Parental Mediation of Smartphone and Social Media Activities to Protect Early Adolescent Children from Online Risks
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Early adolescent children engage in Internet-based online activities on smartphones and social media, which may result in online risks, including sexual risks. Parental mediation to regulate accessed content and contacts on smartphones and social media may prevent risks. This exploratory, descriptive study investigated parental mediation with early adolescent children 11 to 14 years old. A sample of 102 parents completed a REDCap online or paper-based survey to measure active mediation, co-use, general restrictive mediation, content-specific restrictive mediation, and supervision in response to a pre-survey prompt regarding mediation they use to protect their early adolescent children from sexual risks online. IBM SPSS Statistics 22 were used to analyse parental mediation frequencies. Participants utilized active mediation to communicate about appropriate online activities and restrictive mediation to control accessed content and contacts. Participants infrequently co-used by being online with children or supervised online activities. Future research should explore barriers to co-viewing and supervision.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, Issue 1, 2025.
APA Citation
Allison, K., & Dawson, R. M. (2025). Parental mediation of smartphone and social media activities to protect early adolescent children from online risks. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 30(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2025.2504530
Rights
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.