An Exploratory Investigation of Parenting Strategies for Managing Adolescent Social Media Use

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Project Summary/Abstract Over 89% of adolescents use social media, and prior studies suggest that social media experiences have critical implications for adolescents' psychosocial adjustment. Parents may play an important role in promoting adaptive social media use, yet studies examining parents' involvement in adolescent social media use are limited. For many years, research has focused on parenting strategies to manage youth's traditional media use (e.g., TV, movies). However, social media sites (e.g., Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram) are unique in that adolescents use them to both consume and create content, frequently access them via personal devices (i.e., smartphones), and often rely on them for peer interactions. These features create new parenting challenges and require updated assessment strategies. At least six media-specific parenting strategies may impact teens' social media use: communication, co-use, modeling, limit setting, non-technical monitoring, and technical mediation (e.g., use of parental control software). The proposed study will characterize these and other strategies, examining the degree to which they are influenced by traditional parenting dimensions (i.e., warmth, control, structure, alliance) and parents' digital skills. Furthermore, this study offers a needed next step to understand the effectiveness of these strategies in managing teens' social media use. We will recruit 80 adolescents (ages 12-14) and their parents from the community to participate in a multi-method investigation of social media-specific parenting strategies. Parents and teens will complete baseline self-report measures and a novel observationally coded task to assess in vivo parent-teen interactions around parent management of teen social media use. In addition, they will complete a two-week ecological momentary assessment (EMA) procedure assessing daily variations in parent management strategies as well as teen social media experiences and mood. The primary aims of the study are to: 1) characterize social media-specific parenting strategies using a multi-method procedure, 2) examine parenting factors that predict social media-specific parenting strategies (i.e., overall parenting dimensions and digital skills), and 3) examine associations among parent management strategies, adolescent social media experiences, and psychosocial adjustment. Findings will serve as the foundation for refining a larger scale assessment study to examine social media-specific parenting strategies and adolescents' short and long-term social-emotional adjustment. This will inform a preventive intervention to enhance parenting strategies for managing social media use. This research directly advances NICHD's mission, including the Scientific Vision Theme of “behavior,” by examining the effects of emerging technologies on adolescent development and by identifying family factors that are most likely to promote positive outcomes.