Parental perceptions of technology and technology-focused parenting: Associations with youth screen time
Section snippets
The negative outcomes of excessive screen time
The current literature supports parental concerns about excessive screen time in childhood. Total daily screen time, a metric of summed exposure to devices capable of displaying video content (e.g., smartphones, tablets, computers, TVs, and video game consoles) for children 8- to 18-years-old, has risen from five to roughly seven and a half hours since 1999, far exceeding the American Academy of Pediatric's recommendation of two hours or less (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2013, Rideout et
Parental perceptions of technology
From a family systems framework, children's behavior in the home reflects a confluence of relationships within the household and, thus, these relationships must be understood when determining the development of various child outcomes (Bochner & Eisenberg, 1987). This framework has been applied to media use in the home, with researchers suggesting that children's screen time is linked to norms in the household which are determined in part by individual level variables, including parental beliefs
Technology-focused rules and youth screen time
Turning to the next link in our model, both research and theory (e.g., Social Interaction Learning Model) suggest that parents play an important role in a child's development through parenting behavior such as involvement and behavioral control, often in the form of monitoring and rule-setting (Patterson, Reid, & Dishion, 1992; see McKee, Jones, Forehand, & Cuellar, 2013, for a review). As one of many layers in the family system, parent's rules in the home set the stage for their child's
Child developmental age and screen time
A limitation to the existing literature on parental rules and youth screen time is that the broad range of a child's developing years from preschool through adolescence has not been examined. Parents may have different expectations and exert varying degrees of control for screen time depending on the age of their child. Indeed, past research suggests that parents find it more difficult to implement media rules in the household with older children (Jordan et al., 2006), a finding consistent with
The current study
In order to better understand the complex family contributions to child media use, the current study extends the literature on parenting and youth screen time by examining the associations among parental perceptions of technology, technology-related parenting strategies (i.e., rules and enforcement strategies), youth screen time, and youth problem behaviors. Using structural equation modeling, we test the model in Fig. 1. The hypothesized direction of association for each link in the model is
Participants
Parents were recruited online through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as part of a larger study on the assessment of parenting. MTurk is currently the dominant crowdsourcing application in the social sciences (Chandler, Mueller, & Paolacci, 2014) and prior research has convincingly demonstrated that data obtained via crowdsourcing methods are as reliable as those obtained via more traditional data collection methods (e.g., Buhrmester et al., 2011, Casler et al., 2013, Paolacci and Chandler,
Procedure
All study procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Vermont. All parents were consented online before beginning the survey in accordance with the approved IBR procedures. Three different studies were listed on MTurk (one for each child age range) for $2.00 in compensation. For families with multiple children in the target age range, one child was randomly selected through a computer algorithm while parents were taking the survey and measures were asked in
Demographic information
Parents responded to demographic questions about themselves (e.g., parental age, education), their families (e.g., household income), and the target child (e.g., gender, age).
Parent's perceptions of technology
As there are no existing technology scales assessing both parental negative beliefs and their own self-efficacy about technology, the 15-item Parental Perceptions of Technology Scale (PPTS; Sanders & Parent, 2014) was developed for this study. Item content was developed from pilot research in a prevention context with
Preliminary analysis of demographic and study variables
The effect of demographic variables (i.e., parent age, parent gender, parent race, parent education, family income, marital status, youth age, and youth gender) on the primary outcomes was examined using bivariate correlations. If significant associations emerged between demographic variables and primary model variables, those demographic variables were controlled for in primary analyses. We examined all demographic variables as covariates as there is limited research on the role of these
Preliminary analysis
Family ownership percentage and youth weekly screen time for each technology device by youth developmental stage and gender is presented in Table 3. Average screen time summed across all devices varied across age ranges (young childhood M = 7.3, middle childhood M = 8.4, adolescence M = 9.7), with an overall average across all ages of 8.5 h.
Prior to preliminary analyses, three demographic variables were dichotomized based on sample size in groups and inspection of the means. Race was dichotomized to
Evaluation of the measurement model
In all models, the first indicator for each latent factor was set at 1.0 to establish the metric, and all factors were allowed to covary freely. Standardized factor loadings are reported. Inspection of the initial measurement model using modification indices suggested that freeing the error between two indicators of the enforcement strategies latent construct would improve fit. The two items were similar in content and wording (i.e., “limits on when it can be accessed and place limits using
Discussion
In this study we examined the associations between parental perceptions about technology, technology-focused parenting strategies, amount of daily screen time, and youth problem behaviors across three age ranges. Our hypotheses were partially supported. First, parent's perceived efficacy was related to technology-related parenting strategies across all three age groups; however, counter to our hypotheses, parent's negative attitudes about technology were not related to technology-related
Recommendations for interventions
The present study suggests that parents' perceived parental efficacy should be considered when attempting to implement parenting strategies to regulate their children's technology use: Improving parental self-efficacy with technology may help parents better manage youth screen time in the home. Our findings also suggest that placing limits on technology may be difficult for parents of older, particularly adolescent age, youth. Thus, intervention efforts may be most fruitful when targeting
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Child and Adolescent Psychology Training and Research, Inc. (CAPTR). Deborah J. Jones is supported by R01MH100377 and Rex Forehand is supported by NICHD RO1HD064723.
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