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174 Heather A. Horstspend time with their sons and daughters messing around with new media.As Heather Horst discusses in box 4.2, some fathers become heavily investedin their kids’ interests, such as music making and podcasting, expressingtheir support by buying accessories for these activities. Yet, much like theliberal fathers Hochschild describes in her study, fathers tend to restricttheir control to the technological capacities of their home computer networksand tools, leaving mothers to be the enforcers of the family rules andregulations. Java, a twelve-year-old white middle-school student who livesin one of the wealthier areas of rural California, described to Christo Sims(Rural and Urban Youth) who is in charge of restricting new media: “Mymom. Most of the time my mom comes up with the rules.” By contrast,Java depicts her dad as a person who is into music and technology:Well, we’re basically allowed . . . that’s actually my dad’s thing. The music and thecomputers are his thing. But if they don’t know the artist, the person, the CD is,then they like to listen to a few songs or they’ll ask people, different people, aboutit before they let us buy it. But normally the mix CDs are fine. . . . Well, ‘cause mydad’s more into the technology and stuff. And he . . . well, he works with computersobviously so he’s more into that.In some instances fathers join forces with their kids to actively subvertthe mother’s rules. Kim, a participant in Megan Finn and colleagues’“Freshquest” study, described how her father bought games for her behindher mother’s back:My dad. And every time he went to Costco, he’d surprise me with just a little gamewithout my mom knowing. My mom would get so pissed that he waste[d] moneyon that. “Ooh, a game.” So I’d go ahead and play. After a while I think he hit upona couple that really got me into gaming. Either it was Warcraft or something else.So he got me really into gaming and then I forced my parents to buy me a gameafterwards. Like every day, I’d be, “Can we go to Computer City? Can we go [to]Electronic Boutique in the mall?”The relatively playful nature of dads’ engagements with media in domesticsettings often results in negative characterizations of moms either asnagging enforcers or “hopeless,” as a twenty-five-year-old AMV creatordescribed his mother’s technical skills to Mizuko Ito (Anime Fans). OneLos Angeles mother named Anita (Tripp and Herr-Stephenson, Los AngelesMiddle Schools) explained:Pues . . . como le digo yo . . . casi no conozco la computadora; yo no sé usarla . . . casi yono conozco. . . . O sea, entonces, por eso me preocupo; porque como yo a veces no sé lo queestán haciendo.