Abstract
Researchers widely agree that how children spend their time is an important predictor of the development of their skills, relationships, attitudes, and behavior patterns. And while media estimates indicate that media play a considerable presence in the daily life of most youngsters today, media use estimates in the absence of context present an incomplete picture. Not only can the context of media use influence whether or not media are consumed, but context can also influence the experience and subsequent effects of such media content. Despite this, media context is inconsistently investigated in children’s media research. To help address this gap, this study evaluated young Dutch children’s media use through the contours of one context variable—parental media mediation. Working with parent-report data from a sample of children 3–8 years old, results of this study support the argument that context matters. Not only is the type of parental mediation (restrictive, active) associated with different types of media use, but the style of mediation is also differentially associated with media use. Perhaps most notably, not only were children more likely to consume greater amounts of educational media content when their parents actively encouraged such content (as well as consume less violent content), but the effect size of these relationships was the largest among all of the relationships discovered in this study. Such findings have important implications for future research as well as for the messages that we share with parents about managing media at home.
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Notes
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Preliminary models also examined potential interactions with age to identify whether the relationship between parental mediation and media use may vary as a function by age. Although some interactions were significant, no meaningful differences emerged. For model parsimony and to aid interpretation, age was treated as a covariate in final analytic models.
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Acknowledgements
The research reported in this chapter is supported by a grant to Professor Patti Valkenburg from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no [AdG09 249488-ENTCHILD]. Special thanks to Professor Valkenburg for her comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and to the research team involved with the study design and data collection—especially Helen Vossen, Karin Fikkers, Sanne Nikkelen, Maria Koutamanis, and TNS-NIPO.
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Piotrowski, J.T. (2017). The Parental Media Mediation Context of Young Children’s Media Use. In: Barr, R., Linebarger, D. (eds) Media Exposure During Infancy and Early Childhood. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45102-2_13
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