Do You See What I See? Parent and Child Reports of Parental Monitoring of Media

Abstract

Research on parental monitoring of children's media use suggests parents can reduce the negative effects of media exposure on children, although this research is rarely conducted with elementary school children and leaves open questions about whether parents or children are better reporters. Participants were 1,323 children, their parents, and teachers. Parents and children reported on four aspects of monitoring for TV and video games: co‐using, limit setting on amount, limit setting on content, and active mediation. Parents gave much higher estimates than did children. Monitoring was moderated by child age, child sex, parent marital status, parent education, and parent income. Although parent‐ and child‐reported monitoring correlated rather poorly, both types were almost equally good predictors of children's screen time, media violence exposure, and teacher reports of school performance. When there were differences, the child reports tended to be slightly better predictors, demonstrating the validity of child reports of parental monitoring.

Implications of low or high media use among parents for young children’s media use

“…With regard to the marital household status, also no differences appeared between the four types of media users, i.e., single parents and married parents were evenly distributed among lower and higher use families. Former studies had indicated that single parents are less restrictive on their children's media use (Gentile et al, 2012) and probably therefore have children who are higher users of media as compared to children in intact families (Cingel & Krcmar, 2013;Vandewater et al, 2007). Maybe, marital status and number of siblings are not strongly related to the parent's own media consumption when children are still rather young, as compared to when children get older and more demanding.…”

“…Next, in single parent families young children make more use of media, both educational and non-educational (Cingel & Krcmar, 2013;Vandewater et al, 2007), but this could also be related to the parent's media use. Single parents experience more stress in parenting (McLoyd, 1998), are usually less involved in their children's media use (Warren, 2005) and are less restrictive on their children's media time and content choices (Gentile, Nathanson, Rasmussen, Reimer, & Walsh, 2012). Thus, single parents may not only more often allow their children to own and use media devices, but to use media more often to entertain themselves, therefore comprising higher use families (H 2c ).…”

Mediating social media use: Connecting parents’ mediation strategies and social media literacy

“…While restrictive mediation, active mediation, and co-use strategies originate from previous studies (Gentile et al, 2012;Nikken & Jansz, 2006;Warren, 2001), participatory learning and distant mediation are combinations of previously separate strategies. The first one combines both active mediation and co-use, and implies that parents invest in digital knowledge and skills.…”

“…parents having instructive or evaluative conversations with their children in order to explain or discuss children's use of digital media), and (3) co-use (i.e. parents sharing media activities with their children, driven by a common interest) (Gentile, Nathanson, Rasmussen, Reimer, & Walsh, 2012;Nikken & Jansz, 2006;Warren, 2001). …”

The influence of social networking, video games and general computer usage on parent-child relations

“…Halpenny et al (2010) describe two types of parenting: (1) Authoritative parenting which is characterised by warmth and reasoning, exercised with younger children (2) Authoritarian parenting is characterised by high levels of control, exercised with adolescents. In terms of parenting and mediation of media/technology use, a variety of academic projects (Gentile et al, 2012;Kundanis, 2003) report three different media mediation styles: (1) Active: talking to the child about the media/technologies and explaining its mechanics to them (2) Restrictive: Setting strict rules of what can be accessed and in what amounts by the child (3) Coviewing: Only participating in the child's media use. As Kundanis (2003) and Gentile et al(2012) outline, active mediation is usually seen as optimal due to its beneficial effects on children's understanding of the media and technologies.…”