Parental Mediation of Pre-Schooler's Digital Media Use

Parental Mediation (PM) studies entail parents’ management of their children’s digital media (DM) habits, and its parental concerns with such mediation practices. PM typically encompass 4 broad activities which parents undertake to monitor and manage their children’s usage of DM devices, namely Gatekeeping, Informative Mediation, Discursive Mediation, and Diversionary Mediation. Through qualitative interviews with 21 parents, this study investigated PM of young children’s DM devices, and its affiliated parental concerns with the usage.

Consistent with other studies, parents were not only perturbed about the physiological impacts and eyesight issues incessant DM usage yielded, but were also apprehensive about the sedentary lifestyle it may inculcate, derailing children’s holistic development consequently. Moreover, parents have expressed the following concerns: displacement of time effect, inappropriate content and predatory online encounters.

This study found that PM practices for young children fixated on Gatekeeping and Informative Mediation. Contrary to most PM studies conducted on older children, this study found that Discursive and Diversionary Mediation was not frequently practised and employed, as various Gatekeeping mechanisms were already established. Parents closely supervised their children’s usage, which typically involved conspicuous and austere rules for children’s content consumption and online contacts.

Interestingly, this study found that Gatekeeping and Informative Mediation were substantially impacted by siblings’ and grandparents’ behaviour. Children, who had older siblings modelling favourable DM behaviour, were more receptive to the Gatekeeping measures. PM became difficult for parents when grandparents’ management of children’s DM usage were inconsistent with theirs. Such findings are a novel contribution to the PM theory.