Digital Parenting in Adolescence – A Socio-Ecological Analysis of Parental Practices and Interpretations [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

Over the past decades, the rapid spread of digital technologies has fundamentally reshaped everyday life, including the most intimate sphere of social interaction: the family. Digital technologies offer new opportunities for learning, entertainment, and connection, yet they also introduce new uncertainties. Parents are increasingly expected to guide their children in digital environments they did not grow up with, where norms and risks are often unclear (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). As a result, children’s technology use has become a visible and socially evaluated aspect of contemporary parenting, in which parents make decisions about their own family life and also reflect on whether they are acting as responsible parents. These developments occur in a broader social context characterized by rising expectations of parenting. In many Western societies, good parenting is increasingly understood as an intensive, future-oriented activity that requires constant attention, emotional involvement, and informed decision-making (Hays, 1996; Lee et al., 2023). These expectations are particularly evident in relation to digital technologies, which place additional responsibility on parents to guide children in rapidly changing environments (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). Within this culture of intensive parenting, technology occupies an ambivalent place. It appears at once as a resource to be cultivated, an investment in children’s development and future prospects (Lareau, 2002; Doepke et al., 2019), and as a risk to be anticipated and contained, in keeping with the risk-consciousness of late-modern parenting (Beck, 1992; Lee et al., 2023). Much of the everyday work this involves is anticipatory and organizational, and it is distributed unequally, falling most often on mothers (Daminger, 2019; Ciciolla & Luthar, 2019; Dean et al., 2022). Despite the growing body of research on parental mediation and digital media use, digital parenting is still often treated as a set of individual strategies rather than as a socially embedded process shaped by family dynamics, institutional expectations, and broader cultural narratives. This dissertation argues that digital parenting in adolescence is best understood within a socio-ecological framework, and it uses Belsky’s (1984) socio-ecological process model of parenting as its main theoretical framework. In Belsky’s model, parenting is influenced by three interrelated subsystems: the parent, the child, and contextual sources of stress and support surrounding the family. This perspective allows examination of digital parenting as a multidetermined process shaped simultaneously by individual resources, relational dynamics, and structural conditions. Although Belsky’s framework has been used in research on parental mediation and ICT use (Dedkova & Smahel, 2020; Walker & Rudi, 2014), its explicit application to digital parenting in adolescence remains relatively rare, despite its clear relevance.