Abstract
Parental regulation of children's smartphone use is typically associated with conflict. To explain conflict, this paper focused on parents' own smartphone use. A panel survey among parent-child pairs (NTme2 = 384) revealed that parents' excessive smartphone use at Time 1 was associated with a lack of control over children's smartphone use at Time 2. Lack of control over children's smartphone use, in turn, was related to conflict about the smartphone from children's and parents' perspectives over time. The relations with conflict were independent of whether parents thought that smartphones have negative effects on children. Overall, findings stress that both, children's and parents' smartphone use, need to be considered when explaining technology-related family conflicts.
Highlights
Children’s new technology use is often an arena of conflict in the family
Digital parenting research has mainly looked at parental mediation strategies as a means to alleviate conflicts
We found support for this hypothesis (b = 0.13, SE = 0.04, b = 0.12, p = .004) showing that parents’ excessive smartphone use at Time 1 positively affected parents’ lack of control at Time 2
Summary
Children’s new technology use is often an arena of conflict in the family. While young people are especially enthusiastic about new digital technologies, parents are worried about their children’s fast adoption and heavy use of new technologies (Hwang & Jeong, 2015; Kildare & Middlemiss, 2017). Due to the hierarchical relationship between parents and children, there is a great potential for dissatisfaction on both sides: Children may not agree with the rules set by their parents, and parents may perceive their children as addicted to new technologies, leading to a perceived lack of control when trying to regulate children’s technology use (see Erickson, 2015; Nikken & de Haan, 2015). This tension between parents and children has been intensified with the rise of smartphones as constant companions in children’s lives. The role of parents’ own media use has, received less scholarly attention
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