About this session

Thursday, 11:50 AM - 1:20 PM

Parents' Role in Children's Digital Media Use and Cascading Effects on Language Development

Parents play an important role in regulating children's digital media use, especially during the first few years of life, yet research on digital media often leaves parents out of the equation. Parental influence is critical not only in shaping the amount of time children spend with media but also in determining how and why media is used, which has cascading impacts on their language development. This symposium showcases the longitudinal relationship between parental engagement, motivations, and personality in children’s media use, highlighting its importance in predicting language outcomes in young children.

The first paper examines how various forms of parental media engagement, such as joint media engagement and technoference, affect children’s conversational turns during dialogue and expressive language development. The second paper explores how parent motivations and activities around e-books predict children’s vocabulary 6-months later. The third paper proposes that some of these relationships between parents and children’s media use may be driven by parent personality traits. Here, parent personality predicts children’s expressive vocabulary, but the relationship may be moderated by parents' context of use such as joint engagement and reasons/motivations during media use. Finally, an expert in children’s digital media use will discuss the implications of this work.

Taken together, this symposium highlights the often-overlooked role of parents in research on children's digital media use. Parents may be crucial in shaping their children's developmental trajectories, especially early in life.

Paper #1
Title	Speaking of Screens: Longitudinal Associations Between Home Media and Home Language Environment During Early Childhood
Presenting author	Dr. McCall Amberly Booth, Georgetown University, United States

Paper #2
Title	Longitudinal Associations Between Parent Motivations for Using Print vs E-Books with Infants and Infant Vocabulary
Presenting author	Jennica Li, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

Paper #3
Title	The Role of Parental Personality on Digital Media Use and Language Outcomes in Young Children
Presenting author	Sneh Jhaveri, Southern Methodist University, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Syakira Wijaya, Berea College, United States

Discussant
Rachel F. Barr, Ph.D., Georgetown University, United States

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