Supporting Children and Parents in the Digital Age

By Michaeline Jensen, PhD (University of North Carolina-Greensboro) & Jessica Navarro, MSW, MS (University of North Carolina-Greensboro)

Families are more digitally connected today than ever before, with near saturation among adolescents and young adults (Perrin, 2021). Today’s cohort of parents must help their children navigate ever-changing virtual contexts despite themselves being raised in a largely offline world. About two-thirds of parents feel that parenting is harder today than it was 20 years ago, with nearly a quarter attributing the added challenge to technology (Auxier et al., 2020). However, some parents also see familia benefits, with 18% of parents reporting that digital devices mostly help the parent-child relationship (Common Sense Media, 2016). In reality, digital technologies are deeply embedded within family systems, where they confer both benefits and risks. There is a role for child, adolescent, and family psychologists to help guide parents through the challenges and opportunities of parenting in the digital age.

Parental Mediation

Parental mediation (i.e., the skills and practices parents use to mitigate the risks and amplify the benefits) of media has been studied since the 1960s and originally focused on exposure to television. However, modern digital technology is more interactive, immersive, social, and portable (Jiow et al., 2017) than the media of the past, and thus has distinct intersections with parenting contexts (Navarro & Tudge, 2022). In general, parents attempt to utilize mediation strategies in line with their overarching attitudes and beliefs (Livingstone et al., 2015), but this may be more difficult in the digital age given gaps in digital literacy between parents and children. Digital parental mediation may be viewed as a form of digital socialization, whereby parents attempt to guide the development of their child’s values and beliefs about the internet (Smith et al., 2015; Navarro & Tudge, 2022). Within parental mediation, scholars typically delineate four main domains: active mediation, restrictive mediation, monitoring, and co-use (Clark, 2011). Empirically-based recommendations about what constitutes effective parental mediation of child technology use are rare, due in part to the difficulty of measuring mediation strategies across rapidly evolving platforms (Modecki et al., in press).

Technological Influences on Parent–Child Relationships

One long-standing parental concern centers around the potential for time spent on technology to detract from face-to-face relationships (e.g., by displacing parent-child face-to-face interactions, distracting from quality time spent together, or by causing conflict; Kraut et al., 1998). Although some early research pointed towards the displacement of time spent interacting with parents by time spent online (Lee, 2009; Liu et al., 2013), other studies suggest that time online may not be strongly related to the quantity or the quality of parent–child interactions (Jensen et al., 2021b; Lee, 2009; Willoughby, 2008). Technoference, or interference to interpersonal interactions caused by technology, is also a risk associated with digital and social media; 85.5% of youth report that they get distracted by technology while interacting with their parents at least some of the time, and 77.5% report that their parents likewise get distracted by their own devices (Stockdale et al., 2018). Digital technology can also spark conflict within the family, and is fairly common; 32% of teens and 36% of parents in the US say that they argue about digital devices daily (Common Sense Media, 2016). Conflict is especially likely when there is a mismatch between parent and adolescent digital literacy or perceptions of online risks, and when youth perceive that their parents use overly restrictive or intrusive mediation tactics (Borca et al., 2015; Dwokin, 2018; Nelissen & Van den Bulck, 2018).

Digital and social technologies also afford opportunities for growth and flourishing within the parent-child relationship. For instance, the fact that youth are often the experts (and their parents the novices) in the digital domain can present opportunities for novel positive interactions, participatory learning, and parental reinforcement of child leadership skills (Clark, 2011; Dworkin, 2018; Nathanson, 2018; Navarro, 2021).

Technology as a Parenting Tool

Digital technologies are also important tools for parent-child communication in contemporary families. In the US, 90% of parents of adolescents report using electronic messaging with their child (Rudi et al., 2015). Mobile phones allow parents flexibility in balancing domestic and professional roles (Fletcher et al., 2018; Racz et al., 2017), with 35% of parents noting that technology makes parenting easier (Lauricella et al., 2016). The mobile phone is a vital source of connection in families separated by distance, as in transnational families, military families, family members in long-term care settings, and family members in co-parenting arrangements (Carvalho et al., 2015; Hessel & Dworkin, 2017; Williams & Merten, 2011). On the whole, the frequency of digital interactions between parents and their adolescent children is associated with both reduced conflict and higher levels of connection in real life (Coyne et al., 2014; Sharaievska, 2017).

Our own ecological momentary assessment research suggests that adolescents and their parents text/call on about 1/3 of days, and that days with digital contact also tend to be days when adolescents have positive offline experiences with their parents. We also find that teens with more internalizing or externalizing symptoms report texting/calling more frequently to seek parent support, and parents are more likely to do text/call “check-ins” on adolescents experiencing more behavioral problems, suggesting that those adolescents who most need extra parental help and monitoring may be getting it via mobile phone (Jensen et al., 2021a). This is consistent with our observational research on parent-emerging adult text messaging (in which we collected and qualitatively coded the content of 30,000+ texts; Hussong et al., 2020), which suggests that parents and children continue to use text messaging for monitoring, disclosures, and support seeking and provision even across the transition to college (Jensen et al., 2021c).

Roles for Child and Adolescent Psychologists in the Digital Age

Parents are frequently bombarded by messages on the perceived harms of digital technologies (George & Odgers, 2015), and can struggle to wade through a rapidly-evolving literature on technology and mental health characterized by a preponderance of findings that are small, correlational, confounded, and mixed (Ferguson et al., 2021; Odgers & Jensen, 2020). Child and adolescent psychologists can assist parents by translating both the most up-to-date empirical research and what we already know about parenting and socialization in offline contexts to the online world (Modecki et al., in press). It is also important that practitioners practice self-reflection and realize when their own digital literacy may be surpassed by adolescents’. In such cases, skill-building and the treatment of adolescents as experts can be useful strategies to increase clinician digital competence. Indeed, emerging research suggests that adolescent therapy clients who perceive their therapists as more competent around social media issues also tend to report a stronger therapeutic alliance overall (Pagnotta et al., 2018). Clinicians should support families in accessing the wealth of online mental health information, to help connect them to virtual resources where one can turn in time of crisis (e.g., Youth Crisis Text Lines), and to navigate digital tools for managing mental health symptoms (e.g., see Cyberguide). Finally, it is imperative that psychologists acknowledge that, although most young people have access to the internet, there persists a digital divide in broadband access and digital literacy across socioeconomic status and geography (Perrin, 2021; Katz, 2017; George et al., 2020) that can act as a barrier to youth engaging in psychosocial and educational interactions and activities online.

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