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152 Heather A. Horstin individual households, they are expressed through decisions to include andexclude media content and to regulate within the household who watches whatand who listens to and plays with and uses what. (20)As research on youth and the family reveals, the anxiety surrounding theintegration of new media into the home also reflects concerns about independence,separation, and autonomy that, at least in the context ofWestern societies, occur during the teenage years. Parents throughout ourstudies worried about the amount of time that kids spent online and not“with real people,” as one mother described her son’s “addiction” to networkedgaming. Some parents lamented that they felt they had lost control,or that their kids had become too dependent upon their portable games,iPods, and mobile phones. Still other parents expressed concern over theextent to which their kids were spending “too much time” talking withtheir friends over instant messaging, on social network sites, or on themobile phone. While these concerns over dependence and independenceas well as control and autonomy appear to be a persistent family dynamic(Spigel 2001), Alters (2004) argues that during the past forty or fifty yearsthere has been a shift in the nature of parenting in American family life; 3“Since the 1960s, parents have become uneasy about how to raise childrenin light of increases in drug use, delinquency, pregnancy, and suicidesamong children and adolescents” (Alters 2004, 59) as well as broader societalchanges, such as the entrée of women into the workforce and theincrease in divorce rates during the past three decades. Alters further contendsthat parents now feel aware and accountable to themselves, and tosociety at large, regarding the decisions they make in the domestic sphere,a phenomenon she refers to as “reflexive parenting.”The particular expressions of this sense of responsibility or reflexivity—present among most, if not all, of the families we interviewed—remainclosely intertwined with the cultural, social, economic, and educationalcapital associated with class dynamics. In a seminal ethnographic study ofparenting in the United States, Annette Lareau (2003) explores parentingstrategies and the implications of different approaches to parenting forchildren’s chances in life, what she terms the “transmission of differentialadvantages to children.” 5 Examining the ways these patterns of parenting,or the “dominant set of cultural repertoires,” are traversed in everydaylife, Lareau outlines two approaches to parenting that, she argues, correspondwith class positioning. According to Lareau, working-class parents