Introduction
Screen media has become a nearly ubiquitous feature in children’s cultural landscape. There are evidences that parent variables, such as socioeconomic status (Jordan, & Hennessy, 2013), parent education (Bittman & Unsworth, 2011) and parent television use (Rideout & Hamel, 2006）are associated with higher levels of child television time , but we know little about what predicts children’s media use with other technology. Moreover, given the growing amount of time young children spend with screen media , the features of children’s media using in this environment have important implications on children’s development on cognition (Schmidt, et al., 2008), language (Christakis, et al., 2009), social ability (Anderson,et al., 2001) and other aspects. The current study aims to conduct an empirical research to investigate the correlation between parents’ mobile phone addiction and children’s screen media addiction as well as the potential effects of screen media addiction on the adaptive behavior development and intellectual development of children. The mediation effect of parents’ management strategies was also examined in order to provide an actionable reference for children’s guardians to reduce the possible negative effects of children’s media exposure.
Method
We developed our scales based on the framework outlined in Smartphone Addiction Scale (Min, et al., 2013), Problematic Media Use Measure (Domoff, et al., 2017), Adaptive Behavior Assessment System (Oakland & Harrison, 2010), Wechsler Preschool& Primary Scale of Intelligence (Wechsler, 1939) and an analysis of the existing reviews in parents’ screen media management strategy (Richert, Robb, & Smith, 2011; Cingel & Krcmar, 2013 Lin & Atkin, 1989)). Researchers initially released 40 questionnaires and resolved discrepancy thorough analyzing the pre-test results and high reliability was achieved (average α = .93). Data on parents’ mobile phone addiction, children’s screen media addiction, adaptive behavior development of children, intellectual development of children as well as the parents’ screen media management strategies were measured separately by scales in Beijing and the total sampler size was N= 113. This study employed descriptive statistics and correlation analysis to examine the correlation between variables as well as the mediating effects of parents’ active management strategy and passive management strategy followed by structural equation analysis.
Results
Our research suggested that, children’s screen media habits could be affected by their parents. Parents’ mobile phone addiction level(M=9.2,SD=1.7) had a significant influence on children’s screen media addiction level(M=45.6,SD=10.8). And parents’ education level(M=5.99, SD=1.4) was also negatively related to children’s screen media addiction level. The results also indicated that children’s screen media addiction had a negative impact on children’s adaptive behavior development(M=102.7,SD=14.4), but have no influence on children’s intellectual development(M=104.6,SD=11.6). While parents’ mobile phone addiction level has neither direct influence on children's development nor indirect influence on children's development mediated by children’s screen media addiction level. Finally, parent’s passive management strategy mediated the influence of parents’ mobile phone addiction on children’s screen media addiction(β=.17,P<.01,CFI=.94, TLI=.91, RMSEA=.10, SRMR=.06,fit indices of this mediation model were adequate) , while the mediation effect of parent’s active management strategy was not proved(β=.14,P>.05,CFI=.9, TLI=.85, RMSEA=.13, SRMR=.067,fit indices of this mediation model were nearly adequate).