Parent and child problematic media use: The role of maternal postpartum depression and dysfunctional parent-child interactions in young children

Screen media exposure and behavioral adjustment in early childhood during and after COVID-19 home lockdown periods

“…Next, our results show that maternal use of media to regulate child distress to reduce children's distress decreased between lockdowns and further declined in the post-lockdown period. Excessive use of media to regulate children's distress can be considered as problematic media use (i.e., media use that interferes with daily functioning; Holmgren et al, 2022 ), as it can establish passive and ineffective regulatory strategies in young children, resulting in increased arousal and difficulties in regulating behavior in the face of external demands ( Coyne et al, 2021 ; Gordon-Hacker & Gueron-Sela, 2020 ). The Interactional Theory of Childhood Problematic Media Use (IT-CPU; Domoff et al, 2020 ) suggests that both proximal and distal factors can shape the development and maintenance of problematic media use.…”

“…The Interactional Theory of Childhood Problematic Media Use (IT-CPU; Domoff et al, 2020 ) suggests that both proximal and distal factors can shape the development and maintenance of problematic media use. For example, maternal postpartum depression symptoms predicted elevated maternal and child problematic media use two years later ( Holmgren et al, 2022 ). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent studies show that child problematic media use increased from before the pandemic onset to the initial stages of the pandemic ( Eales et al, 2021 ).…”

Problematic Media Use among Children up to the Age of 10: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The samples were mainly composed of children rather than parents and most of the latter were mothers. The children's average age ranged from a minimum of 5.95 months [58] to a maximum of 10.05 years [59], and the samples were well gender-balanced. GA was the most explored online behavior in N = 12 studies, followed by Internet addiction (IA) in N = 7 studies, Problematic Internet Use (PIU) in N = 5 studies, and Problematic Media Use (PMU) in N = 5 studies.…”

“…Concerning screening tools aimed at detecting PMU from a parental perspective, the Problematic Media Use Measure (PMUM) [33] was the most used [58,72,73], followed by the Korean Scale for Internet Addiction (K-Scale) [61,74,75] which was instead found to be the most used screening tool to measure PMU from children's perspective [61,62,70,[75][76][77]. Other employed tools were the Computer Addiction Scale for Children [71,78,79], the Internet Game Use-Elicited Symptom Screen (IGUESS) [80][81][82], the Young Diagnostic Questionnaire for Internet Addiction (YDQ) [10,63,83], and the Chen Internet Addiction Scale (CIAS) [84][85][86].…”

“…One study showed that dysfunctional parent-child interaction at Time 1 positively predicted a child's PMU at Time 3 [58]. Moreover, time spent without parents (for 2-4 h a day) was positively associated with higher children's PMU [61].…”