Civilizing Parents in the Digital Age

Abstract

After almost half a century of the Internet being a part of everyday life for billions of people, the jury is still out on whether the coming of the digital age is a blessing or a curse for humanity. Even the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic—which has forced whole sectors of social life, including teaching, exercise, religious celebrations, and academic small talk over wine and cheese, into the virtual sphere—did not change the overall ambivalence of our perceptions of the role of digital media in social life. On the one hand, the benefits seem undisputable: They include the wide, if not universal, availability of low-cost communication; global connectivity; retrievability of immense loads of data, which can be processed quickly and efficiently and provide knowledge about societies which would otherwise be out of reach; and the freedom of sharing content, which is harder to control than any kind of media in existence, and thus more equal and less exclusive than any other.

The author acknowledges the support of Polish National Science Centre (“National habitus formation and the process of civilization in Poland after 1989: a figurational approach”, 2019/34/E/HS6/00295). I am grateful to Marta Gospodarczyk for her kind assistance in editing the first version of this paper, and to the Editors of this volume for their valuable criticisms.

After almost half a century of the Internet being a part of everyday life for billions of people, the jury is still out on whether the coming of the digital age is a blessing or a curse for humanity. Even the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic—which has forced whole sectors of social life, including teaching, exercise, religious celebrations, and academic small talk over wine and cheese, into the virtual sphere—did not change the overall ambivalence of our perceptions of the role of digital media in social life. On the one hand, the benefits seem undisputable: They include the wide, if not universal, availability of low-cost communication; global connectivity; retrievability of immense loads of data, which can be processed quickly and efficiently and provide knowledge about societies which would otherwise be out of reach; and the freedom of sharing content, which is harder to control than any kind of media in existence, and thus more equal and less exclusive than any other.¹ On the other hand, the advantages of the Internet invariably turn out to have a dark side: digital exclusion; inequalities in access to digital media and in skills necessary to benefit from them; the overflow of misleading, false, or manipulative content that is hard to discern from the truth; the sinking criteria of quality in communication; the threats to privacy of individuals and secrets of states, enterprises, and families; the vast potential of cyber-criminality; and the latent political control and psychological manipulation seeping right into individual lives in a way that secret police or marketing agencies could not have dreamt of 50 years ago.²

Among the dilemmas facing us in the digital age, and one which combines almost all aforementioned concerns, are those related to the new shaping of parenthood and relations between parents and children.³ The number of studies on the influence of digital media on child and adolescent development is growing quickly,⁴ and so is the scholarship in the role of digital technology in parenting⁵ and family life⁶. Nonetheless, there is still no theoretical framework that connects the changes in childhood, family, and parenthood with the socio-historical narratives of longue durée of the processes of socialization. There are still a number of vital questions which could bear more systematic theorizing: how digital media influence the relationship between parents and children as a part of the broader social setup, how they affect the distribution of power between children and parents, and how shifts in the power balances between them caused by digitalization, if any, are related to the overall direction of social change. These in turn translate directly into specific legal problems: how does the new power differential between parents and children affect the operations of the legal frames shaping these relationships in various legal orders? To what extent is the effect of digitization specific and unique, historically speaking, and thus calling for new legal-philosophical ideas leading to new regulatory concepts and practices? Does the digitization as a social phenomenon call for more rules or less regulation and policy in the sphere of parent-child relations in order to secure the values which have heretofore determined their legal framing, both on the national and international level? Does the new digital age only challenge us to think about new ways of securing these values, or is the call of the moment rather to reconsider whether these values are still relevant, social, culturally and legally?

In this chapter, I will apply Norbert Elias’s process sociology to suggest some tentative answers to these questions. Elias’s socio-historical study of what he called “the process of civilization” included socialization as one of its core problems.⁷ The process of civilization—a reversible tendency towards the elimination of haphazard violence from social life—had both a psychogenetic and a sociogenetic aspect.⁸ On the psychogenetic side, civilization was argued to operate by molding the emotional lives of individuals so as to strengthen their self-restraints and to lease external control exercised in the form of sanctions applied by social institutions: each individual was her or his own guardian, and each was guarded by her or his long-trained habits more than by anything else. As a result, all humans in any given society would be more like each other, and the more complex the society, the stronger the tendency to standardize the individual habitus on which the existence of the social structure ultimately relies. Violence, which is eliminated from social life, is accumulated in specialized institutions, with the nation-state being the most accomplished monopolist of violence thus far. The net beneficiaries of the standardization of habitus and the monopolization of violence are the members of the physically and socially weakest social categories, as the process of civilization reduced the distance between the strongest and the weakest and curbed the abuse of the latter by the former.⁹

Formatting children to make them suited to live in a particular society and in a particular section thereof was of pivotal importance for maintaining a level of self-restraint needed to prevent society from falling victim to the centrifugal forces of human affect. Consequently, Elias sought the key to explaining how an individual and society are interrelated in the modeling of its youngest members by way of manner books, which were one of the main sources of evidence on which his concept of civilization is based.

There is a body of scholarship applying Elias’s approach to the study of families and the upbringing of children.¹⁰ However, the civilizational consequences of digitalization have not yet been systematically addressed. Therefore, I will first reconstruct the Eliasian view of what he called the “civilizing of parents” over time, and then summarize the effect of this change in late modernity before the digital age, an era which Elias, who died in 1990, neither experienced nor accommodated in his theoretical framework. From there, I will outline the civilizational impact of digitalization, particularly of the Internet, on child-parental relations. In my conclusion, I will elaborate on the notion of a ‘civilizing offensive’, which was coined in the late 1970 s in the Netherlands and draws on Eliasian sociology. As Ryan Powell wrote:

“Since then the term has been disseminated widely across Dutch society and penetrated political and popular discourse as a means of describing the deliberate, conscious attempts of powerful groups, including a historically paternalistic state, at altering the behaviour of sections of the population and inculcating lasting, ‘civilised’ habits.”¹¹

In regard to the emergence of the Internet and its influence on civilizing parents as a particular form of a civilizing offensive, I point out the ambivalence of the role that digital media play in the process of civilization, in families, and beyond.

1 Civilizing Parents: How it Used to Happen

In 1980, Elias wrote an essay on The Civilizing of Parents, the opening statement of which reads: “In the course of the twentieth century we have seen the acceleration of a transformation in the relationship between parents and children that can be traced back to the Middle Ages”.¹² Referring to Philippe Ariès’s history of childhood, Elias further observed that:

“Despite a growing literature, in many respects we do not completely understand how we can help children enter into such a complex and unchildish society as ours, one which demands a high degree of foresights and self-control: how we can help them survive the inescapable individual civilizing process of becoming adult, without stunting their chances for pleasure and joy. However, this discovery of childhood most certainly concerns not just an advance in knowledge about children and understanding of children, but also something else. We could perhaps characterize it as the necessity for children to live their own lives, a type of life which in many respects is distinct from that of adults, even though the two are interdependent.”¹³

The history of childhood is the history of the recognition of children as a particularly vulnerable social category. Children are different from the other wretched of the earth in that they are a dynamically changing group: They are children today, but they will surely no longer be children in 20 years, when they may be expected to have children of their own. Similar to many socially weaker groups in societies around the world, including women, racial and ethnic minorities, migrants, non-heteronormative peoples, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and the dying, children are dependent on the socially stronger. In the case of children, this dependency is deeper than in most groups: Its basis is biological as well as social. For a significant portion of their lives, children depend on their parents (or other adult caregivers) for their biological survival. In this respect, they are indeed the weakest of the weak. They must rely on the assistance of someone who is infinitely physically stronger than they are, and their means of opposition are extremely scarce. The relationship between children and parents is highly asymmetrical. However, Elias argued that in any social relation, even in the most unbalanced one, the dependence always runs both ways: a slave may be the slaveowner’s inferior, but a slaveowner is also dependent on the slave, just much less so than the other way around. But the dependence of children on adults is near absolute and incomparable to the dependence of adults on children, despite all consideration for emotional dependence of parents on tiny babies. “In societies like ours, there is hardly any other form of relationship in which the power differential between interdependent people is as great as that in the parent-child relation”.¹⁴

However, as opposed to other relations of biological dependence, children’s dependence ends rather quickly, if we consider the lifespan of an individual. This makes the power differential between children and parents particularly problematic: it is an inherently instable one. This is probably one of the reasons why parents’ use of physical violence against their children has fought off efforts for external regulation and governance for so long. Now in the twenty-first century, beating up employees, prisoners, beggars, or soldiers is no longer a daily occurrence, but spanking children is still commonplace in some countries, albeit forbidden in many legal orders and no longer a recommended form of educational influence in many cultures, and generally a practice less tolerated than it once was.¹⁵ It is easy to hit a child. Nonetheless, Elias argues that even in places where spanking is still generally accepted, parents can be expected to hit their children less than they used to, and to pay more attention to their children, value them more, and allow them a greater degree of personal, bodily, and mental autonomy than in any previous epoch in human history—even though the scope of the change may differ from society to society, and from one social milieu to another. As parents become more civilized, children become more autonomous, and their power chances grow.

One significant consequence of the gradual civilization of parents is the increasing isolation of an individual, even within the family.¹⁶ The increase in self-restraint routinely takes place through the separation of various bodily functions from the interactional sphere, which is achieved by the individualization of ‘use’ in housing spaces, such as designating areas as bedrooms, toilets, kitchens, etc., and by the delocalization of various activities, such as work, education, and exercise, which are typically pursued out of the home. Incidentally, the impact of all events preventing this kind of separation—such as the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought all bodily and intellectual functions (back) together into the home space—can thus be expected to cause an increase in domestic violence, a finding also based on the general assumptions of the theory of the process of civilization. Such effects have indeed been observed.¹⁷

Notwithstanding the variety of forms of civilizing parents in various environments around the world, the increasing autonomy of a child and the recognition of its specific status as a social category were accompanied by extending various forms of external social protection to children. Similar to other socially weaker categories, children have been included under legal protection. Here, Elias mentions the emergence of the international regime of children’s rights as a particularly important sign of the civilizing of family relations. State power, which extended its monopoly of violence over parental and domestic relations, contributed to a shift in power between parents and children. By the same token, the power of other adults over children—that of teachers, priests, policemen, shopkeepers, and bona fide strangers—was also limited. In the course of civilizing parents, children became a special social category not only for their parents, but also for other people. This appropriation of children by society in general—the “entry of children into the stadium of history” (and law)—is accompanied by a specialization of various welfare agencies that are mainly there to watch, control, support, and if need be, replace the parents. This may, as has been reported in many countries, lead to bias and to bitter conflicts between parents and welfare agents who do not share the same cultural beliefs about the right standard of child protection, especially in multicultural, multiethnic societies or in the context of recent migration.¹⁸ The “child’s best interest”, which is certainly a central concept of the state and international regulation of child welfare, is far from inambiguous.¹⁹ Nonetheless, the very fact that such a concept has risen to its current prominent position in global, regional, and national legal orders is in itself proof that a civilizational change has taken place to the benefit of children.

2 The Figuration of Parents and Children in Late Modernity

What are the general characteristics of the relationship between children and parents in late modernity? The general direction of civilizing parents seems to have been towards less violence, less inequality, less closeness, more distance, more standardization, and less privilege for parents over their own children compared to other humans. A child is far from being a parent’s property. Even if the much-mediatized images of parents sacrificing everything for the well-being, education, safety, health, and life prospects of their children need not be indicative of a complete reversal of the relation, a parent in the Global North seems to be much more bound by having children than ever before. Having children is an obligation, a debt—in the case of student loans, a very real debt expressed in monetary terms. Children are, as has been noted for many decades now, increasingly a “value” for their parents. However, they are more of a liability than an asset, at least in economic terms, even though there is evidence that having children may benefit parents’ social integration, a vital asset in the late-modern world.²⁰ Still, the most obvious value of children, the economic one, no longer applies: Children are not permitted to work to an economically significant extent, not even in rural environments where family life and work are often indistinguishable.

Children are being schooled; they are outsourced to specialized institutions. According to Pierre Bourdieu’s famous thesis, institutionalized education tends to reproduce class structure by rewarding those with more cultural capital.²¹ However, this means that out-of-home schooling does not fulfill the promise of equal opportunity. It does not mean that schooling leads to a simple reproduction of the parents’ views, lifestyles, values, etc. Rather, by reproducing inequalities, it reproduces the social distinction that inequalities involve. School is likely to draw children away from their parents, even though it does not happen by moving them upwards in the social structure. The very fact of losing grip of one’s child for a few hours a day significantly weakens a parent’s power.

According to the 2021 OECD report, “there is nearly universal coverage of basic education for 6–14 year-olds, as enrolment rates for this age group reached or exceeded 95% in all OECD countries. In addition, 84% of the population is enrolled in education between the age of 15 and 19 on average across OECD countries”.²² Effectively, in the OECD countries practically all children are schooled. Globally, UNESCO data as of February 2020 shows over 89% of enrollment in basic education, a rise from 71% in 1970, albeit with vast regional, country and, in many societies, gender differences, with 83% of pupil persisting till the end of the primary school.²³ This would show that, with all reservations for inaccuracy and inequality, in today’s world, a big majority of children are schooled on the basic level, typically in public or publicly controlled institutions, even in countries where homeschooling is common. As a result, parents and non-parents have become less differentiated in regard to the scope of power the state exercises over children, be they their own or those of other people. At the same time, the social control of children exercised in a disperse form by all adults seems to have been largely reduced, though no systematic global comparative data can support the thesis. To put it bluntly: 50 years ago, a misbehaving child would have expected to be reprimanded or castigated in some form or another by virtually any grown-up person who felt like it, in most countries of the world. Nowadays, in many countries the parent may expect to be castigated by other adults if her or his reaction to the child’s comportment is deemed excessive compared to the social norm.

Reading about more distanced, restrained relations and increasing state control might induce the image of cool, functional family life with little emotional intensity and directness in it. However, with view to the tendencies illustrated above, an additional factor needs to be added that has been characteristic of social relations in the last century: the tendency towards “informalization”.

Cas Wouters first described the process of informalization in his studies of Dutch society.²⁴ He drew on Elias’s marginal observation in On the Process of Civilisation, regarding the prevalence of very revealing bathing attire on European beaches. Up to a certain point, civilizing seems to work by introducing more complicated, more nuanced, and more energy-consuming behavioral standards, as well as by inducing people to exert themselves in pedantic self-control. Freud’s men and women are the protagonists of the phase of civilization in which it operates by the formalization of manners: Individuals bound by very detailed prescriptions of social and societal life, which react with various somatic and mental malfunctions, to the unbearable tension between their desires and impulses and the permitted patterns of behavior and thought. Elias was a late Freudian himself, and he shared the basic tenets of Freudian psychology. However, as he observed, the control of impulses in individuals may become so strong and so detailed that it is no longer a burden—it is another nature, interiorized and inalienable, and not to be shattered even in the face of a powerful trigger, such as a woman off her guard and in her bathing suit. The woman need not be formally dressed to be safe, nor does the man need a top hat and a stiff collar to remind him of the rules of proper behavior. Wouters noted, commenting on the sexual revolution of the 1960 s, that this informalization was one of the ways by which civilization works: forms are external restraints that can be dispensed of once internal constraints have become a part of human nature.

In relations between children and parents, the trend towards informalization has been particularly conspicuous over the twentieth century. People who themselves never spoke to their parents unless spoken to, and who were not allowed to sit at the family table until they had learned to ‘behave properly’, often have nothing against their children calling them by their first names and spitting around happily over everyone’s plates when first learning to deal with solid food. There are a number of factors that contributed to shifts in parenting styles between the World War II generation, baby boomers, Generation X, and Millennials, some of which relate to demographic and structural variables (including the percentage of mothers active on the labor market, the fathers’ involvement, the number of children, divorce rates, single parents, etc.), and some to purely cultural factors. Even though the changes in parenting styles have not been studied nearly as assiduously beyond the Global North, there is a body of evidence to confirm that a change in parent-child relations is more than a local or regional occurrence.²⁵ Informalization, though first detected in the Western world, seems to be an element of the whole postwar history of family and parenting. While there may be more self-restraint in parental-child relations, there is also less distance due to a reduction of forms.

3 Internet in the Late Modern Figuration of Parents and Children

How does this landscape of civilizing parents in late modernity change with the arrival of digital media? In whose favor does the powerful tool known as the Internet work? Does it serve to further empower children, or does it increase the power differential favorably for parents? And what role does the state play in the process?

At first sight, new media seems to act as an equalizer due to the nature of interactions in the digital space. A child may have gained a large scope of autonomy since the Middle Ages, but until its teen years, it is still unlikely to be taken for an adult in any face-to-face interaction. A child is smaller, and its body, voice, etc. immediately betray its belonging to its special social category. But the Internet, despite all the regulatory measures taken to counteract it, is notorious for its “easy conductivity for anonymous and pseudoanonymous communications”.²⁶ There are still plenty of places on the Internet where everyone could be anyone, including a child playing an adult. Admittedly, this symmetry also works to the advantage of adults who want to—for any licit or illicit reason—pass as a child. But with the Internet, a child is freed from its biological determination by the sheer size of its body, an emancipatory effect similar to that experienced by other categories bearing bodily signs of their belonging, such as racial minorities or transgender persons.²⁷

The point of the Internet being a safe space for children pretending to be adults is, of course, a highly controversial one: Being freed from the limitations of bodily recognition comes at the price of being exposed to harmful practices and reactions of other Internet users. Nonetheless, if we consider the civilizing of parents, it can hardly be disputed that children are less controllable once they are able to use digital media. And they are using it extensively. The sphere, which only emerged a few decades ago, and was an adult domain until only recently, has been ‘won’ by children, including very young children, at a rampant rate.²⁸ Children and teenagers, as users of content platforms and social media, are a market power, and their impact on their parents’ Internet usage is significant.²⁹ So, both directly and indirectly, children have an additional asset which works in their favor in the family-power balance: They have an additional space where they can move relatively freely. This correlates with the parents’ obligation to monitor and control one more sphere of activity (potential or actual) of their own children—not only in the interest of their own liability, but also to protect their children’s safety.³⁰

Thus, an interesting field emerged where parents have to deal with the unprecedented challenge of raising ‘digital natives’. There is no one they can ask for advice; the majority of today’s parents did not grow up with constant access to the Internet. The cohorts who are themselves digital natives have now reached the age when they have children of their own: they would be born not earlier than 1980 (in many societies, even in Europe, some years later), with the mean childbearing age in the most digitalized countries systematically increasing, over 29 in the European Union in 2019. As a result, in the scholarship on media use in families it is observed that “children often introduce new media into the family and influence parents’ media adoption and use”: children are “digital natives” instructing “digital immigrants” not only because they learn the technology earlier, but because they adapt to it faster.³¹ From this perspective, the relative technological advantage of children may become a lasting experience even when all cohorts active in the child-rearing will belong to the category of the digital natives. The parents’ reactions to the imbalance can vary significantly. They might restrict the use of new media altogether—a solution applied by some statistically marginal groups, despite being highly impracticable, especially in view of the requirements of homeschooling during the pandemic and the resulting awareness of the inevitability of a more digitalized education, even for the youngest. They might impose rules, restrict usage, monitor content, and generally move towards a formalization of the child-parent relationship in the context of Internet usage. However, they might also proceed along the path of informalization.

A number of studies have been conducted to analyze parenting strategies of dealing with digital media at home, and an interesting conclusion is that parents are applying a style which is very much coherent with the overall idea of civilizing parents: they are, as Sonia Livingstone and her collaborators phrased it, “maximizing opportunities and minimizing risks”.³² The more competent the parents are in the digital world, the more likely they are to guide their children’s digital media usage and transfer their knowledge to their children in a relatively equal setting of common experience. There are a number of factors, such as the age and gender of children, which affect the overall picture of equality and cooperation. Nonetheless, restrictive forms of parental mediation in Internet usage seem to be ebbing, at least in high-income countries.

Such informalization can be partly explained by the fact that children and parents share more or less the same resources online, and that learning to use them is a necessary cultural technique, soon to join other ‘basics’ like writing or counting. While in some countries known for highly digitalized educational systems, like Denmark, digital media literacy is largely assumed by the school, Internet skills are learned outside of the school in many other countries with more analog educational systems, such as Germany. It remains to be seen how much will change in this respect after the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is definitely potential for a rapprochement between children and parents sharing the experience of Internet usage. Moreover, the rapprochement may be sought by the parents, who in many cases may turn out to be less competent users. It would be too simplistic to think of the Internet as a potentially dangerous space where parents know their way around and children do not. While children can get lost and hurt very easily, they are often the ones who have a better and more accurate understanding of digital media operations, even if their critical thinking and discernment skills are not fully developed. Bottom-up technology transmission happens often in families with very young Internet users.³³

To return to the point about mystery, anonymity, and pseudoanonymity: The Internet is not only a space of personal freedom, but a place for creating and mobilizing group resources. Children, as the socially weaker category, may use digital media to communicate, exchange information, and cooperate with peers, in this case others in a similar position—other children. The extent to which they may be interested in avoiding parental control, participation, and guidance also highlights the contentious aspect of Internet usage in family life: there is a subversive potential, especially on social media, which connects individual users into communities capable of organized action. “Children of the world, unite!”—this call has been powerfully picked up by the global movement Fridays for Future, forming their collective identity “on Instagram” and apparently beyond the family context.³⁴

Fridays for Future may serve as an example of what children’s autonomy may mean in the digital age, but it also shows the changing role of the state in light of new forms of social mobilization. Contrary to what many believe, nation-states can be very efficient in controlling the Internet and in exercising overt hidden pressure on Internet service providers. The Internet is, in this sense, far from being completely free. It is being increasingly regulated in some, if not all, regions of the world, and the enforcement of legal rules on the Internet is also developing more dynamically than could have been expected even a few years ago. Still, state control of Internet content and usage, which is frequently motivated by children’s well-being (especially in matters of child pornography, child trafficking, and access to violent content), does not reach into the innovative and creative uses of the Internet which allow children and teenagers, as a group, to become not only a psychological or an economic player, but also a considerable political force. Gaining one’s own political standing and voice is a great leap in the autonomization of children as a social category. The political voice of children today is still relatively dependent on adult recognition, but if this changes, digital media will surely be instrumental in the process, and the balance of power in families will then shift even more favorably for children.

4 Conclusion: A Digital Civilizing Offensive?

The Internet’s arrival in family lives might be perceived as a civilizing offensive, as explained by Ryan Powell in the following way:

“It is over a third of a century since the term het burgerlijkbeschavingsoffensief—the bourgeois civilising offensive—was first coined and the concept subsequently developed. It is, ‘of course, derived from Norbert Elias’. Since then the term has been disseminated widely across Dutch society and penetrated political and popular discourse as a means of describing the deliberate, conscious attempts of powerful groups, including a historically paternalistic state, at altering the behaviour of sections of the population and inculcating lasting, ‘civilised’ habits.”³⁵

The civilizing offensive caused by the Internet is a peculiar, authorless one. Even though there is significant content control, manipulation, and fraud on the Internet, it would be naïve to see one single concentrated agency behind it all. Similarly, although there may be many good intentions, high ideals, and sound motives behind the promotion of Internet usage, there is hardly a single benefactor backstage for the World Wide Web. While the Dutch civilizing offensive in the late 1970 s was a deliberate state-made moralizing effort to create a different and more satisfactory society, the digital civilizing offensive does not seem to have a goal. Certainly, it does not aim to create less formal, more equal, and more externally connected families with more autonomous children and less powerful parents. But there are some consequences of the digital age, be they intended or unintended, which seem to work towards the civilizing of parents in an offensive-like manner.

The Internet created the possibility of moving beyond the household space and of lifting the limitations of a child’s body. It enables communication with peers beyond one’s immediate everyday surroundings, which may be especially important for vulnerable children with statistically rare problems hard to solve in their own circles. The Internet may be instrumental in children’s self-defense against threats that they encounter in their young lives. But it seems that in these attempts, adults in general and parents in particular are on the children’s side. While parents’ restrictive strategies often stem from the desire to protect and guide their children in the digital space, they might result in the reversal of the informalization of family life and the accommodation of new media—and sharing this experience intergenerationally seems to be a prevailing model in high-income countries that have a long history of Internet usage. It seems that the Internet supports the emancipation of children, and that it does away with a few of the last bastions of parental domination, such as privileged knowledge-status and higher operational skills.

One question which must inevitably be posed in the conclusion of a paper on the civilizing of parents by way of digitalization concerns the future of this trend. One hint seems to rest in the functional democratization of families under digital rule: the fundamental fact of children’s biological dependence and relative powerlessness might simply be blurred out by the day-to-day efficiency of children in digital communication and by the universal immersion into online interaction. While there is a limit to the empowerment of children by digital means, it might easily be pushed further and further into a shared experience across ages. Trusting digital civilization may turn against both the children and the parents. They may both become oblivious of their interrelatedness because it would matter less and less in their everyday lives. Whether this would be the final step in the civilization of parents as the privileged adults in children’s lives is something of a moot point: a creature which is biologically non-self-reliant must rely on someone, and reliance is a source of power. It remains to be seen whether the digital age will undermine this basic inequality inherent in the long and straining course of human socialization by eliminating power despite preserving the family as an environment for socialization. The Internet, which did not live up to the expectations as a universal global equalizer, might yet deliver in the ubiquitous sphere of family relations.