisation and consumerism of childhood. Five mothers of children under the age of 16 participated in individual semi-structured interviews. Within sociological literature, mothers are positioned as being both culpable in and source of resistance to childhood sexualisation (Howard et al 2014, Bragg and Buckingham, 2012). In this research mothers reveal that social media, TV/Film, the music industry celebrities, advertisers and retailers all impact their ability to exercise power and control over their children’s lives, which results in complex processes of negotiation and conflict in the mother-child relationship. Participants emphasise their struggle to understand modern day childhood, which has significantly transformed compared to their own experience. Keywords: mothers’ role; childhood; power; sexualisation; consumerism; interpretative phenomenological analysi