Understanding the Relationships between Parent and Child Problematic Media Use and Child Wellbeing

• In Event: Social media and adolescent relationships: The good, the bad, and the complicated

Abstract

Screen media and mobile device use have quickly become an integral part of child development processes, and constitute a significant percentage of a child’s waking hours. In fact, recent studies have shown that children ages 8-12 spend an average of more than 4 hours a day with screen media just for leisure purposes (Rideout & Robb, 2019), and this value increases when considering school and homework. To that end, media use is increasingly integrated into children’s daily routines and often results in emotional attachment to media and problematic use behaviors (Domoff et al., 2019; Jenkins-Guarnieri et al., 2013). Problematic media use is primarily defined by the addictive symptoms outlined in the DSM-V, which include preoccupation with media use, excessive use, and use of media to improve mood (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Further, problematic media use in childhood has been linked with negative effects on academic performance (Baumgartner et al., 2014), sleep (Pea et al., 2012), and anxiety (Becker et al., 2013).
While problematic media use has been studied across multiple different types of screen use, including gaming (Spekman et al., 2013; Young, 2017), internet addiction (Jelenchick et al., 2014; Kahraman & Demirci, 2018), and mobile phone use (Domoff et al., 2019; Park & Park, 2014), this is the first study, to the best of our knowledge, that considers problematic use of YouTube. As online video viewing (i.e., YouTube) is the primary media activity for children ages 8-12 (Rideout & Robb, 2019), it is necessary to consider not only the prevalence of problematic use in this age group, but also the implications problematic YouTube use can have on children who are growing in autonomy when it comes to their media choices (Grusec & Hastings, 2014), but are unable to understand the consequences of their use (Domoff et al., 2019). Additionally, as children tend to model the media use behaviors of their parents (Levine et al., 2019), it is also important to consider the role of parents’ problematic use. Therefore, we conducted an online survey of 300 parent-child dyads (children ages 10-12) with the expectation that:
H1: There will be a direct relationship between children’s problematic use of YouTube and their (a) social and emotional investment into YouTube, (b) sleep disturbance, (c) anxiety, (d) ADHD symptoms, and (e) psychosocial dysfunction.
H2: There will be an indirect relationship between parent’s problematic use of YouTube and their child’s wellbeing outcomes via child problematic use of YouTube.
Preliminary results (presented in attached table) showed significant positive correlations between all of the variables of interest. We will further investigate these relationships and test our hypotheses through SEM path analysis to gain a complete understanding of how these variables are related to one another. As data has already been collected and cleaned, the analysis will be completed before the conference presentation dates in April.
These findings will shed light on how child modeling of parent problematic media use influences multiple indicators of child well-being, particularly during the key developmental period of middle childhood.

Authors

• Lauren Beth Taylor, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Drew Cingel, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alexis R Lauricella, Erikson Institute
  Non-Presenting Author