Parental favoritism and mobile phone addiction in Chinese adolescents: The role of sibling relationship and gender difference

Abstract

• Firstly, based on family system theory, investigating both paternal favoritism, maternal favoritism, and their joint effect. • Secondly, the mediating role of sibling relationship is investigated, to reveal the underlying connection in multiple-child families. • Thirdly, multiple-child families are the dominant type of family across the world, and are in need of more research. Mobile phone addiction has raised increasing public concern in recent years, and researchers constantly demonstrated one of its factors as family risk. Parental favoritism, a common phenomenon in multiple-child family, is tightly linked to negative developmental outcomes, such as addiction and substance use, however, few studies have related it with mobile phone addiction. To investigate the underlying mechanism of parental favoritism and mobile phone addiction in Chinese adolescents, this study used the favoritism subscale of EMBU, Sibling Relationship Inventory, and Mobile Phone Addiction Index Scale, on 304 elementary school children and 303 junior school students (M age = 12.56, SD = 1.17, 45.9% boys) from two-child families. Results suggest that parental favoritism can positively predict adolescents’ mobile phone addiction, which is further mediated by sibling hostility. Moreover, the mediating model is only significant in girls, but not in boys. That is, for girls, combination of both high paternal favoritism and maternal favoritism is associated with highest sibling hostility. To conclude, this study demonstrated the mechanism underlying the relationship between parental favoritism and adolescents’ mobile phone addiction and gender differences, contributing to the understanding of the complex mechanism between family dynamics and children’s developmental outcomes.