Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 12, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 12, 2024 - Sep 6, 2024
Date Accepted: Jun 30, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Parental Internet-Specific Rules and the Onset of Adolescents’ Problematic Social Media Use: A Prospective Study Testing Potential Moderators
ABSTRACT
Background:
Concerned about adolescents' problematic social media use, many parents apply restrictive mediation. However, its effectiveness remains unclear.
Objective:
Therefore, this study aimed to provide insights into the specific groups and conditions under which restrictive mediation may effectively prevent adolescents' problematic social media use. Specifically, we investigated the prospective relationship between rules about amount, location and moment of Internet use and the onset of adolescents’ at-risk/problematic social media use. Additionally, we examined the moderating role of demographic and parenting factors, including adolescents’ age, adolescents’ gender, adolescent involvement in rule-setting, positive parenting, parental phubbing, and quality of co-parenting (two-way interactions). Furthermore, we explored whether the moderation effects of the parenting factors varied by adolescents’ age and gender (three-way interactions).
Methods:
Four wave survey data of 315 adolescents (T1: M age = 13.44 years, SD = 2.26, 46.3% girls) and their parents (T1: M age = 46.4 years, SD = 5.05, 55.4% mothers) were used.
Results:
Analyses revealed that setting internet-specific rules may prevent the development of problematic social media use symptoms in adolescents aged < 12.31 years, but may be counterproductive for adolescents aged > 15.70 years. No other significant two- and three-way interaction effects were found.
Conclusions:
These findings highlight the importance of age-appropriate parental mediation strategies to prevent problematic social media use.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.