Abstract
Families are now recognised as informal places of education, and as a result, research is turning to the everyday practices in families in order to gain an understanding of the educational processes that are lived out. In this article, the question is explored to what extent children perceive different responsibilities for media education and media regulations in their families. For this purpose, a data set of 21 qualitative interviews with children from Germany and the USA is used, which were analysed and evaluated by means of heuristic social research. The reconstruction of the qualitative data shows that mothers are perceived by the children as the controlling instances in the families studied, who remain outside in media reception situations, while fathers can become media allies of the children. Compared to the mothers, the fathers are identified by the children interviewed here as more media-savvy and function predominantly as the competent contact persons for media technologies. This first qualitative approach suggests that children perceive differences in parental media responsibility according to gender; this generated thesis needs to be validated in further empirical studies.
