Parental Attachment and Problematic Internet Use among Chinese Adolescents: The Moderating Role of Gender and Grit.

Xiaoyu Lan,Wenchao Wang

doi:10.3390/ijerph17238933

Abstract

Problematic Internet use (PIU) is currently becoming a more serious public health concern, representing a deleterious effect on adolescent adaptive emotional and behavioral patterns. Given the prevalence of PIU and its deleterious impact on adolescents’ optimal functioning, it is valuable to investigate the risk and protective factors of PIU. Guided by a socio-ecological framework, the current study examines the associations of paternal attachment and maternal attachment with PIU among Chinese adolescents. Furthermore, this study investigates whether adolescents’ gender and grit moderate this association. A total of 2677 Chinese adolescents (56.5% girls; M age = 15.56; SD = 1.57) was involved in this study. Adolescents were uniformly instructed to complete a battery of self-reported questionnaires. The results of linear regression analyses showed that paternal attachment and maternal attachment security were negatively related to PIU. Moreover, moderation analyses revealed that higher levels of grit buffered against boys’ PIU in the context of paternal attachment security and girls’ PIU in the context of paternal attachment insecurity. The current study suggests that parental attachment security plays an important role in mitigating the likelihood of Chinese adolescents’ PIU. Moreover, the buffering role of grit in PIU varies by the levels of paternal attachment security, depending on the adolescents’ gender.

Highlights

With the rapid economic growth in mainland China, Internet use has dramatically increased in the last few decades
We focus on parental attachment as a contextual factor and adolescent’s gender and grit as individual characteristics, documenting how these factors directly and interactively influence Chinese adolescents’ problematic Internet use (PIU)
The authors explained that gritty adolescents tend to have high self-efficacy and strong desires to mobilize all available resources to overcome difficulties in front of adversities. Informed by this initial evidence, we propose that grit may moderate the association between parental attachment and PIU among Chinese adolescents

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid economic growth in mainland China, Internet use has dramatically increased in the last few decades. Based on a recent report from the China Internet Network Information Center (2019), the Internet has penetrated 57.6% of China’s total population, and there has been an increase of 56 million. The growth in Internet use has been paralleled by emerging concerns about problematic Internet use (PIU). As noted by previous studies in Chinese adolescents [4,7], PIU is currently becoming a more serious public health concern. In this context, the onset of PIU could interfere with adolescents’ daily life, leading to a plethora of psychosocial adversities and underachievement in school [8,9]. Given the prevalence of PIU and its deleterious impact on adolescent adaptive emotional and behavioral patterns, it is necessary to investigate the risk and protective factors of PIU among them

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion