Abstract
Media education in the family has always been a demanding task for parents, but it has grown in several respects in the recent past. On the one hand, there is a social trend that places more and more responsibility on parents for the upbringing and well-being of their children (cf. Oelkers/Lange 2012). On the other hand, the media world is becoming more and more complex: convergence phenomena and multifunctionality of the media, commercialisation of media offers, individualisation of media use and increase of mobile usage possibilities make it difficult for parents to keep an overview. At the same time, media are penetrating more and more areas of everyday life and opening up new possibilities for interaction within the family (cf. Theunert/Lange 2012), so that the option of keeping media out of family life to a large extent can seem neither realistic nor desirable, even for parents who are relatively distant from media.
