How does the level and style of digital parental involvement during childhood impact emotional maturity in teenagers?

By May Wong, Australia

Abstract:

The level of digital parental involvement during childhood can potentially affect the emotional maturity of teenagers. Traditional parental involvement such as reading children's books together, has been extensively studied, and a particular study by Dev Sci on the effects of early book reading to children has been demonstrated to have a significant positive impact on a child's emotional and psychological development during their teenage years. However, currently there are no studies on the effects of different styles of digital parental practices, including things like screen time monitoring, social media supervision, and online boundary setting, which, especially regarding the long-term impact on emotional development, remains underexplored. The research objective is to identify the patterns in various types of digital parenting (balanced, highly controlling) during childhood and the effect towards the emotional development, such as emotional regulation, resilience, and interpersonal skills after becoming a teenager. The findings of the research aim to provide future parental strategies that are better suited to navigating the challenges of raising emotionally healthy children in our increasingly digital and emotionally immature world.

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Introduction:

In this modern digitalised world, parenting has extended beyond the physical environment into virtual spaces, demanding new strategies to support children's emotional development. While traditional parental involvement – Including emotional support, supervision, and communication – is well-documented to influence emotional outcomes (Fan & Chen, 2001), the impact of digital parental involvement remains less clear. Digital parental involvement includes practices such as monitoring online activity, setting screen time limits, and engaging in conversations about internet safety. It is a common occurrence today for the teenagers in this generation to have experienced much of their social and emotional development online. Exposure to digital content without proper guidance can lead to emotional immaturity and insensitivity towards vulnerable topics, while healthy digital boundaries will lead to emotional resilience (Livingstone & Byrne, 2018). However, the optimal level and style of digital parental involvement during childhood that promote emotional maturity in teenagers is not yet well-understood.

Literature Review:

Parental involvement is often associated with positive outcomes in children's emotional and psychological development since high levels of parental support and communication tie in with greater emotional regulation and social competence (Fan & Chen, 2001; Pomerantz et al., 2007). Low parental involvement is often linked to emotional difficulties, including low self-esteem and poor coping mechanisms (Grolnick & Slowiaczek, 1994). However, these studies do not address the digital parental involvement level and how it can potentially affect the outcomes of a child’s emotional and psychological development. The rise of digital technology has added complexity to the parent-child dynamic. Recent studies show that excessive exposure to unregulated digital content can negatively impact emotional development, increasing anxiety, depression, and issues with self-esteem which could result in a person being emotionally unstable (Twenge & Campbell, 2018). Whilst this study mentions digital content, it does not take into account of the childhood of the teenagers or adolescents who may have already had unrestricted digital content since they were a child or properly restricted/regulated digital devices by their parents from childhood.

Methodology:​ 

Quantitative component: A survey will be distributed to the teenage volunteers aged 13–18, which will measure their current emotional maturity levels by using a scale between 1-10 for how they feel towards a particular phrase/prompt. The Emotional Maturity Scale for Adolescents (Singh & Bhargava, 1990) will be adapted to modern contexts to assess emotional regulation, resilience, empathy, and interpersonal skills. For example, one question can be like: ‘Do you typically handle conflict or stress online and offline well?’ which the participant will then give a score of 10 being very well and 1 being not at all.

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Qualitative component: Interviews with a smaller subgroup of 10 people of each age (13-18) to gain deeper insights into personal digital parenting experiences, and emotional development. An example question could be ‘How restrictive were your parents towards your online life growing up?’

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Participants will be recruited from local high schools. Inclusion criteria are:

• Ages 13–18 with access to personal digital devices (e.g., smartphone, tablet) during childhood.

• They are willing to participate in the survey and/or interviews.

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Procedure

1. All the participants will complete an online survey that takes around 10 minutes to measure/calculate their emotional maturity score.

2. Volunteers for the interviews will be selected based on the previous survey responses with volunteers representing high, medium, and low emotional maturity categories.

3. The selected participants will sit interviews (~20 minutes each) which explore deeper emotional reflections and perceptions of parental digital involvement.

4. Compare experiences of participants with high, medium, and low digital parental involvement with the average emotional maturity score of the participants from that same range.

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Quantitative data will be analysed by finding a mean of the emotional maturity levels and separating the participants into 3 sections – low, medium, and high emotional maturity to identify relationships between digital parental involvement and emotional maturity.

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Qualitative data will be thematically analysed to identify common patterns and experiences across different levels of parental involvement.

Conclusion:

While the influence of traditional parental involvement on emotional maturity is well established, relatively little research focuses specifically on digital parental involvement. Existing studies mainly emphasise internet safety or academic impacts rather than emotional development. Furthermore, the majority of literatures either treats all parental control as 100% positive or 100% negative, without distinguishing between authoritative (balanced) and authoritarian (overly controlling) digital parenting styles (Hiniker et al., 2016).

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References :

Fan, X., & Chen, M. (2001). Parental involvement and students' academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 13(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009048817385

Grolnick, W. S., & Slowiaczek, M. L. (1994). Parents' involvement in children's schooling: A multidimensional conceptualization and motivational model. Child Development, 65(1), 237– 252. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131378

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Hiniker, A., Schoenebeck, S. Y., & Kientz, J. A. (2016). Not at the dinner table: Parents’ and children’s perspectives on family technology rules. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 1376–1389. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819940

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Singh, Y., & Bhargava, M. (1990). Manual for emotional maturity scale. Agra Psychological Research Cell.

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Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2018). Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study. Preventive Medicine Reports, 12, 271–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmedr.2018.10.003