Parents play an important role in scaffolding autonomy and independence as their children transition to adulthood. In the digital age, mobile phones allow for increased connection at this important developmental transition, but we know little about the extent to which digital connection may help (i.e., through developmentally appropriate support) or hinder (i.e., through intrusiveness or helicopter parenting) emerging adult (EA) autonomy development. We tested whether digital parent-EA interactions tapping engagement, monitoring, and responsiveness were associated with EA perceptions of parental autonomy support in a sample of 238 college students ( M age = 19.85) who contributed all text messages exchanged with their parents over 2 weeks. Results indicate that many dimensions of parent-EA text message interactions are unrelated to perceived parental autonomy support, but those that did emerge point towards a potentially maladaptive role of overparenting in associations with less perceived parental autonomy support. Results underscore that, for most EAs, parental text messaging is not likely to be perceived as autonomy inhibiting, but that for a small minority of parent-EA dyads, intense levels of digital connection with parents may be associated with perceived autonomy inhibition.

Within the past decade, parents, scientists, and policy makers have sought to understand how digital technology engagement may exacerbate or ameliorate young people’s mental health symptoms, a concern that has intensified amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research has been far from conclusive, and a lack of research consensus may stem in part from widely varying measurement strategies (including subjective and objective measurement) around digital technology engagement. In a cross-sectional study of 323 university students, the present study seeks to understand the ways in which youth engagement with digital technology – across subjective and objective measurements, weekday and weekend distinctions, and social and non-social uses – is associated with mental health (as measured by depression, loneliness, and multidimensional mood and anxiety). The present study also tested a differential susceptibility hypothesis to examine whether COVID-19 related social isolation might exacerbate the potential harms or helps of digital technology engagement. Results yielded few observed associations between digital technology engagement and mental health, with little evidence of detrimental effects of observed or perceived time spent on digital technology. Rather, those significant findings which did emerge underscore potential protections conferred by social connections with friends (both online and offline), and that the loneliest students may be the most likely to be reaching out for these types of connections. It is important that the field move beyond crude (largely self-reported) measures of screen time to instead understand how and to what effect youth are using digital technologies, especially during the social corridor of emerging adulthood.

Parents and their emerging adult children are highly connected via mobile phones in the digital age. This digital connection has potential implications for the development of autonomy and sustained parent–child relatedness across the course of emerging adulthood. The present study uses the qualitatively coded content of nearly 30,000 U.S. parent–college student text messages, exchanged by 238 college students and their mothers and fathers over the course of 2 weeks, to identify distinct dyadic parent–emerging adult digital interaction styles across dimensions of responsiveness and monitoring. Results reveal that digital interaction styles are largely consistent across age, gender, and parent education as well as reflective (i.e., texting patterns of parents and emerging adults mirror one another), with little evidence of overparenting profiles. Results also show that those college students who are reciprocally disengaged in text messaging with their parents perceive their parents as less digitally supportive. However, no styles were associated with perceived parental pressure to digitally engage. Findings suggest that the mobile phone is likely a valuable tool to maintain connection with few risks for undermining the privacy and autonomy of emerging adults.

Adolescent externalizing and health risk behaviors are some of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality among young people (Blum & Qureshi, 2011;Kann et al., 2018) and are of significant public health concern. Adolescence is a key period for understanding these types of behaviors, as they tend to emerge and peak in this stage (Claxton & van Dulmen, 2013;Krieger et al., 2018). Importantly, adolescence is not only a key risk corridor for risky and problem behaviors, but also for entry into new social and digital spaces; most social networking sites (and their regulators) set age 13 as the age at which youth can have their own accounts (Jargon, 2019). Co-construction theory (Subrahmanyam et al., 2006) asserts that adolescents create (and co-create) their online worlds and experiences to match developmental needs, and thus we should not be surprised that adolescents' developmentally appropriate affinities for risk taking, boundary testing, and affiliation would all manifest in some form in digital spaces, and that digital activities and offline behaviors would be mutually influential.How youth digital media use and externalizing/risk-taking behaviors intersect is somewhat more complicated. In many domains, adolescent rates of health risk behaviors (substance use, sexual risk taking, violence perpetration) are at their lowest levels in decades (Lewycka et al., 2018;Twenge & Park, 2017), which some have asserted may be related to the proliferation of digital media and displacement of time (previously spent engaging in risk behaviors) in favor of time online and new forms of leisure, entertainment, and relationship formation (Kraut et al., 1998). Others have posited that youth engagement in online communities allows for covert or hidden coordination or reinforcement of deviancy and rule breaking, and thus technology may be linked with increased problem behavior (Ehrenreich & Underwood, 2016). In fact, the associations are not always straightforward, and thus this chapter seeks to summarize and integrate the research findings that have been published to date on these mutual influences and the mechanisms that underlie them.