This study examined the effects of negative parenting attitudes on adolescents’ academic helplessness through the mediating effects of social withdrawal and smartphone dependency. Data from the panel study of Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey 2018 (KCYPS 2018) collected by the National Youth Policy Institute (NYPI) was used to examine the research model. The subjects of the study consisted of 2,541 first grade middle school students (1,375 boys and 1,166 girls). Confirmatory factor analysis [CFA], structural equation modeling [SEM], and bootstrapping analysis were conducted by means of SPSS 25.0, AMOS 25.0, and Hayes’s PROCESS programs to examine the serial multiple mediating effects. The study results were as follows. First, negative parenting attitude had a direct effect on adolescents’ academic helplessness. This implies that adolescents who perceive their parents’ attitudes to be high in coercive, rejective, and chaotic levels indicate that they can easily get exhausted in academic settings. Second, negative parenting attitudes had an indirect effect on adolescents’ academic helplessness through social withdrawal and smartphone dependency. The results suggest that a high level of negative parenting attitude leads to higher social withdrawal and smartphone dependency that influences adolescents’ academic helplessness.

This study examined the longitudinal effects of media usage by early school-age children and of maternal parenting stress on children’s school adjustment. The study focused on the mediating effect of executive function difficulty. Longitudinal data to examine the hypothetical model were drawn from the eighth (2015) through tenth (2017) waves of the Panel Study of Korean Children (PSKC) collected by the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education (KICCE). A total of 581 children (293 boys and 288 girls) and their mothers were included. Confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation model, and bootstrapping analysis were applied using SPSS 25.0 and Amos 26.0. The results are as follows. First, no significant correlation was found between early school-age children’s media usage and maternal parenting stress. Second, neither media usage by early school-age children nor maternal parenting stress were found to directly affect children’s school adjustment. Third, media usage by early school-age children and maternal parenting stress were shown to indirectly affect children’s school adjustment via executive function difficulties. In other words, higher levels of media usage by early school-age children and maternal parenting stress during the first grade lead to greater executive function difficulties after a year, which, in turn, lead to a lower level of school adjustment in the third grade. This study indicates the need to develop practical support for the psychological wellbeing of mothers while they are performing their role as a parent and for children in maintaining suitable levels of media usage during early childhood.

Undergraduate freshmen are currently encountering numerous difficulties in adapting to college life due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, several studies have underlined the need to develop interventions focused on undergraduate students’ resilience during this situation. We adopted the service design method in identifying the difficulties faced by undergraduate freshmen during this pandemic, and also developed interventions for raising their resilience. The service design method is a person-centered approach which adopts the user’s viewpoint in developing solutions, thereby enabling their requirements to be satisfied. Surveys and in-depth interviews revealed that undergraduate freshmen were experiencing psycho-emotional problems which were derived from schoolwork and college life. This is particularly the case with students who are experiencing greater levels of academic difficulty, and were insufficiently equipped with resources such as stress-coping strategies and social support. Four undergraduate freshmen were recruited online to test the effectiveness of a resource promotion program aimed at enhancing their resilience. This program has proved to be helpful in relieving daily/academic stress and in building relationships among freshmen, regarding which the participants showed a high level of satisfaction. The results were discussed by focusing on psycho-emotional difficulties and resources of college freshmen, as well as the effectiveness of the resource promotion program. Further research is required in order to verify the efficiency of the program and to confirm conclusions.