Combining a comprehensive literature review with original empirical research on young people's use of new media, this book provides a fresh and in-depth discussion of the increasingly complex relationship between the media and childhood, the family and the home. Young People and New Media asks: * what impact are the new media having on childhood and adolescence? * are these technologies changing the nature of young people's leisure and sociability? * has the participation of children in private and public life changed? We can no longer imagine our daily lives without media and communication technologies. Nor would we want to. At the start of the twenty-first century, the home is being transformed into the site of a multimedia culture. There is much discussion of the potential benefits of this new media. But where there is hope, there is also anxiety.