Parental mediation and children’s Internet use

This article examines parental regulation of children and teenagers’ online activities. A national survey of 1511 children and 906 parents found that 12—17-year-olds encounter a range of online risks. Parents implement a range of strategies, favoring active co-use and interaction rules over technical restrictions using filters or monitoring software, but these were not necessarily effective in reducing risk. Parental restriction of online peer-to-peer interactions was associated with reduced risk but other mediation strategies, including the widely practiced active co-use, were not. These findings challenge researchers to identify effective strategies without impeding teenagers’ freedom to interact with their peers online. Livingstone and Helsper/ Parental Mediation Of Children’s Internet Use 3 Parental Mediation of Children’s Internet Use Media surround children and young people in the modern household. At times, parents seem engaged in a constant battle with their children as they seek to balance the educational and social advantages of media use and the negative effects that some content or mediated contact might have on children’s attitudes, behavior, or safety. Though parents assume media affect other people’s children more than their own (Nathanson, Eveland, Park, & Paul, 2002), they try to regulate their children’s media use, hoping to maximize the advantages of today’s media-rich environment for their children and to minimize the disadvantages, as examined in this article. Strategies include rule-making and restrictions, both positive (e.g., explaining, discussing) and negative (e.g., disagreeing, criticizing) forms of mediation, and social co-viewing (Austin, 1990). Terminology varies, but the notion of “mediation” is widely seen to capture the parental management of the relation between children and media; usefully, it extends the parental role beyond simple restrictions to encompass also conversational and interpretive strategies (e.g., Nathanson, 1999; Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, & Marseille, 1999) as well as parental monitoring activities (Kerr & Stattin, 2000). However, it’s noted that some use “mediation” more narrowly to refer to parental discussion without also including rule-making or co-viewing (e.g. Austin, 1990). As the media and communication environment becomes increasingly difficult for governments to regulate, these hitherto private activities of parents are becoming more valued within public policy frameworks, especially those concerned with protecting children from media-related harm (Kunkel & Wilcox, 2001; Livingstone & Bober, 2006; Oswell, 2008). This is, broadly, consistent with the theorization of parental mediation in terms of the family system, for on this view, parental mediation strategies represent ways in which the family reproduces its values in the face of external meaning systems (e.g., Goodman, 1983; Hoover, Clark, & Alters, 2004; Livingstone, 2002). Not only do parents seek to prevent unwanted influences but also, as proposed by Warren’s (2005) ecological approach to the parent-child interaction proposes that parents use the media to facilitate desired values, for example, by using media to support shared family activities (via co-viewing, the construction of common interests, talking about media; c.f. Fujioka & Austin, 2002). This line of inquiry directs researchers to the importance of family communication patterns (Ritchie & Fitzpatrick, 1990) or parenting styles (Eastin, Greenberg, & Hofschire, 2006). Other researchers take a sociocognitive approach, regarding parental mediation as stimulating the development of children’s media literacy which may, again, mitigate harmful media effects (Austin, 1993; Kunkel & Wilcox, 2001; Nathanson, 2004). Although largely developed in parallel, these approaches may be considered complementary: Parental mediation both results from processes of family dynamics and child socialization and contributes to the shaping of family values, practices, and media literacy. In regulating their children’s media use, parents face several challenges. These include the proliferation of media goods in the home, especially in children’s bedrooms, and the growing complexity of media and communication technologies. Especially for new media, lack of technical expertise may hinder implementation of parental mediation at home (Facer, Furlong, Furlong, & Sutherland, 2003; Livingstone & Bober, 2006). Yet as domestic Internet use becomes more commonplace, even overtaking time spent with television in some countries (Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin, 2005), the bewildering array of online content accessible to young people occasions concern among parents, academics and policy-makers (Criddle, 2006). In the United Kingdom, 75% of 9—19-year-olds have Internet access at home (Livingstone & Bober, 2005). In the United States in 2004, 87% of 12—17-year-olds were Internet users, and 49% have home access to broadband (Fox, 2005; see also Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005). Notwithstanding the growing evidence of online risks (Berson & Livingstone and Helsper/ Parental Mediation Of Children’s Internet Use 4 Berson, 2005; Liau, Khoo, & Ang, 2005; Livingstone & Bober, 2006; Mitchell, Finkelhor, & Wolak, 2003; Peter & Valkenburg, 2006; Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2007), little is yet known of the strategies parents employ regarding their children’s Internet use, and still less is known of their effectiveness (although see Eastin, et al., 2006; Lenhart, 2005; von Feilitzen & Carlsson, 2004). In the research literature, most attention has been paid to parental mediation of children’s television use, this typically including practices designed to influence the child’s response to television content through joint discussion or through simply watching together with the child as well as more controlling practices designed to restrict or manage overall time spent watching television or the particular programs viewed (Austin, 1993; Van den Bulck & Van den Bergh, 2000). The use of various rules and practices varies according to the child’s gender (more for girls) and age (more for younger children) as well as, in some research, parenting style (Eastin, et al., 2006) and household socio-economic status (SES) (Nathanson, 2001b; Warren, 2005). Nathanson (1999, 2001a) draws together the research literature by proposing three broad strategies of parental regulation, namely active, restrictive, and co-viewing mediation. Valkenburg et al. (1999) similarly group mediation strategies for television into the categories of active or instructive mediation, rule making or restrictive mediation, and parental modeling or co-viewing (van der Voort et al., 1992). These strategies may be stated in a more general form to apply to all media: (1) Active mediation consists of talking about media content while the child is engaging with (watching, reading, listening to) the medium (hence, this includes both positive/instructional and negative/critical forms of mediation); (2) Restrictive mediation involves setting rules that restrict use of the medium, including restrictions on time spent, location of use or content (e.g., restricting exposure to violent or sexual content), without necessarily discussing the meaning or effects of such content; (3) Co-using signifies that the parent remains present while the child is engaged with the medium (as for co-viewing), thus sharing in the experience but without commenting on the content or its effects. Do parents employ similar mediation strategies for the Internet? It is noteworthy that in relation to parental mediation of video games, three similar types of strategies have been found—“restrictive mediation”, “active mediation” and “co-playing” (Nikken & Jansz, 2006). Hence, it is possible that parents will apply familiar strategies to the Internet also, thus showing consistency in their parenting approach. On the other hand, it is also possible that they will seek new strategies, given the highly publicized array of online risks. Moreover, by comparison with television (and even video games), it is difficult to make Internet use a shared activity (because of screen size, sitting position, reliance on the mouse, and common location in a small or private room). Also, online activities are less easily monitored with a casual glance at the screen, given multitasking across multiple open windows. Most important, online risks to children are greater than are television-related risks (regarding the extremes of violent or pornographic content, privacy or contact risks from strangers, etc), giving rise in turn to greater anxieties among parents (Wolak, et al., 2007; Peter & Valkenburg, 2006). Hence the first research question is: RQ1: What strategies of mediation, if any, do parents practice in regulating their children’s Internet use? Addressing this question should reveal the degree to which parents use similar mediation strategies to those developed for television for their child’s use of the Internet and whether, given the difficulties of monitoring and the limitations of parental expertise, they prefer restrictive to active mediation or co-use strategies of mediation. Although the literature to date does not bear the construction of specific hypotheses, the measures used (see below) Livingstone and Helsper/ Parental Mediation Of Children’s Internet Use 5 were designed, within practical limits, to cover the range of likely strategies, drawing on both the television mediation literature and widespread guidelines to parents (e.g., Criddle, 2006). Since research on television mediation shows few differences by child’s gender but greater mediation for younger children, it is expected to find this pattern also for Internet mediation. Is parental mediation effective? In relation to television, this question has not proved straightforward to answer. However, it can be concluded that different strategies of parental regulation of television have varying effects (Austin, 1990