Helen, 36, is married to Ken, also 36, and at the outset of the deployment their son Sam was 30-months-old. Helen and Ken have been married for six years, with Sam being their second child. They also have an older daughter, Sophie, who is 7 years old, and attending school during the fieldwork. Helen describes their home as “very busy and showing the damage of two hyperactive children and two working parents”. After Sam was born, Helen moved from working full-time as an accounts director for a small company to being part-time working three days a week:
“I remembered what it was like with Sophie. I took a full year off when I had her and while it was nice, there were also times where I was going a bit crazy with baby brain. I probably listened more to my mom than I should have, who was a bit shocked that I wanted to go back to work at all. So I took the first year but it did get difficult towards the end. I knew I wanted to go back to work but not full-time and luckily I was able to switch to a three-day working week”.
6.4.4.1 Motivations for joining the platform
Helen currently works Tuesday-Thursday and, while it is the best solution for her, it also brings different challenges in terms of not being able to make it to activities and events at her local children’s centre. There is quite good service provision at the Children’s Centre but Helen feels that it does not suit her very well:
“I think we’re lucky in that the local children’s centre is quite good. They do have lots of activities for children Sam’s age but the problem for me is that most of these seem to be on Wednesday and Thursday, which are the days when I’m working. I did think about trying to change my working week but this is the best option with Sophie as well. I would like to go more and meet some other parents who have children around his age as there aren’t many here”.
This foregrounds one of Helen’s motivations for joining the Digital Toybox. She was hoping to meet parents of other children around the same age as Sam while also expanding her own knowledge:
“I’ve obviously been through this before with Sophie and people seem to think that I should just immediately know what I’m doing but I actually find it completely different.
Ken is better at this because he can understand better what a little boy might like to do. They just grapple and he’s happy. I find that I’m trying to do the same things with Sam that I did with Sophie and he does seem to enjoy it but there’s probably better things that I can do”.
While hoping to learn new ideas that she can use with Sam, she is also hoping that joining the
Toybox might help her meet other parents who have boys of a similar age as Helen worries
that he does not get to play with many now. She considers the street that they live on to be relatively quiet and while other children do visit their home, these are mostly Sophie’s friends:
“I do wish there were some other boys on this street because it would be nice for him to have that but there aren’t and he mostly just ends up playing with his sister when she will let him”.
6.4.4.2 Use of the platform
Helen was a frequent creator of content on the Digital Toybox creating seven posts sharing new content and commenting 5 times on the content posted by others but Helen noticed a different tone to the content she shared in comparison to that shared by the other users:
“I think it was pretty clear to me that I was very different to the others who would post content on the site. They all seemed really prepared. Maybe I’m doing them a disservice but I got the feeling that they put a lot of effort in to getting the right shot, preparing these huge activities that they would do, and then sharing it with others. I don’t think it was showing off or anything like that, this is just what they do. I don’t really have the time to be as organized as them so for me it was just seeing what Sam is doing and trying to respond to him. I’d try to capture a short video and just show how I was responding to him more than what he was doing”.
Despite not feeling as organized as the other users of the platform, Helen was a frequent commenter on the posts the others created, always being very grateful and making sure to thank the poster for sharing her idea. She felt that, since she had two children and was more experienced, she could encourage them as much as possible:
“I remember the doubts that I had when I first had Sophie. My mum and Ken’s mum were getting phonecalls almost every hour of the day asking for advice, help, or even just reassurance. I don’t know anything about the others but I’m sure some are feeling similar if they are first-time parents, so I did want to try to be as reassuring and helpful as I could be”.
However, at the start of the fourth week, Helen became a less frequent visitor to the Toybox. Where she had created around two new posts per week for the first three weeks, she only created one post in week four and didn’t post any further content on the site after that. She explains that she was not really contributing anything positive or helpful nor was she gaining anything of real value for her, so she decided to cease using the platform. She hinted at this in our second interview during week three:
“I’m glad to comment and contribute but I’m not sure if what I’m sharing is useful. I don’t really want to spend a lot of my time making these posts if they are for no one but myself”.
The other main contributors to the Toybox all were first-time parents with young daughters. Helen, with Sam being her second child, felt that she did not have much in common with the others, did not think she could contribute much that would be of use, nor that she could learn much from the posts of the others. In her exit interview, she reflects on how she sometimes felt like an outsider to others discussion:
“You could see sometimes that three of the mums on the Toybox were becoming quite close. They would always comment on each others posts and it just seemed like they had developed a nice relationship. I think the type of things that I was looking for were different to what they wanted and I couldn’t use their ideas with Sam. They were nice and there was always an encouraging comment on posts I made and I did likewise. And I did try with one of the activity boxes but he really didn’t show any interest in that. But I think that was probably the point that I stepped away from it. I just didn’t see it as being helpful for me anymore”.
6.4.4.3 Disengagement from the platform
Helen’s experience of the Toybox proves very different to the other participants. While she started out enthusiastically posting content, this slowed quickly when she did not think her
content was potentially useful for the others or that the content that was shared was relevant for her. Where Amanda, Jessica, and Sally became disengaged with the Toybox once their friendship transitioned beyond the platform, Helen’s experience was less positive and she disengaged once it became clear to her that it would not meet her needs. She notes in her exit interview:
“I do think this is a good idea and I’m sure it has been nice for some of the others but it just hasn’t worked for me. It did feel a bit stale quite quickly because there weren’t any new members being added. I was hoping to use it to meet other similar parents who had young boys but that just didn’t happen. And I think when I realized that the content wasn’t really right for me and there wasn’t any new people joining, I just decided that I could use my time in a better way”.
Helen’s experience of the Digital Toybox appeared to be significantly less positive than the other parents. Having considered herself as someone who could advise and support other parents given that Sam is her second child. However, Helen never felt able to connect with the other parents who used the platform and did not perceive the content of the posts to be useful for her. She did create her own activity box for her son to use but felt that he quickly lost interest. Instead, she wanted some ideas that were more active or more energetic:
“Sam is always running around and he loves it. I was hoping for something more, what’s the word, more energetic. These ideas are all nice and lovely but they seem a little bit constrained. I put up one video of a small treasure hunt-type activity that I did around the house and Sam was running around like crazy, laughing, while trying to find the clues. And I posted a short video of this with me laughing in the background too. I think that was actually the last thing I posted because there was even no comments or anything on it. It might have been different if there were more parents of young boys on it”.
In sum, while Helen joined the Digital Toybox in the hope of being able to share her experiences with others and support them, potentially connecting with other parents of young boys with whom Sam could be friends with, this did not occur. Instead, she disengaged from the platform, disappointed with the content of the activities posted and feeling that they did not match her needs.
6.5 Summary
In this chapter, I presented the findings of the parents’ uses and experiences of the Digital
Toybox. This was based upon a rich, multi-modal dataset that incorporated one-to-one
workshops with parents at the beginning of the deployment as a means to co-create the platform and begin to populate it with content, interviews after three weeks with the first set of users of the platform, and exit interviews with four users of the platform at the end of the five-month deployment. I came to understand that the parents’ motivation to join the platform was influenced by their past personal and professional experiences, alongside a desire to do all they could to support their own child, and an interest in connecting with others and learning from them. Four participants who would frequently post new content and comment on the content posted by others regularly used the platform, with three of those participants becoming friends and socialising together frequently over the course of the deployment.
While the platform was initially popular, use tailed off towards the mid-way point of the deployment, partly as a result of the parents who had begun to meet each other in their community. Additionally, some of the participants referred to the Digital Toybox as becoming stale, with no new participants joining the later stages of the intervention. This also resulted in the types of content posted not being very varied, with frequent posts of different types of activity boxes by the parents. This kind of content did not suit all users, however, with Helen noting a preference for more energetic activities that she could use with her son. Ultimately, the participants disengaged with the platform when it either no longer served their needs, such as when they had started meeting socially, or when it was felt that the platform did not offer anything of value to them. However, the analysis highlights a pre-occupation with the form of activity in terms of playing, rather than focusing on simply being present, aware, and actively engaged with one’s child. The parents were concerned with finding the perfect activity, with only Jessica highlighting a concern with stepping out of the moment of play and the potential negative impact on her daughter. I further discuss the implications of this in Chapter 7, the final chapter of this thesis.