Parental mediation, children’s self-control and their social media use

Abstract

Background: Parents believe that children’s intense social media use might negatively affect their academic performance and their well-being because of addictive like behaviors presented, that’s why, parents use some parenting strategies (restrictive mediation and active mediation) to decrease children’s social media use. It is crucial to investigate whether parenting practices are effective to reduce children’s social media use and which mechanisms may intervene in the relationship between them. In our paper, we will focus whether children’s self-control mediates the relationship between (parental) restrictive mediation and children’s intense social media use. Furthermore, we tried to depict if active mediation in addition to restrictive mediation contributed to children’s social media use. Methods: Children aged between 9-18 years old (N=404) completed 4 questionnaires as being the Reactive Restrictions Scale, Parenting Style inventory II, Self-control Scale and Intensity of Social Media Use Scale in an online environment. To test the mediation effect of children’s self-control between restrictive mediation and children’s social media use, we conducted multiple regression analysis using Baron and Kenny’s (1986) statistical method. Also, to see active mediation’s contribution on children’s social media use, we conducted hierarchical regression analysis. Results: We concluded that children’s self-control partially mediates the relationship between restrictive mediation and children’s social media use, also, we observed that active mediation could not significantly contribute to the children’s social media use next to restrictive mediation. Discussion: Our results contradicted what the self-control theory argued (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990) and demonstrated that the higher children are exposed to restrictive mediation, the lesser self-control they would have. Moreover, it is important to present that when parental restrictive mediation increases, children use more social media which indicates the strict parenting rules might not help to decrease children’s social media use. Even though we could not find a significant effect of active mediation next to restrictive mediation, for the future researches, looking to the main effect of it would be valuable.