Parental mediation in the age of mobile technology

The exploratory research here presented investigates the relationship between children and the mobile phone, the sense they attribute to its use and their perception of parental mediation related to this medium considered into the domestic context: family is the first place where meanings, norms and values on media use are supposed to be socialized and negotiated. According to studies on parental mediation, the research is aimed at understanding if children perceive an educational intervention by parents or, as it is a personal medium, parents don't interfere in children's relationship with the mobile phone. Through a closed format questionnaire, self­ completed by 272 students aged 9-11 years, the research surveys ownership, practical uses, meanings given to personal practices and perceptions about interventions of mediation by parents in relation to mobile phone. The data analyses show different levels of mobile phone usage, the functions most often experienced, the dimensions of meaning that accompany children's practices with the mobile phone and the perceptions of different forms of parental intervention, revealing a not clear correlation between children's practices and parents' educational perceived intervention. The results suggest the opportunity of further investigations to deepen the understanding of parental mediation and to check if the limited educational impact reported by children relates only to the use of this technology or if it deals with a more general problem of educational engagement by parents.

2019

Basato sui dati raccolti dal progetto Net Children Go Mobile, uno studio transnazionale su bambini di età compresa tra i 9 e i 16 anni in sette paesi europei, con particolare attenzione al contesto irlandese. Questo articolo esamina la mediazione dei genitori delle attività online dei bambini. Viene inoltre esaminata la relazione tra le competenze digitali dei bambini (compreso l'uso di Internet e degli smartphone) e la mediazione dei genitori e vengono evidenziati i fattori che influenzano la mediazione dei genitori. I genitori implementano una serie di strategie, favorendo una stretta mediazione e regole di mediazione attiva sulla sicurezza di Internet, ma queste sono risultate associate con ridotte attività online e competenze digitali dei bambini. Questi risultati mettono alla prova i ricercatori nell'identificare strategie efficaci senza impedire ai bambini la libertà di accesso al mondo online e di avvalersi delle opportunità online. Abstract: Based on data collected f...

Communication Theory, 2011

This article describes the theory of parental mediation, which has evolved to consider how parents utilize interpersonal communication to mitigate the negative effects that they believe communication media have on their children. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this theory as employed in the sociopsychologically rooted media effects literature as well as sociocultural ethnographic research on family media uses. To account for the emotional work that digital media have introduced into contemporary family life, I review interpersonal communication scholarship based on sociologist A. R. Hochschild's (1977, 1989) work on emotions, and suggest L. Vygotsky's (1978) social development theory as a means of rethinking the role of children's agency in the interactions between parents and children that new media affords. The article concludes by suggesting that in addition to the strategies of active, restrictive, and co-viewing as parental mediation strategies, future research needs to consider the emergent strategy of participatory learning that involves parents and children interacting together with and through digital media.

This article describes the theory of parental mediation, which has evolved to consider how parents utilize interpersonal communication to mitigate the negative effects that they believe communication media have on their children. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this theory as employed in the sociopsychologically rooted media effects literature as well as sociocultural ethnographic research on family media uses. To account for the emotional work that digital media have introduced into contemporary family life, I review interpersonal communication scholarship based on sociologist A. R. Hochschild's (1977) work on emotions, and suggest L.

This article describes the theory of parental mediation, which has evolved to consider how parents utilize interpersonal communication to mitigate the negative effects that they believe communication media have on their children. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this theory as employed in the sociopsychologically rooted media effects literature as well as sociocultural ethnographic research on family media uses. To account for the emotional work that digital media have introduced into contemporary family life, I review interpersonal communication scholarship based on sociologist A. R. Hochschild’s (1977, 1989) work on emotions, and suggest L. Vygotsky’s (1978) social development theory as a means of rethinking the role of children’s agency in the interactions between parents and children that new media affords. The article concludes by suggesting that in addition to the strategies of active, restrictive, and co-viewing as parental mediation strategies, future research needs to consider the emergent strategy of participatory learning that involves parents and children interacting together with and through digital media.

2020

This article examines how much parent-child interactions around the online world reflect broader, more long-standing parent-child relations and parenting dilemmas. It does so through exploring the meanings that parents give to their parenting practices and the beliefs that underlie parental mediation of their children's online activities as well as the reasons for any differences between their broader normative approach to parental mediation and their actual practices. Qualitative in-depth interviews conducted with 26 Spanish parents of children aged 9 to 16-years-old found that many parents favoured the managed progression of children towards more autonomy and gave reasons why it was important to trust older children. However, the analysis explores a range of dilemmas parents experience when trying to implement these ideals, where issues of privacy, trust and managing that progression all proved to be problematic.

Revista Comunicação e Sociedade, 2020

The objective of this article is to explore the gendered characteristics of digital parenting and parental mediation through a qualitative study developed with families and children in Argentina. Diverse typologies have recently been elaborated to better understand parental mediation of digital screens. Quantitative studies have correlated different styles of parental mediation with sociodemographic variables and have also assessed their effectiveness in preventing several online risks. In this paper we use qualitative data from a research developed using the technique of technobiographies to construct an in-depth approach to children's practices and representations with multiple voices involved (parents, teachers, school authorities). As we show, different types of parental mediation are associated to mothers or fathers, following more broader gender ideologies and stereotypes. With insights from different families, we built research questions that state that there is a gendered division of digital parenting.

Ferreira, E., Ponte, C., Castro, T. S. (2017). ICT and Gender: Parental Mediation Strategies, in SIIE 17 Simpósio Internacional de Informática Educativa, Lisboa, Portugal, Novembro 9-11 2017, pp. 135-140. Information and communication technologies (ICT) continues to be a highly gendered area of life in all socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, and a source of significant social inequality in enduring ways. Parental mediation strategies can regulate the benefits and risks of the ICT for children, and have a significant and lifelong impact on children's self-confidence and positive attitudes toward digital technologies. This paper aims to explore how does gender, of both parents and children, affects parent mediation strategies of children's media use, adopting a critical discourse perspective in which gender differences in ICT use are understood as a result of gender-technology and power-knowledge relations. We present a gender perspective on the results of the research 'Growing Up with Screens', conducted in Portugal which aims to explore the mediation practices of parents including the first generation of digital native parents with children aged 3 to 8 years old.

ANIMA Indonesian Psychological Journal, 2019

A parental strategy in relation to the influence of media usage (parental mediation), in this case that of the Internet on adolescents, is greatly needed. The ideal strategy is a combination of active mediation (discussion regarding the content), and restrictive mediation (determination of rules for media usage), however what is normally employed is still restrictive mediation and co-using mediation (the joint use of media with the child, but without parent-child interaction to explain media content and impact). In this research, the aim was to look at an illustration of parental mediation towards the child. Quantitative research, with purposive sampling was conducted, on 94 parents and 423 information technology-based junior high school students, using questionnaires based upon the Perceived Parental Media Mediation Scale (the reliability of the parental scale being .84, and that of the student scale being .84). From frequency analysis and correlation testing, it was found that the...

Intersections

This study explores parental mediation – its patterns, purpose and intention, the intentions behind it, and related social inequalities – from the perspective of the ideal of intensive parenting. Parental mediation in the form of restricting or monitoring teenagers’ technology use might mitigate the harm of the intensive or risky online behaviour. Moreover, active mediation strategies might improve the teenagers’ digital literacy by obtaining specific skills that foster appropriate online behaviour. Therefore, the paper argues that parental mediation has become a highly relevant aspect of contemporary parenting practices. The paper is based on thematic analyses of semi-structured interviews on children’s screen time and parental mediation strategies. The interviews were carried out with 29 parents of adolescents in Hungary in 2019. The findings show that restriction and active mediation primarily aimed at protecting children from risks, as a resource-intensive practice, form part of...