Open AccessWhat Is Digital Parenting? A Systematic Review of Past Measurement and Blueprint for the Future
Author(s) -
Kathryn L. Modecki,
Rachel Goldberg,
Pamela Wiśniewski,
Amy Orben
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
perspectives on psychological science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 5.234
H-Index - 140
eISSN - 1745-6924
pISSN - 1745-6916
DOI - 10.1177/17456916211072458
Subject(s) - blueprint , relevance (law) , psychology , focus group , survey data collection , social psychology , applied psychology , developmental psychology , data science , computer science , political science , engineering , marketing , business , mechanical engineering , statistics , mathematics , law
Concerns about parenting adolescents are not new, but the rapid diffusion of digital technologies has heightened anxieties over digital parenting. Findings are decidedly mixed regarding the impact of digital technologies on adolescent well-being, and parents are left to navigate their concerns without an empirically based road map. A missing link for understanding the state of the science is a clear characterization of how digital parenting is measured, including an evaluation of which areas demand an outsized share of scientific attention and which have been overlooked. To address this gap, we undertook two interdisciplinary systematic reviews of the digital-parenting literature and characterized measurement across (a) quantitative surveys ( n = 145 studies) and (b) qualitative focus groups, interviews, codesign studies, and user studies ( n = 49). We describe previously popular areas of survey measurement that are of decreasing relevance to parenting of digital spaces (e.g., co-use, hovering). We likewise highlight areas that have been overlooked, including consideration of positive uses of digital technologies, acknowledgment of bidirectional influence, and attention to heterogeneity among families and to extraparental social ecologies of support and monitoring. We provide recommendations for the future of digital-parenting research and propose a more comprehensive approach to measuring how modern adolescents are parented.