The simple fact that families purchase computers says next to nothing about their actual uses and the reasons why. The parents or children in nearly all seventy families we studied were, in fact, using their home computers. These machines, for the most part, were not gathering dust in corners or closets. Within the families that bought this technology primarily or secondarily for education, however, the children were not using their computers by and large for educational purposes, especially for academic computing. The reasons include the lack of parental encouragement and assistance; school emphasis, if at all, on other forms of computing; and children's lack of interest in using computers for education.

In this chapter, we describe the kinds of home computing parents and children performed in general, and we identify four types of families. We tabulate our findings concerning children's minimal academic use in all seventy families and present a qualitative comparison of four selected families. We also present an explanatory model for academic computing containing these conditions and their interrelationships.