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“Parents shape their children’s media habits from the time of infancy, through setting limits on amount and content of media use, helping children understand what they encounter on screens, and role modeling technology use.” (Redesky et al., 2016, p. 694)

An important facet of my inquiry is determining how adults and young children (particularly infants) actually communicate in an environment where digital and/or mobile technologies are being used. In A Naturalistic Study of Child and Family Screen Media and Mobile Device Use by Domoff et al. the authors studied what was being said by, and to, young children when any screen or mobile device was in use in their immediate home environment. They had several interesting findings:

  • Parents’ mediation of screen media tended to be reactive and aimed at restricting use or explaining technology functionality.
  • Active mediation was initiated most by the children (in preschool and school-age groups) asking or commenting on the content of the media. This was less evident in the infant group as they lacked the speaking skills to initiate those dialogues.
  • Siblings played a more dominant role in mediation than parents.
  • Parents and children negotiated screen time limits.
  • “Parallel family media use was common. Multiple family members engaged with their own mobile devices while simultaneously being exposed to background screen media (i.e., media multitasking).” (Domoff et al., 2019, p. 401)
  • “Active mediation of TV has been found to mitigate the risks of exposure to violent media (e.g., aggression; Nathanson and Cantor 2000), and enhance positive effects of prosocial media (e.g., Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood; Rasmussen et al. 2016).” (Domoff et al., 2019, p. 402)

The second point was the most interesting to me as my research to date has highlighted the importance of mediating screen media with very young children. Domoff et al. describe active mediation as “consist[ing] of parents’ communication with their children about media content, including characters’ actions and motivations”. It looks then like this is not happening very much with the youngest children. If parents don’t often initiate active mediation, then the ones with more consistent speech skills are privileged, as they are able to initiate these interactions. The authors last point about family members engaging with separate devices while together made me wonder about whether the adults were so wrapped up in their own device use, that their interactions with their children were reactive rather than proactive.

Then I wanted to know about parents’ perceptions of their own media use around their children. Enter Parent Perspectives on Their Mobile Technology Use : The Excitement and Exhaustion of Parenting While Connected by Radesky et al.. In it, the authors describe a study where they conducted a series of interviews to elicit parents’ nuanced and complex feelings toward they way that they use screen and mobile technology around their infants.

“Cognitively, they described the act of multitasking between technology and children as stressful or less effective; specifically, they described how the cognitive load of doing work or accessing information via technology often makes it difficult to read and respond to children’s social cues in the moment” (Redesky et al., 2016, p. 699).

Parents felt tensions between their tech use and their parental and daily responsibilities. This supports the Domoff’s findings that parents interactions around technology use tend to be reactive and rarely focus on the content that their children are accessing unless the child brings it up. It seems that parents are distracted by their own devices and so are less mindful of their children’s experiences with screen and mobile media than they might like to be. The question is, how does parental use of mobile tech influence children’s socialization and development? Does parents’ attention to their devices impact their child’s sense of self worth? What kind of role-modelling are we adults doing? It brings me back to the idea of consciously role-modelling tech etiquette with young children. It seems we also need to be more mindful of actively mediating young children’s tech use, especially if they are too young to ask us about it.