The parental media mediation context of young children’s media use

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.