Parenting the Mobile Internet in Italian Households: Parents' and Children's Discourses

Drawing on the rich literature on parental mediation of children's use of digital and mobile media, this paper discusses the findings of an explorative study conducted in Italy, aimed at understanding how families appropriate smartphones in relation to the household's moral economy, their domestication of ICTs and the parenting style adhered to by parents. The aim of the paper is threefold: understand (1) how are social legitimations for or against children's use of smartphones constructed; (2) how do parents make sense of their mediation of children's mobile internet use drawing on different interpretative repertoires; and (3) how children negotiate, resist or evade parental justifications by producing alternative narratives.     

Children’s digital content creation: Towards a processual understanding of media production among Danish children

ABSTRACT

This article explores how we may study children’s digital content creation as creative processes of production. Based on a case study of 6-16-year-olds’ filmmaking in an out-of-school context, the analysis identifies three interlaced categories marking the production processes: Social interaction, semiotic negotiation and practice-based learning. Results demonstrate that joint creation of new film narratives unleashes students’ playful exploration, trains multimodal skills, and catalyzes modes of reflexivity that are germane to complex problem-solving. In conclusion, it is argued that digital content creation needs added pedagogical attention as a means of advancing children’s democratic rights of expression as societal resources, not as individual requisites.     

Time use,parenting practice and conduct problems in four‐ to five‐year‐old Australian children

Background: Conduct problems (CoP) represent one of the most common mental health issues manifesting in childhood, with the potential to influence the developmental trajectory of children negatively. Early identification of children at risk of developing CoP is a key strategy to their effective management. Evidence suggests that parenting practices are important contributors to CoP; however, these practices can also interact with the activities in which children engage and these have not yet been addressed in combination. Method: A cross‐sectional study of a nationally representative sample of 4936 four‐ to five‐year‐old children from Wave 1 of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children was undertaken to examine the relationship between CoP, parenting practices and time use. Results: All children were at a lower risk of CoP if they were exposed to less hostile and consistent parenting practices and if they did not have sleep problems as reported by their parents. However, boys were more vulnerable if they had fathers who had not undertaken tertiary education, and spent more time in risk‐oriented physical activities. Conclusion: Parenting practices are affirmed as a significant independent predictor of risk for developing CoP. The nature of activities in which children engaged, particularly boys, also has the potential to influence the manifestation of CoP. Occupational therapy services for children with CoP are best provided in the context of family‐centred practice and should incorporate an examination of daily time use.     

Evidence for the effects of parental mediation and childhood media use on US college students' social media use

Parents' rules and restrictions on media use have been shown to reduce amounts of media consumed by children. It remains unclear as to whether the effects of parents' restrictions on media use persist when children reach early adulthood. The present survey analysis assesses the extent to which restricted media use in childhood affects amounts of social media use among a sample (N = 454) of young adults and how self-control affects this relation. The results suggest that young adults who are higher in self-control and are introduced to social media at a later age use less social media as young adults. Being introduced to social media at an early age is also associated with texting during class as well as texting before sleep. Rules on children's media use appear to have no lasting effects on amounts of social media use.     

Monitoring,Mediating, and Modeling: Parental Influence on Adolescent Computer and Internet Use in the United States

Proliferating internet-accessible media have altered the home context, raising questions about parental influence on youth computer/internet use. This study examines parents' monitoring, internet mediation, and modeling behaviors as predictors of adolescents' computer/internet use among 629 US adolescents and their parents. Parents' time spent with computers was positively associated with teens' computer time, and parents' engagement in seven internet activities (e.g., IM/chat) also predicted teens' engagement in those activities. Greater general parental monitoring of adolescents predicted less teen engagement in IM/chat, social networking site use, video streaming, and multiplayer online games, while parental tracking of internet use predicted more teen IM/chat. Older teens spent more time with computers and in various internet activities and reported lower rates of general parental monitoring and parental internet mediation. Findings suggest that parents act as models for their children's internet use. Additionally, general parental practices not specific to media may affect youths' media behaviors as well.     

Influence of Maternal Exposure to Mass Media on Growth Stunting Among Children Under Five: Mediation Analysis Through the Water,Sanitation, and Hygiene Program

BackgroundThe issue of malnutrition in the Democratic Republic of Congo is severe. Meanwhile, the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene program has been demonstrated to be effective in reducing the rates of growth stunting among children.ObjectiveWe aimed to explore the association between maternal exposure to mass media and stunting in children through water, sanitation, and hygiene behaviors.MethodsMediation analysis was conducted using data from the 2018 Multiple Indicators Cluster Surveys.ResultsMothers’ exposures to television and the internet in the Democratic Republic of Congo significantly decreases the risk of stunting in children by 5% and 10%, respectively, mediated by household water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities and practices.ConclusionsThese findings could inform interventions and policies to reduce the rate of stunting rate children by promoting water, sanitation, and hygiene through mass media, especially through the internet and television.     

Longitudinal Associations between Food Parenting Practices and Dietary Intake in Children: The Feel4Diabetes Study

Food parenting practices (FPPs) have an important role in shaping children’s dietary behaviors. This study aimed to investigate cross-sectional and longitudinal associations over a two-year follow-up between FPP and dietary intake and compliance with current recommendations in 6- to 11-year-old European children. A total of 2967 parent-child dyads from the Feel4Diabetes study, a randomized controlled trial of a school and community-based intervention, (50.4% girls and 93.5% mothers) were included. FPPs assessed were: (1) home food availability; (2) parental role modeling of fruit intake; (3) permissiveness; (4) using food as a reward. Children’s dietary intake was assessed through a parent-reported food frequency questionnaire. In regression analyses, the strongest cross-sectional associations were observed between home availability of 100% fruit juice and corresponding intake (β = 0.492 in girls and β = 0.506 in boys, p < 0.001), and between parental role modeling of fruit intake and children’s fruit intake (β = 0.431 in girls and β = 0.448 in boys, p < 0.001). In multilevel logistic regression models, results indicated that improvements in positive FPPs over time were mainly associated with higher odds of compliance with healthy food recommendations, whereas a decrease in negative FPP over time was associated with higher odds of complying with energy-dense/nutrient-poor food recommendations. Improving FPPs could be an effective way to improve children’s dietary intake.     

Through the tablet glass: transcendent parenting in an era of mobile media and cloud computing

Abstract

In many urban societies, mobile media and cloud computing that offer always-on, always-available information and communication services are increasingly pervasive. These services shape the communication practices and media consumption habits of families, influencing how parents guide children’s media use, and how parents and children connect with one another. In this paper, I explain how the growing prevalence of mobile media and cloud computing has different implications at each stage of young people’s development. I then argue that the advent of pervasive, ubiquitous media has engendered the practice of “transcendent parenting” which goes beyond traditional, physical concepts of parenting, to incorporate virtual and online parenting and how these all intersect. In this emergent form of parenting, parents must transcend every media consumption environment that the child may enter, their children’s offline and online social interaction milieu and “timeless time” as experienced in the apparent ceaselessness of parenting duties.     

Screen Media,Parenting Practices,and the Family Environment in Australia: A Longitudinal Study of Young Children's Media Use,Lifestyles, and Outcomes for Healthy Weight

Few studies of media use and adiposity explore the influence of parenting on children's lifestyle behaviors. Screen media access, bedroom television, lack of physical activity, and snacking on energy-dense foods have long been implicated in child overweight. This research used data from the first three waves of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to investigate, prospectively, the associations between parental practices in early to middle childhood and children's behaviors and weight in late childhood. A path model was used to investigate whether consistent parenting predicted setting of boundaries for access to and use of media, and was indirectly associated with children's lifestyle behaviors that increase the likelihood of healthy weight maintenance. The findings demonstrated that children's lifestyles pertinent to weight maintenance and media use cluster together and involve both old and newer screen media, but are also predicted by parenting practices and the family environment.     

Cross-national differences in consumer socialization,development, and behavior: a comparison of children in the United States and the Netherlands

With many studies on children and advertising presenting universal models of how children are socialized, develop and behave as consumers, this study tested whether such assumptions are appropriate by looking at differences between children and families in two of the countries where research on children and advertising is among the most robust – the Netherlands and United States. A total of 954 mothers of children between the ages of 5–12 from the United States and 437 from the Netherlands participated in the study. The results suggest that there are considerable differences in how children in these two countries are socialized as consumers and what parents report concerning their child’s consumer development and consumer behavior. These differences may be attributable to the differences in the consumer culture between the two countries.     

Physical Activity,Sedentary Behavior,and Sleep on Twitter: Multicountry and Fully Labeled Public Data Set for Digital Public Health Surveillance Research

BackgroundAdvances in automated data processing and machine learning (ML) models, together with the unprecedented growth in the number of social media users who publicly share and discuss health-related information, have made public health surveillance (PHS) one of the long-lasting social media applications. However, the existing PHS systems feeding on social media data have not been widely deployed in national surveillance systems, which appears to stem from the lack of practitioners and the public’s trust in social media data. More robust and reliable data sets over which supervised ML models can be trained and tested reliably is a significant step toward overcoming this hurdle. The health implications of daily behaviors (physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep [PASS]), as an evergreen topic in PHS, are widely studied through traditional data sources such as surveillance surveys and administrative databases, which are often several months out-of-date by the time they are used, costly to collect, and thus limited in quantity and coverage.ObjectiveThe main objective of this study is to present a large-scale, multicountry, longitudinal, and fully labeled data set to enable and support digital PASS surveillance research in PHS. To support high-quality surveillance research using our data set, we have conducted further analysis on the data set to supplement it with additional PHS-related metadata.MethodsWe collected the data of this study from Twitter using the Twitter livestream application programming interface between November 28, 2018, and June 19, 2020. To obtain PASS-related tweets for manual annotation, we iteratively used regular expressions, unsupervised natural language processing, domain-specific ontologies, and linguistic analysis. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk to label the collected data to self-reported PASS categories and implemented a quality control pipeline to monitor and manage the validity of crowd-generated labels. Moreover, we used ML, latent semantic analysis, linguistic analysis, and label inference analysis to validate the different components of the data set.ResultsLPHEADA (Labelled Digital Public Health Dataset) contains 366,405 crowd-generated labels (3 labels per tweet) for 122,135 PASS-related tweets that originated in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States, labeled by 708 unique annotators on Amazon Mechanical Turk. In addition to crowd-generated labels, LPHEADA provides details about the three critical components of any PHS system: place, time, and demographics (ie, gender and age range) associated with each tweet.ConclusionsPublicly available data sets for digital PASS surveillance are usually isolated and only provide labels for small subsets of the data. We believe that the novelty and comprehensiveness of the data set provided in this study will help develop, evaluate, and deploy digital PASS surveillance systems. LPHEADA will be an invaluable resource for both public health researchers and practitioners.     

Obesity-Related Communication in Digital Chinese News From Mainland China,Hong Kong,and Taiwan: Automated Content Analysis

BackgroundThe fact that the number of individuals with obesity has increased worldwide calls into question media efforts for informing the public. This study attempts to determine the ways in which the mainstream digital news covers the etiology of obesity and diseases associated with the burden of obesity.ObjectiveThe dual objectives of this study are to obtain an understanding of what the news reports on obesity and to explore meaning in data by extending the preconceived grounded theory.MethodsThe 10 years of news text from 2010 to 2019 compared the development of obesity-related coverage and its potential impact on its perception in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Digital news stories on obesity along with affliction and inferences in 9 Chinese mainstream newspapers were sampled. An automatic content analysis tool, DiVoMiner was proposed. This computer-aided platform is designed to organize and filter large sets of data on the basis of the patterns of word occurrence and term discovery. Another programming language, Python 3, was used to explore connections and patterns created by the aggregated interactions.ResultsA total of 30,968 news stories were identified with increasing attention since 2016. The highest intensity of newspaper coverage of obesity communication was observed in Taiwan. Overall, a stronger focus on 2 shared causative attributes of obesity is on stress (n=4483, 33.0%) and tobacco use (n=3148, 23.2%). The burdens of obesity and cardiovascular diseases are implied to be the most, despite the aggregated interaction of edge centrality showing the highest link between the “cancer” and obesity. This study goes beyond traditional journalism studies by extending the framework of computational and customizable web-based text analysis. This could set a norm for researchers and practitioners who work on data projects largely for an innovative attempt.ConclusionsSimilar to previous studies, the discourse between the obesity epidemic and personal afflictions is the most emphasized approach. Our study also indicates that the inclination of blaming personal attributes for health afflictions potentially limits social and governmental responsibility for addressing this issue.