Digital Parenting and Children’s Subjective Well-being: the Mediation Role of Children’s Digital Overuse

The rich connotation of parenting practices has attracted increasing academic interests in the context of digitalization. Previous studies revealed the complex relationships between digital parenting and children’s subjective well-being (SWB) but few of them taking culture specificity into consideration and discussing the potential mediation functions. This study encapsulates digital parenting into two components: parents’ digital rule setting for children and parents’ own digital habits. By modeling parent-child matched data from mainland China, this study employed a Bayesian mediation model to explore the relationships between digital parenting and children’s digital overuse and SWB. The results showed that rule setting, though controlling passively, was positively associated with children’s SWB, and this association can be mediated by children’s smartphone overuse and mobile video overuse. Moreover, parent smartphone overuse was negatively associated with children’s SWB and this association can also be mediated by children’s smartphone overuse and mobile video overuse. The research findings can deepen our understanding of the relationships between digital parenting and children’s SWB in the Chinese context, and also shed light on the practice and policy in enhancing children’s well-being in the digitalized society.