Digital Media Literacy of Children with Parents Working Abroad

Abstract

Romania is one of the countries in the European Union that has been confronted with a large intra-EU migration of population towards countries such as Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the last two decades. Thus, one or both parents work abroad for several months or sometimes for years and their children are left in the care of their grandparents or other close relatives. This phenomenon has large implications for the Romanian society and certain regions, such as the Northeastern, are dealing with the consequences. The paper addresses the question of media literacy of the children whose parents are working abroad and adds to the current discussions, in particular to a discourse that does not position children of migrant workers as automatically disadvantaged. As a foundation for our study we used a skills-based model of media literacy (Riesmeyer, Pfaff-Rüdiger, and Kümpel 2012; Dewe and Sander 1996; Groeben 2002; Livingstone 2004). We conducted thirty in-depth interviews with children and adolescents from the Northeastern region of Romania between January and April 2018. Romanian children and adolescents with parents working abroad live in a favourable economic context and have better access to communication technology than their peers. The migration situation influences the motivational dimension of media skills but probably has little influence on legal media skills. Social media offers them technical support in order to see their parents, to share their problems and worries. It is often used for educational purposes in this particular situation.

Keywords

• media literacy
• digital literacy
• intra-eu migration
• qualitative methods