Online Parent Media Literacy Program to Promote Preadolescent Health

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Abstract Preadolescence is a critical window of development during which beliefs and behaviors related to gender roles, appearance ideals, romantic relationships, and sex are adopted, impacting proximal and distal health outcomes. Parents are influential in shaping their children’s beliefs and behaviors, and high-quality parent- child communication can serve as a protective factor to improve youth health outcomes. However, parents often struggle with effectively communicating with their children about these topics, especially within the context of the declining age of puberty. For preadolescents, media are gender and sexual socializing agents, and the messages they receive about appearance, gender roles, relationships, and sex are often stereotypical, unrealistic, and inaccurate. Parents can attenuate the potentially harmful impact of media on their children through parental media mediation, and parenting programs using media literacy education (MLE) have been shown to favorably impact youth health outcomes. The first aim of this project is to create MAP-Tween, a web- based program designed to provide parents of preadolescents with media mediation skills, knowledge about preadolescent development, and practice in high-quality parent-child communication about puberty and sexual development, gender stereotypes, relationships, and sex. Program development will be enhanced by a diverse advisory panel of parents, preadolescents, key stakeholders (e.g., schools, community-based organizations), and expert consultants. The second aim of this project is to conduct a feasibility study of MAP- Tween in which a diverse sample of parent-child pairs (preadolescents ages 9-12 and their parent/guardian; N=300) are randomly assigned to either the intervention group (receive MAP-Tween) or an active control group (review online PDFs of medically accurate information on preadolescent development). Parents and tweens will complete pre-post assessments, which will provide a preliminary test of program effectiveness for positively affecting outcomes. It is hypothesized that this program will enhance parental media mediation and parent-child communication frequency and quality, and in turn, positively impact preadolescent health-related outcomes. This project shifts the prevention paradigm to focus on the early antecedents of sexual and relationship health and sexual violence and fills a gap in evidence-based programs for parents of preadolescents to help them engage in high-quality communication with their child about these important topics. MAP-Tween will be the only evidence-based parent program that explicitly addresses the influence of media on preadolescent health. The program uses highly interactive web-based functionality that allows for a customized user experience including the ability for parents to select specific program content and “post” it to a section of the program for their children to access and develop a customized family media plan. This project would evaluate preliminary effectiveness and feasibility of MAP-Tween and determine if a future larger-scale study with mediator and moderator analyses and longer-term follow-ups is warranted.