Dyadic parent–college student digital interaction styles.

Abstract

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.

Digital location tracking in the parent/caregiver–college student dyad

“…The majority of current‐trackers perceived digital location tracking as primarily motivated by parent/caregiver concern for safety (rather than desire for control), and digital location tracking was largely mutual (i.e., both parent/caregiver and the student track one another). This overlaps somewhat with our past work, in which only a few aspects of parent‐emerging adult text messaging (including for purposes of monitoring or behavioral control) were linked with college student perceptions of their parents' being less supportive of their autonomy (Brown et al, 2023) and digitally intrusive (Jensen et al, 2021, 2023). The normative and mutual nature of digital location tracking here, along with small but significant associations with perceived parent/caregiver helicopter and autonomy supportive parenting underscores the importance of delving deeper into how college students and their parents/caregivers use and construe modern tools that facilitate unprecedented amounts of contact and knowledge within the parent/caregiver‐college student dyad.…”

Parent-Adolescent Communication in a Digital World: A 100-Day Diary Study

“…Promising avenues for future research are Experience Sampling Methods or the analysis of WhatsApp chats or text messages exchanged. The latter has been done in earlier work between parents-adolescents and parents-emerging adults (Ehrenreich et al, 2020;Jensen, Hussong, et al, 2021;Jensen et al, 2023). Such methods allow for more insights into the flow of online communication as well as into more detailed content and how adolescents and parents react to each other.…”