Please join the Princeton Precision Health (PPH) Initiative for the next talk of our spring semester series on Friday, May 9th, at 12:00 pm, at 252 Nassau Street.  

Emily Foster-Hanson, Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, will present a talk, “Talking Tech: How Parents and Kids Co-Create Social Norms About Technology Use.” 

Abstract: Digital media and technology are becoming ever more engrained in modern family life, fueling growing public concern about the long-term effects of technology use among children and adolescents. These habits around technology use begin to develop in childhood, yet many families report being unsure or even anxious about how to navigate decisions about their children’s technology use. In this talk, I’ll discuss some recent and ongoing research in my lab examining how parents make decisions about their kids’ technology use, and how parents and children co-create social norms about technology use at home. One key finding from this work thus far is that parents show patterns of pluralistic ignorance (Prentice & Miller, 1996): Although most parents acknowledge that their children use technology more often than they think is ideal, they also assume that everyone else’s kids use technology way more. These results help shed light on how families make decisions about technology in daily life and can hopefully point to promising strategies to reduce family conflict and foster healthy and responsible technology use throughout childhood development.

Lunch will be provided. 

Getting to the seminar space currently requires that you climb a set of stairs. If an accommodation is needed, please contact PPH in advance at:

[email protected]