About this session

Saturday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Parenting in the Digital Age: Technology's Influence on Parent-Child Dynamics and Child Development

In today's digital age, technology significantly impacts family dynamics and child development. How parents engage with their children and how they interact with digital media not only models behavior but also directly influences their interactions with children, shaping their media use and development. Despite its importance, our understanding of how digital environments affect parenting, parent-child interactions, and child outcomes is limited by the use of survey designs and cross-sectional data in most existing studies.

This symposium aims to address this gap by presenting three insightful papers that explore the associations between parents' digital use, parent-child interactions, and the development of preschool children in Chinese heritage contexts, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. These studies employ varied methodological approaches, such as experimental, longitudinal, multi-method, and person-centered techniques. The first paper examines the effects of parental phubbing during interactions with their children in an experimental setting. The second paper uses longitudinal data to investigate how parental engagement impacts children's screen time and executive functions over time, as well as the transactional relation between the two child variables. The final paper uses a person-centered approach to identify distinct patterns of parental digital media use and their effects on children's developmental outcomes. The discussant, leveraging his expertise in early childhood development and digital technology, will analyze the three papers collectively, evaluating their combined impact on our understanding of the digital landscape of parenting. Together, these papers offer valuable implications for fostering a robust discussion on promoting healthier family dynamics in the digital age.

Paper #1
Title	The Impacts of Parental Phubbing on Parent-child Interactions: An Experimental Study
Presenting author	Dr. Eva Y.H. Lau, Ph.D., The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Paper #2
Title	Digital Parenting and Children’s Self-Control: Longitudinal Associations Between Young Children’s Screen Time and Executive Function
Presenting author	Eva E. Chen, Ed.D., National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

Paper #3
Title	Parental Digital Media Patterns and Children's Behaviors: Insights from Latent Profile Analysis
Presenting author	Sha Xie, Shenzhen University, China

View all paper details

Session chair
Dr. Eva Y.H. Lau, Ph.D., The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Discussant
Dr. Hui Li, Ph.D., The Education University of Hong Kong, China

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