What Is Digital Parenting? A Systematic Review of Past Measurement and Blueprint for the Future

Abstract

Concerns about parenting adolescents are not new, but the rapid diffusion of digital technologies has heightened anxieties over digital parenting. Findings are decidedly mixed regarding the impact of digital technologies on adolescent well-being, and parents are left to navigate their concerns without an empirically based road map. A missing link for understanding the state of the science is a clear characterization of how digital parenting is measured, including an evaluation of which areas demand an outsized share of scientific attention and which have been overlooked. To address this gap, we undertook two interdisciplinary systematic reviews of the digital-parenting literature and characterized measurement across (a) quantitative surveys ( n = 145 studies) and (b) qualitative focus groups, interviews, codesign studies, and user studies ( n = 49). We describe previously popular areas of survey measurement that are of decreasing relevance to parenting of digital spaces (e.g., co-use, hovering). We likewise highlight areas that have been overlooked, including consideration of positive uses of digital technologies, acknowledgment of bidirectional influence, and attention to heterogeneity among families and to extraparental social ecologies of support and monitoring. We provide recommendations for the future of digital-parenting research and propose a more comprehensive approach to measuring how modern adolescents are parented.

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https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211072458
Perspectives on Psychological Science
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DOI: 10.1177/17456916211072458
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ASSOCIATION FOR
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
You also want to make sure that your child engages
in other activities, like mammoth hunting and the
gathering of rocks and bones with which to make
tools.
—Rachel Klein (2018, para. 2)
One indicator that an issue has captured societal atten-
tion is that it becomes the target of satire. Concerns
about parenting in the digital age reached this point in
2018, when Rachel Klein wrote a caricature in The New
Yorker about “limiting your child’s fire time.” In her
“Guide for Concerned Paleolithic Parents,” Klein
acknowledged the many beneficial applications of a
“new” technology: in this case, fire. She then asserted
that although adults who were born before fire’s advent
can readily moderate their use of fire, many children
will struggle with self-monitoring their fire time.
Just like such prehistoric technology, today’s digital
innovations afford parents and children with many use-
ful applications (Livingstone etal., 2018; McClure etal.,
2018; Modecki, Duvenage, etal., 2022; Moreno & Uhls,
2019). However, as Klein (2018) satirized, many parents
fear new digital technologies could potentially harm
their children (George & Odgers, 2015; Modecki, Low-
Choy, etal., 2021; Radesky etal., 2016). These concerns
have magnified over the last years because digital tech-
nologies have taken up increasing amounts of children’s
1072458PPSXXX10.1177/17456916211072458Modecki et al.Perspectives on Psychological Science
research-article2022
Corresponding Author:
Kathryn L. Modecki, Menzies Health Institute Queensland, School of
Applied Psychology, Griffith University
Email: k.modecki@griffith.edu.au
What Is Digital Parenting? A Systematic
Review of Past Measurement and
Blueprint for the Future
Kathryn L. Modecki1, Rachel E. Goldberg2,
Pamela Wisniewski3, and Amy Orben4
1Menzies Health Institute Queensland, School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University;
2Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine; 3Department of Computer Science,
University of Central Florida; and 4MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge
Abstract
Concerns about parenting adolescents are not new, but the rapid diffusion of digital technologies has heightened
anxieties over digital parenting. Findings are decidedly mixed regarding the impact of digital technologies on adolescent
well-being, and parents are left to navigate their concerns without an empirically based road map. A missing link
for understanding the state of the science is a clear characterization of how digital parenting is measured, including
an evaluation of which areas demand an outsized share of scientific attention and which have been overlooked.
To address this gap, we undertook two interdisciplinary systematic reviews of the digital-parenting literature and
characterized measurement across (a) quantitative surveys (n = 145 studies) and (b) qualitative focus groups, interviews,
codesign studies, and user studies (n = 49). We describe previously popular areas of survey measurement that are of
decreasing relevance to parenting of digital spaces (e.g., co-use, hovering). We likewise highlight areas that have been
overlooked, including consideration of positive uses of digital technologies, acknowledgment of bidirectional influence,
and attention to heterogeneity among families and to extraparental social ecologies of support and monitoring. We
provide recommendations for the future of digital-parenting research and propose a more comprehensive approach to
measuring how modern adolescents are parented.
Keywords
adolescent, adolescent development, digital parenting, interpersonal relations, family, measurement, technology use

2 Modecki et al.
and adolescents’ time and have crept into ever more
areas of life (Odgers & Jensen, 2020). In 2018, almost
50% of U.S. teens stated that they are “almost con-
stantly” online (Anderson & Jiang, 2018), and this per-
centage has risen substantially over the past years as
much of daily life has moved onto digital-technological
spaces during the global COVID-19 pandemic (Office
of Communications, 2020).
Concerns about the impact of this rapid digitalization
on children and adolescents are routinely voiced in both
the scientific literature and popular press (Bell etal.,
2015). Although some researchers have claimed the exis-
tence of a negative causal link between time spent on
digital technologies and adolescent well-being (Twenge
etal., 2018), others have voiced concerns that the evi-
dence is not currently strong enough to warrant such
conclusions (Heffer etal., 2019; Orben & Przybylski,
2019a). Indeed, many studies have found mixed or
inconclusive evidence (Allcott etal., 2020; Jensen etal.,
2019; Kreski etal., 2021; Orben & Przybylski, 2019b),
and reviews have posited that such inconsistent findings
may reflect individual differences and complex inter-
actions (Beyens etal., 2020; Odgers & Jensen, 2020;
Orben, 2020b).
There is a growing chasm between the evidence pro-
vided by the scientific literature and what is needed to
create evidence-based guidelines about adolescent dig-
ital-technology use and how parents should respond
(Viner etal., 2019). Digital-parenting behaviors are mul-
tifaceted and complex, including, for example, the mon-
itoring of adolescent technology use, rule provision,
enforcement, education and promotion of digital skills,
navigation of online education, and the exploitation of
online opportunities (Odgers, 2019). Yet there are cur-
rently no up-to-date technology-focused and develop-
mentally focused tools, including questionnaires, to
study this complex behavior. In the absence of question-
naires developed explicitly to understand contemporary
digital parenting, researchers are left to repurpose exist-
ing measures developed for older technologies, such as
the home television, or are left to design improvised
items without the necessary validation processes.
This is hazardous territory. The evidence gap, miss-
ing future-research vision, and outdated measures nec-
essary to understand and guide digital parenting leave
parents largely unaided in seeking to navigate a rapidly
developing space. A Pew Research survey administered
in March 2020 found that two thirds of U.S. parents
considered parenting harder today than it was 20 years
ago; many attributed this development to new tech-
nologies, such as smartphones and social media (Auxier
etal., 2020).
In this review, we aim to provide parents and
researchers with the knowledge base they need to
understand the complexity of digital parenting and a
blueprint for future digital-parenting research. To do so,
we first summarize prior psychological approaches to
parenting adolescents and evaluate the problems par-
ents face in raising adolescents during a time of rapid
technological change. We present current approaches
to studying digital parenting using frameworks devel-
oped in media studies and communication sciences and
then report findings from an interdisciplinary systematic
review in which we examined how digital parenting has
been measured and quantified to date. Subsequently,
we present results from our complementary interdisci-
plinary systematic review of the qualitative literature on
digital parenting, focused on the identification of key
areas that current quantitative measurement has
neglected or overemphasized. Our interpretation of the
research landscape that follows summarizes these
important insights and pinpoints opportunities for
improved, developmentally informed psychological
research on parenting in the digital age.
Essential Parenting Challenge: Fostering
Both Independence and Safety
A fundamental developmental task in adolescence is
to begin functioning as an autonomous individual.
Adolescents must learn how to take responsibility for
themselves and their choices and how to navigate new
relationships and peers, novel situations, and untried
possibilities (Allen etal., 1996; Collins etal., 1997;
Soenens etal., 2007). Such autonomous functioning is
part of a healthy transition to adulthood, regardless of
whether youths are navigating these tasks face-to-face
or digitally.
Tasked with nurturing this growing independence,
parents and caregivers face their own balancing act.
They seek to confer on youths the independence and
autonomous functioning needed to achieve psychoso-
cial maturity while providing sufficient monitoring and
support to keep them safe (Erickson etal., 2016). How
this tension is navigated has long-term implications for
the parent–child relationship and for adolescents’
development.
This challenge is not new and applies to both the
offline and online realms. Indeed, decades of research
have explored management of the parent–child relation-
ship during adolescence. With the onset of puberty,
youths traditionally spend less and less time at home
and more time with peers, which leaves parents with
fewer opportunities for direct supervision (Larson etal.,
2002; Updegraff etal., 2006). In response, parents might
implement control strategies, such as requiring adoles-
cents to seek permission to go out, to provide informa-
tion about adult supervision at their destination, or to

Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X) 3
disclose whom they will be spending time with, what they
will be doing, and when they will return home (Kerr &
Stattin, 2000). Parents might alternately employ solicita-
tion strategies, such as gathering information about what
is happening in their adolescents’ lives by asking them
about their experiences, a technique that relies on ado-
lescents’ willingness to share information.
Parents might also elect to foster relationships in
which their children disclose information on their own
accord (Smetana etal., 2006; Tokic´ & Pec´nik, 2011).
This approach is generally considered more positive
than control or solicitation strategies, given that some
developmental theories argue that vigilant surveillance
and active tracking are tied to poorer youth outcomes,
in part because adolescents may come to doubt their
capacity to make good decisions on their own accord
if monitored too closely (Hunter etal., 2011). When
youths self-disclose voluntarily, this is not only healthier
for their adjustment, being tied to higher well-being
and less risky behavior (Soenens etal., 2007), but also
more effective because parents tend to learn more
about adolescents’ activities (Kerr & Stattin, 2000).
That said, the nature of such solicitation strategies
appears to require sensitive judgment and a light hand.
Some research points to particular hazards of inconsis-
tent on-demand solicitation conversations with adoles-
cents with the direct purpose of learning about their
activities (Hawk etal., 2008). Such half-hearted use of
solicitation strategies can contribute to mismatched per-
ceptions of adolescents’ agency, independence, and
privacy rights, which can fuel turbulence in the parent–
child relationship and increased secrecy and conceal-
ment on the part of the adolescent (Hawk etal., 2013).
The idea here is that the direct nature of solicitation
strategies in which parents seek information on demand,
and do so intermittently, conflicts with adolescents’
established expectations for privacy, which can then
backfire in the form of increased secrecy and conceal-
ment (Hawk etal., 2013). All told, then, the goal for
parents of adolescents is to develop children’s indepen-
dence while maintaining good knowledge of their
activities: knowledge that ideally stems from a close,
positive relationship in which adolescents feel open to
regularly disclose and maintain a sense of their own
personal boundary for privacy (Hawk etal., 2013).
Parenting Television Use
Despite robust evidence, this developmental understand-
ing that parent–child relationship quality is crucial to
balancing adolescents’ needs for safety and autonomy
has not yet permeated the science of digital parenting.
Rather, a focus on adults’ behavioral mitigation of
risks and, to a lesser extent, quality of interpersonal
communication formed the foundation for many of the
first explorations of parenting technologies (Clark, 2011).
Inspired by Bandura’s (1978) social-learning theory and
its focus on parental modeling, researchers routinely put
the parent (as opposed to the adolescent or the parent-
adolescent relationship) in the foreground of this
research (Clark, 2011). In doing so, lines of scientific
inquiry focused on trying to understand parental “doing”
behaviors that in turn might help ensure youths’ safety
and well-being in response to new technologies.
Foundational work on parental mediation of chil-
dren’s television viewing undertaken by Valkenburg
and colleagues (1999) identified three cornerstone
parental-mediation strategies: restrictive mediation,
instructive mediation, and social coviewing. Restrictive
mediation, also known as “rule making,” encompassed
parents setting boundaries and limiting television use.
For example, parents might set time limits for viewing
or restrict adolescents from viewing specific content.
Instructive (also known as “active” or “interpretive”)
mediation involved caregivers discussing media content
with youths. For instance, parents might highlight that
certain aspects of a program are unrealistic. Finally,
social coviewing referred to parents cowatching media
content with their child but without engaging in content
discussion. Note that social coviewing has been associ-
ated with enhanced feelings of closeness (Courtois &
Nelissen, 2018).
It is noteworthy that Valkenburg et al. (1999) went
to considerable lengths to highlight ways in which
“media parenting” could not only reduce risks of televi-
sion viewing but also enhance its potential benefits.
For example, instructive mediation might modify atti-
tudes toward television violence (a potential risk from
media consumption) or bolster acceptance of nontra-
ditional gender roles (a potential benefit). The digital-
parenting lens has arguably narrowed since then, and
there has been an increasing focus on parenting as a
means of solely combating the risks of technology and
not maximizing benefits (e.g., Nielsen etal., 2019).
Shifting From TV to Digital Technology
Despite marked changes in technology use since the
turn of the millennium, Valkenburg et al.’s (1999) tri-
partite typology of restrictive mediation, instructive
mediation, and social coviewing is still the main way
in which researchers conceptualize and measure par-
enting of newer technologies, including youths’ use of
the Internet in general (Livingstone etal., 2017), screens
(Nielsen etal., 2019), smartphones (Wisniewski etal.,
2017), tablets (Beyens & Beullens, 2017), smart speak-
ers (Garg & Sengupta, 2020), social media (Hamilton
etal., 2020), and online gaming (Koning etal., 2018).

4 Modecki et al.
Even when researchers seek to devise updated parenting
measures, the three typologies often reappear with little
additional context or theory specific to the online space
(Eastin etal., 2006).
Continued reliance on measures designed for older
technologies means that key differences between older
and newer technological developments often go unac-
knowledged (Chassiakos etal., 2016). For example,
coviewing television is arguably far more common than
coviewing when browsing the Internet (Eastin etal.,
2006). When parenting adolescents’ Internet use, par-
ents are often left facing a proverbial “black box,” one
in which they know relatively little about their chil-
dren’s online activities (Gomez, 2017). As a result, par-
ents may feel a loss of control over the process of
affording youths greater freedoms.
Furthermore, modern digital technologies are far
more interactive than their predecessors such that chil-
dren act as both consumers and producers of content
for increasingly public audiences. No longer is content
solely about youths’ own media intake—the output is
perhaps even more important (Verduyn etal., 2020).
This presents both opportunities for development and
prosociality (Jones & Mitchell, 2016) but also new risks,
such as the possibility of interacting with unsafe indi-
viduals (Jones etal., 2013).
Finally, digital technologies are more ubiquitous than
older technologies, facilitate increasingly intensive and
extensive contact with others (Blackwell etal., 2016),
and are often used simultaneously with other devices
(Anderson & Jiang, 2018). This omnipresence means
that the boundaries between online and offline are
increasingly blurred (Anderson & Jiang, 2018). Some
have even argued that life is now “postdigital,” meaning
that the differentiation between online and offline
worlds no longer applies (Taffel, 2016). Not only are
youths fully immersed in the online world, but also
their development occurs both online and offline, in a
bidirectional, fluid manner (Vijayakumar & Pfeifer,
2020). From a parent’s perspective, this means that
youths’ digital or postdigital developmental experience
is increasingly opaque.
The Problem of Measurement
To address these changes in digital parenting brought
about by the advent of modern digital devices and an
increasingly immersive online world, researchers have
sought new ways to measure digital parenting. Some
have tried to augment existing parental-monitoring
scales with responses for “online” contexts, often by
adding an “online” option to an existing scale. Yet this
does not ensure validity, and there is little to suggest
that adding an additional domain to prior measures taps
into the experience of adolescents and parents today.
Other scholars have been left to generate self-standing
items to tap behaviors such as disclosure of cyberbul-
lying, keeping passwords private, or technology “addic-
tion” (e.g., Nikken & Jansz, 2006; Wang etal., 2005).
Such on-the-fly scales, however, also often lack mea-
surement quality and measurement invariance and have
low reliability. They therefore are susceptible to poor
or inadequate characterizations of modern family expe-
riences (Flake etal., 2017). Key parenting dimensions,
including autonomy building and support, are routinely
overlooked in these stopgap operationalizations. Given
that the arena of digital parenting directly feeds into
recommendations to whole populations of parents, the
field’s issues with reliable and valid measurement are
especially troublesome.
Previous Reviews and
Reconceptualizations of Digital Parenting
Although several attempts to develop new approaches
to conceptualizing digital parenting have been pub-
lished, these studies often “pave the cow-path,” to use
vernacular from the field of human–computer interac-
tion. That is, they follow traditional ways of conceptual-
izing problems rather than taking a holistic approach
to reappraise digital parenting. For example, Chen and
Shi (2019) conducted a meta-analysis of 52 studies that
examined how Valkenburg et al.’s (1999) three forms
of parental mediation influence youths’ media use and
online risk exposure. They found that over a third of
included studies focused on television viewing and that
the focal point was exclusively on risk mitigation. As a
second example, Jago et al. (2013) surveyed 29 studies
on media parenting and youths’ screen viewing (e.g.,
television, Internet, and gaming) and adolescent obe-
sity. They found that most studies failed to demonstrate
construct validity and/or internal consistency of the
measures used.
Perhaps the most notable call for updated measure-
ment of digital parenting came from Valkenberg and
colleagues (2013). They sought to develop a perceived
parental-mediation scale based on Deci and Ryan’s
(2000) autonomy-support-in-parenting model. The scale
was originally intended to capture use of the Internet
as well as TV, movies, and digital games. The objective
was to understand parents’ behaviors and gauge par-
ents’ explanatory style, encouragement of children’s
opinions, and responses to noncompliance. However,
subsequent challenges regarding the reliability and
validity of some of the items resulted in Valkenberg
et al. (2013) using only an abbreviated set of items,
none of which concerned adolescents’ Internet use.

Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X) 5
The Importance of Considering
Diversity in Digital-Parenting Research
Among the most vexing issues that a reconceptualization
of digital parenting needs to address is heterogeneity
among families (e.g., Hankerson etal., 2016; Modecki,
Low-Choy, etal., 2021; Sugie, 2018). As described by
Schlesinger and colleagues (2017), understanding the
“user” of technology means acknowledging the differ-
ent, overlapping attributes of a given user’s identity.
Although scholars of human–computer interaction and
digital race have historically pointed to race and class
differences both in how families make use of technology
and in norms and expectations regarding technology’s
benefits and risks, such variation is too rarely consid-
ered in the psychological literature (London etal., 2010).
Population-based surveys and ethnographies have
shown that technology usage looks markedly different
depending on socioeconomic status (SES; Lauricella
etal., 2016; Pater etal., 2015; Yardi & Bruckman, 2012).
For instance, in the United States, low-income house-
holds are significantly more likely to be smartphone-
only households without broadband Internet (Vogels,
2021). These families rely on smartphones for tasks
typically designed for larger screens, sometimes referred
to as the “homework gap” for youths who turn to phone
screens for their course work and out-of-school study
(Vogels, 2021). In lower income or homeless families,
it is also not unusual for youths to resort to accessing
educational technology at friends’ homes and at schools
and libraries (Harpin etal., 2016). In 2015, smartphone-
only homes represented 35% of U.S. lower income
households with school-age children (Anderson &
Perrin, 2018); yet the predominant narrative in devel-
opmental psychology remains that of risks related to
overuse, such as phone addiction, cyberbullying, and
the like (Kardefelt-Winther, 2014; Olweus, 2012).
Addressing this incomplete characterization of family
technology use requires both the employment of more
diverse samples and measurement designed to capture
such heterogeneity.
Parents also diverge in their hierarchies of concerns
and parenting styles (Erickson etal., 2016), and tech-
nology use is by no means at the apex of worries for
some families, especially those from marginalized con-
texts, such as foster families (Badillo-Urquiola etal.,
2019). For example, lower income families have tended
to view television as an accompaniment to everyday
life that often contributes to family harmony, whereas
higher income families have tended to have more con-
cerns regarding negative influences (Clark, 2011). More
recently, research has found that low-income families
both more frequently share devices and give youths
more autonomy over their own technology use (Yardi
& Bruckman, 2012) such that concerns about monitoring
may be less prevalent (Lauricella etal., 2016). As one
example, in low-income Latino homes in the United
States, it is common for youths to lead families’ efforts
to access online information, much the same way these
youths are known to act as “knowledge brokers” offline
in bilingual families (Pina etal., 2018). As a result, joint
media engagement is relatively common in these fami-
lies, but the impact on well-being of such collective use
remains unknown (Pina etal., 2018).
Research agnostic to heterogeneity in family experi-
ences, norms, and priorities may arguably give rise to
a misleading picture of digital parenting. White middle-
class samples are often held as the “normative” expecta-
tion, which ignores heterogeneity in availability of
technologies, expectations and realities with respect
to where and how youths gain access to digital devices,
and family-privacy norms. Arguably, much past
research—and particularly the research that has been
most influential in the development of digital-parenting
measures—has glossed over these types of compelling
differences in families’ technology experiences and
digital parenting. As a result, scholars have called for
digital-media scholarship grounded in ethnographic
and digital-race perspectives and a more integrated
discussion of heterogeneity across the digital-parenting
literature (e.g., Clark, 2011; Ellison & Solomon, 2019;
Noble, 2018).
Toward a New Account in
a Postdigital Age
Current approaches to understanding how parents
monitor and support adolescent development in the
digital age are arguably antiquated, fragmented, and
riddled with ad hoc measurement. Yet the way research-
ers conceptualize, study, and understand the interface
of parenting and technology is becoming ever more
critical. Digitalization is expected to continue in the
future, which means that a functional approach to digi-
tal parenting and accurate measurement of such parent-
ing will become increasingly important if psychology
is to support this area of contemporary concern.
As a result, it is critical to take stock of existing
measures of digital parenting to understand where cur-
rent work is falling short and offer a blueprint for ways
to move the science forward. Arguably, measures need
to correspond to actual adolescent technological behav-
iors and actual digital-parenting strategies. They need
to capture both the spectrum of potential affordances
from technology, whether negative or positive, and het-
erogeneity in technology use, parenting strategies, and
parental approaches to technology.

6 Modecki et al.
To address the provisional status of measurement in
the field, we took an interdisciplinary, novel approach
to systematically inventory the many ways in which
scholars have recently sought to measure and under-
stand parental monitoring and support in relation to
adolescents’ technology use. The scope of this review
was designed to encompass multiple fields: psychology,
sociology, media and communication studies, and con-
ference proceedings related to human–computer inter-
action and computer science. To better understand the
breadth of digital parenting, we first systematically
reviewed survey-based research to catalogue the array
of items and scales researchers have used to operation-
alize digital-parental monitoring and support. We then
further undertook a systematic review of the qualitative
research that assessed digital parenting. This allowed
us to identify constructs neglected, underemphasized,
or overemphasized in survey research and put forward
a new blueprint for measuring digital parenting.
Review of Survey Measurement of
Digital Parenting
Identification of the literature
Our reviews of both the survey-based and qualitative
literatures followed the Preferred Reporting Items for
Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guide-
lines for the reporting and conduct of systematic
reviews (Moher etal., 2009). We ran a search of the
literature in February 2019 that covered six databases
chosen to span multiple disciplines and formats: Web
of Science, PsycINFO, Ovid Medline, the Educational
Resources Information Centre, Proquest Dissertations
and Theses, and ACM Digital Library. The search
employed a combination of keywords and subject terms
that related concepts of tech devices or social media
(e.g., “smartphone,” “internet,” “social networking site”),
adolescents (e.g., “teen,” “youth”), and parental moni-
toring or support (e.g., “parent” or “family” adjacent to
“monitoring” or “involvement”). The full list of search
terms and databases can be found in Section 1 of the
Supplemental Material available online. We limited the
search to studies that were published from 2008 onward
(to capture the rise of smartphones), published in Eng-
lish, and published as peer-reviewed journal articles,
dissertations or theses, conference papers or proceed-
ings, books, or book chapters. The search identified
3,427 publications. After removal of duplicate results,
2,800 unique publications remained to be screened.
Screening of quantitative search results
We first screened the search results for quantitative
survey research using Rayyan Software (Ouzzani etal.,
2016). Abstracts and full texts were screened against
several inclusion criteria. First, the analysis needed to
have employed either original survey research or sec-
ondary analysis of a survey data set. Second, the mean
age range of adolescents assessed needed to be between
10 and 17 years. Third, parental monitoring of, involve-
ment in, and/or support of adolescent technology use
needed to be examined; however, we did not include
research focused solely on television viewing. Fourth,
the research’s focus needed to be on monitoring of
adolescent technology behavior and not on parental
use of digital technology to monitor offline behavior
(e.g., using GPS tracking on a phone to monitor a
child’s whereabouts). Finally, the survey items in ques-
tion needed to have assessed recent behaviors and not,
for example, retrospection to the time of adolescence
among adults.
All four authors double-blind screened an initial
sample of 100 search results for inclusion/exclusion
using the above criteria; results were then compared,
and discrepancies were resolved by discussion. Subse-
quently, the remaining search results were double-blind
screened for inclusion/exclusion by a subset of the
authors (K. L. Modecki, R. E. Goldberg, A. Orben) using
the same criteria. Coders agreed on 97% of publications.
Disagreements were resolved through group discussion.
The screening process yielded 157 publications for
inclusion. Closer scrutiny later revealed that 12 publica-
tions did not meet the inclusion criteria (e.g., were
focused exclusively on television viewing). Thus, the
final sample for analysis comprised 145 publications.
The search and screening process are summarized in a
PRISMA flow diagram in Figure S1 in the Supplemental
Material.
Quantitative data extraction and coding
Our data-extraction and coding process for the quan-
titative survey research was two-pronged. In the first
stage, we recorded a host of details about each study
(e.g., sample size, country, parent and/or adolescent
respondent). In addition, we extracted from each study
the quantitative survey items used to measure digital
parenting. In the second stage, we assigned substantive
codes to each of the extracted survey items. Two
authors (A. Orben and R. E. Goldberg) jointly devel-
oped a set of 10 substantive codes after they closely
read all of the extracted items. Definitions of each code
are provided in Table 1. The two authors double-blind
coded each survey item using the list of codes and
distinguished between parent- and adolescent-reported
items. Interrater reliability was strong; Cohen’s κ was
91% for parent-reported items and 82% for adolescent-
reported items. Discrepancies were resolved through
discussion.

Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X) 7
Of the 145 publications in the sample, 24 did not
contain sufficient detail on the survey items that mea-
sured digital parenting to permit coding, and we were
not able to procure the items separately; these publica-
tions were excluded from the analysis. A further 37
publications provided only examples of relevant survey
items, and the full set of items was not procurable;
therefore, only the available sample items were used
for coding. Thus, we were able to code the complete
set of survey items used for 84 publications, and for 37
publications, we coded a partial set.
Results of the quantitative review
The quantitative review highlighted which areas of digi-
tal parenting were most often targeted in the interdis-
ciplinary survey-based studies reviewed and which
areas were often overlooked (see Fig. 1). Rules about
the time, place, or length of time digital technologies
can be used by adolescents (“basic rules”) and also the
content they are allowed to consume on these digital
technologies (“content rules”) were by far the most
popular areas of digital parenting to measure, both
when children and their parents were asked. Least
popular were items about helping children when they
had experienced something distressing online (“crisis”)
or encouraging their digital-technology use for positive
means (“encouragement”).
When we examined what digital technologies were
targeted by the survey items, we also observed a clear
skew. Most of the items asked parents and children gen-
erally about their use of the “internet” (268 items) or
used the word “online” (129 items). Substantially fewer
items probed social-media use (43 items) or gaming
Table 1. Table Detailing the Codes Extracted From Quantitative Survey Items by the Study Team, Including the Code, Its
Definition, and an Example From the Survey Items Reviewed
Code Definition Examplea
Basic rule setting Specifying general rules for technology use, including the
amount of time that can be spent and when and where
technology can be accessed. This also includes basic rules
about supervision (e.g., needing to tell a parent when going
online).
“I limit the time my child is allowed
on the internet (e.g., only 1 hr a
day).”
Content-specific
rule setting
Specifying rules that limit access to certain technological
platforms (e.g., allowing the adolescent to have a social media
profile) or access for certain purposes (e.g., to do homework).
“I limit the type of websites my child
is allowed to visit.”
Co-use Active participation in the same technological activity
concurrently. This includes items about the parent actively
helping the adolescent succeed in a technological task.
“Do shared activities together with
your child on the internet.”
Crisis
intervention
Helping the adolescent when something goes wrong when using
technology.
“Helped him/her . . . when something
has bothered him/her on the
internet.”
Discussion Bidirectional communication between the parent and adolescent
about technology use.
“I talk with my child about what he/
she does on the internet.”
Encouragement Encouraging the adolescent to use/explore technology, for
example to learn new skills or engage in another activity with
a positive outcome.
“Encourage your child to explore and
learn things on the internet on their
own.”
Filtering Using technological means to control the adolescent’s access to
particular platforms or content (e.g., websites or apps) or the
time spent on particular devices.
“Do you use filter software or other
means of blocking some types of
websites?”
Hovering Not being engaged in the same technological activity as the
adolescent but being in the vicinity (e.g., in the same room).
References to general supervision without further information
about the nature/kind are also classified as hovering.
“Keep an eye on what’s on the screen
while your child is online.”
Instruction Conveying information about technology use from parent to
adolescent in an educational manner.
“I show my child how to surf safely
on the internet.”
Monitoring Using technological and nontechnological means to learn what
the adolescent is doing online (e.g., checking the adolescent’s
Facebook profile or text messages, installing monitoring
software). The item must reference a parental-monitoring
behavior, not knowledge gleaned by monitoring.
“Do you check which websites your
child visited after he/she finishes
surfing the internet?”
aExamples in the table are limited to parent items, although similar items were often asked of adolescents themselves.

8 Modecki et al.
specifically (70 items). Most quantitative measures there-
fore focused predominantly on general uses of the Inter-
net and digital technologies that afford adolescents to
go online and the setting of rules about how they are
allowed to use these broad categories of technologies.
When we looked more closely at the measures them-
selves, we found that the largest proportion are focused
on restrictions, specifically, the prevention of spending
too much time online or of exposure to certain plat-
forms or materials. Some of the most popular items
asked parents about time-based restrictions: whether
they allowed their child to use digital technologies only
at specific days and/or times (e.g., “I only allow my
child to surf the internet at specific days and times,” “I
set limits around the time my teen spends on digital
technologies”). Some studies also included items on
location-based restrictions (e.g., “I make sure my child
uses technology in a public space at home”). Further-
more, many asked about whether, when youths used
digital technologies, there were rules about what the
adolescents were allowed to engage in (e.g., “I stop my
child when he/she visits a less suitable website,” “Set
rules about interacting with strangers or which websites
can be visited”).
Less restriction-focused items still largely targeted
risk prevention. For example, in the “instruction” cat-
egory, some of the most popular items centered on
safety or protection (e.g., “Do your parents suggest to
you ways to use the internet safely,” “Explaining why
some websites are good/bad”). Moreover, many paren-
tal-monitoring items tended to focus on independently
gathering information about children’s activities and
0
10
20
30
40
Basic Rules Co-Use Content Rules Crisis Discussion Encouragement Filtering Hovering Instruction Monitoring
Category
Number of Publications
Respondent
Child
Parent
Fig. 1. Bar chart that characterizes the number of outputs with survey items that pertain to certain categories/codes of digital parenting.
The categories include basic rules about when, where, and how long technologies can be used (“basic rules:); parents co-using technology
with their children (“co-use”); rules about what content or platforms children are allowed to access (“content rules”); helping children if they
have a crisis on digital technologies (“crisis”); discussing the use of digital technologies with their child (“discussion”); the encouragement of
digital-technology use for positive means (“encouragement”); the use of technological aids to block or filter certain types of digital content
(“filtering”); remaining in the vicinity of a child on digital devices (“hovering”); instructing children how to use digital technologies and pro-
viding children with information (“instruction”); and monitoring children’s use of digital technologies through either direct or technological
means (“monitoring”).

Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X) 9
social networks rather than soliciting or encouraging
children’s self-disclosure (e.g., “tracking his/her Face-
book page or checking his/her search history,”
“check[ing] the contents of your child’s cell phone,” or
even “installing software to . . . monitor children’s
online activity”).
Fewer survey items considered positive uses of tech-
nology, adolescent self-disclosure, or digital skill build-
ing. Yet there were some that did. For example, a
relatively small number of studies included items about
adolescent self-disclosure of online activity (e.g., “How
often do you discuss what you are doing online with
your parents?”). Others asked about encouragement of
independent exploration on the Internet (e.g., “Encour-
age your child to explore and learn things on the inter-
net on their own”).
Review of Qualitative Studies of
Digital Parenting
To identify what aspects of digital parenting have been
underrepresented or overemphasized in survey research
to date, we complemented our systematic review of the
survey literature with a secondary systematic examina-
tion of results from qualitative research. This parallel
characterization of qualitative accounts allowed us to
highlight important gaps and opportunities for psycho-
logical research on parenting in the digital age. Thus,
a key contribution of our review is not only bridging
the multidisciplinary fields of psychology, sociology,
communication, and human–computer interaction but
also bridging the methodological divide between the
quantitative and qualitative literature in these fields.
Identification of literature and
screening of search results
We made use of the same systematic search results as
the quantitative review to survey the qualitative research
(2,800 unique items). The four authors screened
abstracts and full texts against similar inclusion criteria.
However, we screened only for studies that used focus
groups, interviews, and/or open-ended responses. All
four authors blindly screened an initial 100 search
results to test the inclusion criteria; results were com-
pared, and discrepancies were resolved by discussion.
Subsequently, the remaining 2,700 search results were
each double-blind screened for inclusion/exclusion by
all four authors. The screening process yielded 63
potential publications for inclusion. Closer scrutiny
revealed that 14 publications did not include appropri-
ate data (e.g., reported a mixed-method approach but
discussed findings only from quantitative results). Thus,
49 publications constituted the final sample. For the
search and screening process summarized via a PRISMA
diagram, see Figure S2 in the Supplemental Material.
Qualitative coding
In the first stage of coding, K. L. Modecki and P.
Wisniewski developed an original coding schema to be
used when we coded the 49 studies. In a second stage,
the schemas were subsequently developed and modi-
fied inductively through close readings of each publica-
tion. If a publication demonstrated a given theme, an
illustrative quote was selected. Thus, for each publica-
tion, we applied pertinent codes and extracted a rep-
resentative quote for each code identified. The
definitions and frequencies of each coded theme are
presented in Section 2 in the Supplemental Material.
Results of the qualitative review
Six broad themes emerged from the review of the quali-
tative literature: (a) restriction and rule setting, (b)
parental monitoring, (c) parental communication and
support (mediation), (d) parent–teen boundary negotia-
tion, (e) social ecologies of support, and (f) apprecia-
tion of technology. We begin below with the concepts
that most resembled those in the survey items and note
departures from the focus of surveys throughout. Sub-
sequently, we detail concepts that were absent entirely
from the survey literature but that we deemed worthy
of consideration in future survey research on digital
parenting. In particular, the latter two themes (social
ecologies of support and appreciation of technology)
appeared to be especially prevalent among ethnic-
minority and lower SES families and hence need to be
areas of emphasis moving forward.
Themes found in both the qualitative
and quantitative literature
Restriction and rule setting. In the qualitative litera-
ture, restriction and rule setting encapsulated basic house
rules such as “There’s no taking pictures of yourself and
sending it unless it’s like you have clothes on, there
shouldn’t be pictures, nothing like that, sexting, none of
that” (Fletcher & Blair, 2016, p. 247). Restriction and rule
setting also included a variety of methods for restricting
technology use, including using technology to lock down
features or set time limits or physically taking away
devices during key times. For example, one parent indi-
cated, “During homework, I don’t want his phone nearby
to distract him. So we had real strict rules last year . . . he
would have to charge it every night like outside of his

10 Modecki et al.
room” (Solecki, 2016, p. 55). Parents also acknowledged
access to technology as leverage in the household, used
to “reward” adolescents for completion of their chores
and responsibilities or removed as a “punishment” for
failure to fulfill obligations:
I will reward them with the cell phone when they
are doing the right thing. I think the phone has a
lot of power. The parents have more power over
their kids than they think, you know? We’re hold-
ing the money and we’re holding the phone.
(Solecki, 2016, p. 59)
Indeed, financial support for devices or monthly fees
was commonly used as justification for policing ado-
lescents’ use and behavior, as this parent went on to
share: “Mom pays for it so Mom gets total access to the
phone. Mom also takes it away if she feels it needs to
be taken away” (Solecki, 2016, p. 59). Also touching on
the idea that alternative obligations and activities can
help set boundaries on technology use, parents
described keeping their children busy with an array of
nontechnology activities (e.g., sports) or hobbies (e.g.,
music) so that they would have limited bandwidth for
reactional use of technologies. This “time balancing”
approach, as explained by one parent, meant “always
look(ing) for activities, even Saturdays, Sunday, we’re
always in the street” (Gomez, 2017, p. 114).
Restriction and rule setting also involved attending
to the quality of peers’ behavior and their potential for
negative influence. For example, in a departure from
what was covered in the quantitative items, restriction
sometimes encompassed tracking adolescents’ peers
via technology, not only to monitor them but also to
decide with whom they are allowed to spend time.
Parents and adolescents both described using peers’
unsupervised use of technology or their behavior online
as a litmus test for restrictions on time together:
When somebody posts to her Facebook, then I’ll
go into their profile and I’ll start to look at those
people. And I look at their photo albums. I see if
their parents are in with them. I look at their
interests and their schooling or whatever that’s on
that. (Erikson, 2016, p. 1391)
Parental monitoring. Also prevalent in the qualitative
literature, as in the survey items, was the umbrella con-
cept of parental monitoring. This included parents
actively monitoring adolescents on an ongoing basis by
friending them on social media or social media “stalking”
so that adolescents’ profiles (or at least those profiles
known to parents) were under near-constant supervision.
Not surprisingly, adolescents described frustration with
this level of scrutiny. One commented, “Your parents are
always checking on you, and if you say something bad,
you get in trouble. With me . . . if I posted at midnight,
my mom would be like ‘You should have been in bed. It’s
a school night!’” (Rickman, 2013, p. 219). Monitoring also
included use of parental control apps or other technolo-
gies for surveillance. For example, one parent stated, “I
can easily just turn my phone on and check what’s going
on on the laptop. We have them synchronized like that”
(Vongkulluksn, 2016, p. 88).
More commonly, however, parental monitoring was
characterized as “intermittent.” Parents gained access
to devices sporadically, either requiring access on
demand or secretly gaining access to review children’s
activities. As one adolescent described, intermittent
access was still experienced as invasive:
She thinks she slick . . . so she’ll come in and she’ll
be pretending like she’s wiping something off or
getting something up and I’ll be like okay, and I’ll
be scrolling down and she’ll be like, “Who is that?”
and asking me questions. (Fletcher & Blair, 2016,
p. 249)
Parental communication and support. Parental com-
munication and support (mediation) was a theme more
prevalent in the qualitative literature than in the survey
items. This largely reflected the roots of the qualitative
research in communication and media studies and was
primarily grounded in parents’ positive and open com-
munication regarding youths’ technology use. For exam-
ple, one parent likened the online space to a potentially
risky area that needs to be scaffolded: “You wouldn’t
take a kid to a pool and say, ‘Don’t go swimming, you
might drown.’ You’re gonna take them to the pool, and
you’re gonna teach them ways to be safe around water”
(Mendoza, 2013, p. 137).
Often, parents spoke of giving youths broad guide-
lines in which to operate to stay actively involved in
their child’s online life and encourage self-disclosure.
For example, a parent said:
It’s still a trust game, and she’s really a pretty good
kid. She does have one e-mail account she uses
with friends. I don’t have the password for that. I
really struggled with it for a while, but then I
decided I could be a superprotective parent. She
should know how to be responsible to gain more
independence. (Hopper-Losenicky, 2010, p. 64)
Likewise, parents encouraged self-disclosure and indi-
cated that warmth and openness in their relationship
allowed for adolescents to share emerging issues: “It is
important to talk. If they know that they can come to

Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X) 11
you in case of a problem, I find that important” (Symons
etal., 2017, p. 428). That said, parents also described
constant calibrations and challenges balancing a desire
to monitor youths with desires to trust the child and
respect their privacy. For instance, one noted, “I feel
like he’s old enough that I have to give him privacy.
And I don’t want to be breathing down his neck all the
time because I don’t want to alienate him” (Erickson
etal., 2016, p. 1392).
This theme also involved encouraging and teaching
children to be “decent” individuals via digital citizen-
ship. As one parent pointed out, this included basic
standards of communication: “What I don’t dare to say
in someone’s face, I also won’t write it down. It’s a kind
of respect that you need to have I think, also in that
medium” (Symonds, 2017, p. 426). Also reflecting the
theoretical grounding of media studies in Bandura’s
social-learning theory (Clark, 2011), this concept
included parenting by example. That is, by parents
modeling healthy technology use and limit setting, chil-
dren will themselves learn healthy use. For example,
one parent commented, “We’ve also had conversations
where the kids have told us we’re using our devices
too much. We appreciate having it pointed out, because
you’re right. It’s not a good example” (Blackwell etal.,
2016, p. 1395).
Themes found mainly in the
qualitative literature
Our parallel qualitative review also allowed us to char-
acterize prevalent themes that emerged from interviews
with parents and adolescents that are not yet covered
in current quantitative survey research on parenting of
adolescent technology use. We focus on three broad
themes that illustrate deficits in the ways digital parent-
ing has been assessed, including parent–teen boundary
negotiations, social ecologies of support, and alternate
perspectives on technology.
Parent–teen boundary negotiations. First, parent–teen
boundary negotiations were often described by both par-
ents and adolescents. These included tensions around
parental rules and restrictions on technology use and
how these rules and restrictions were renegotiated and/
or circumvented. Parents described a regular back and
forth over rules and a concern that strict rules would
backfire: “When I try to keep my child within the bound-
ary of rules, he would start to lie” (Rhim etal., 2016, p. 104).
Adolescents, in turn, expressed frustration with rubbing
up against set limits and described instances of feeling
under the microscope: “Here’s my iPhone, there’s you
[their parent]. I’m looking at Twitter, you’re looking at me
on my phone looking at Twitter” (Blackwell etal., 2016,
p. 1397). Unsurprisingly, then, adolescents also described
workarounds, in which face-value rules (e.g., no texting
peers) were circumvented via another technology (e.g.,
using social media chats). As described by one adoles-
cent, moving platforms can provide a reprieve from con-
stant parental scrutiny:
Twitter is like . . . [pause] when your parents leave
the house and you can have a party. And you do
and say what you want. But Facebook is like when
mom and dad are home. You have to like, watch
yourself. (Rickman, 2013, p. 222)
Social ecologies of support. Second, the social ecolo-
gies of support concept broadly encompassed attention
to adolescents’ development in nested contexts and more
specifically spoke to the significance of family members,
friends, and school systems in enforcing and sometimes
establishing digital rules. At the inner most ecology, par-
ents described enlisting extended family to look out for
children on social media and the role of older siblings in
helping to monitor technology use at home and provide
parents with a sense of their sibling’s digital identity. This
reliance on extended families was especially prevalent
among low-SES and racial-minority individuals. For
example, describing the role of siblings among Puerto
Rican and Dominican families living in the United States,
a parent noted:
The big one is always checking, cause like the
other one is younger and that, she is more atten-
tive, closer to the little one, because we are in a
ladder [laughs] us with the big one and the big
one checks what the little one does. (Gomez,
2017, p. 151)
Wider ecologies also included the role of schools in
setting restrictions on youths’ access to certain sites,
but also the difficulties that ensue when schools’ man-
dates of technology use run counter to parents’ technol-
ogy limits or approaches. For instance, one parent
shared that one “worry of [her son] being online is that
the schools aren’t necessarily training kids the way I’m
training my kids at home” (Mendoza, 2013, p. 180).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, such tensions between
parental restrictions and the necessities of technology
for school were undoubtedly amplified, and quantifying
these tensions in ongoing research will be important.
Appreciation of technology. Finally, the appreciation of
technology concept largely encompassed parents’ under-
standing of technology’s positive potential with respect to
social skill building and as a future gateway for career
opportunities. For instance, parents described promoting

12 Modecki et al.
their offspring’s technology use to encourage sociability
and communication skills. Parents acknowledged, “this is
how they communicate with each other, and I need to get
on board and catch up” (Ebersole, 2012). Technology was
also described as a pathway to future success. Here, tech-
nology was viewed largely as an opportunity, for instance,
“an outlet—as he (the child) . . . gets interested in writing,
or in design, or in photography, or whatever it is. It will
give you a kind of gallery, a place to exhibit” (Mendoza,
2013, p. 207). By the same token, lack of access to technol-
ogy was sometimes described as a looming disadvantage
among families with less access; parents expressed con-
cerns that disparities in online skills might engender dis-
parities in future career prospects. Adolescents from
low-income families described challenges such as print-
ing homework and relying on libraries for digital assign-
ments. Even in classrooms, lack of devices posed a
challenge, as described by one adolescent:
My theology teacher was like, okay, take your
phones out, and we did a live Quizlet . . . so every-
one went in their phones, signed in, whatever and
they picked. . . . Yeah, so, that means I had to tell
the teacher I can’t get in. (Gomez, 2017, p. 170)
Discussion
Concerns about new digital technologies and their
potential harm for children have been the subject of
considerable societal debate (George & Odgers, 2015).
Amid mixed findings regarding the impact of technol-
ogy use on adolescents’ well-being (Orben & Przybylski,
2019b; Twenge etal., 2018), parents are left on their
own to balance the competing demands of addressing
safety concerns and fostering adolescents’ autonomy.
To address the challenges of modern parenting,
researchers have been seeking new ways to measure
digital parenting. However, these efforts have largely
been ad hoc.
The current study’s rigorous stocktaking through two
interdisciplinary systematic reviews yielded a compre-
hensive overview of both quantitative measurement and
direct qualitative accounts of adolescents and their par-
ents. Merging insights from both literatures allowed us
to depict the realities of digital parenting and identify
key gaps in how digital-parenting strategies have been
operationalized to date. As depicted in Figure 2, although
many concepts appeared in both literatures, a small sub-
set appeared almost exclusively in the quantitative litera-
ture (and hence indicate potential overemphasis in
current measurement), and a nontrivial number appeared
almost exclusively in the qualitative literature (and hence
may be currently neglected in quantitative measure-
ment). For example, the qualitative literature highlighted
adolescents’ need for autonomy, heterogeneity in fami-
lies’ ecological systems for support and monitoring, and
the many positive affordances of technology, particularly
for youths from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• Monitoring via “Hovering”
• Co-Use of Technology
• Support With Distressing
Online Encounters
Prevalent in Survey Items
• Restricting Physical Access to Devices
• Restricting via Time Balancing
• Considering Peer Technology Use
• Encouraging Child Self-Disclosure
• Encouraging Good Digital Citizenship
• Encouraging Digital Opportunities
• Modeling Technology Behavior
• Fostering Social Learning via Tech
• Parent–Teen Boundary Negotiation
• Consideration of Other Social
Ecologies
Prevalent in Qualitative Findings
• Rule Setting Around Timing, Location, Duration, and
Content of Technology Use
• Restriction via Filters and Other Parental Controls
• Active Monitoring of Technology Use and Behavior
(e.g., via “Friending” on Social Media, Reviewing
Search Histories, Reading Text Messages, etc.)
• Monitoring Online Behavior via Monitoring Apps
• Instruction on Safe Online Behavior
• Discussion of Adolescent’s Online Activity
Fig. 2. Venn diagram of concepts prevalent primarily in (left) survey items, (right) qualitative findings, and (middle) both.

Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X) 13
Restriction and risk
As characterized in Figure 2, overlaps between the
quantitative-survey and qualitative literatures centered
especially around themes related to restriction and risk
reduction: Both literatures have emphasized restriction
via rule setting (on the timing, location, duration, and
content of technology use) and restriction via filters or
other technology-based controls.
Nonetheless, the qualitative literature provides addi-
tional nuance about restriction that should be incorpo-
rated into future quantitative work: (a) restriction
through physical removal of the child’s device, which
is most feasible with mobile phones and tablets that
can, for example, be placed in drawers, and (b) restric-
tion via distraction or time balancing, for example, keep-
ing children busy with offline extracurricular activities
and hobbies so that they lack time for recreational tech-
nology use. Note that although removing devices is a
readily available strategy for restricting mobile technolo-
gies, doing so may effectively cut off adolescents’ social
support network, which could produce negative conse-
quences (e.g., Leung, 2006). By contrast, time-balancing
approaches can arguably facilitate adolescents’ exposure
to novel contexts and complementary opportunities for
identity development and skill building (Modecki etal.,
2018; Vernon, 2019). As a result, time-balancing tech-
niques have the potential to both limit technology time
and help meet adolescents’ developmental mandate for
exploration and autonomy (Larson etal., 2002). That
said, keeping teenagers “busy” with varied activities and
in-person demands tends to require both parental time
and financial resources and thus may not be equally
accessible to all households. Consequently, the effec-
tiveness of this parenting strategy across diverse family
contexts remains unknown and presents an important
area for future research.
A final perspective on restriction present only in the
qualitative literature was how parents use information
on their children’s peers’ technology use to adjust their
rulemaking. For example, parents might use content on
a friend’s social media profile or their family’s rules on
digital-technology use to decide whether to permit their
child to spend time at the friend’s house. Thus, rule
setting extends beyond the immediate family bubble
and includes oversight of more than just the child’s
use, which indicates it is a truly multidimensional
behavior.
Monitoring
Another area in which the quantitative survey research
and, to a lesser extent, the qualitative literature often
fell short was in its unidimensional conceptualization
of parental monitoring, which focused almost exclu-
sively on control-based parenting strategies. Although
developing a warm and trusting parent–child relation-
ship and providing youths with autonomy support lead
to better knowledge regarding adolescents’ activities
(Crouter etal., 2005), nearly all measures focused on
parental control and independent sourcing of adoles-
cents’ information. That is, survey items focused on the
varied ways parents worked to independently gather
information on adolescents’ uses of digital technologies:
These included “friending” children on social media to
track their posts, checking search histories, examining
text messages and call logs, and (less commonly) using
software to continually monitor online behavior. An
important distinction moving forward will be to parse
parental monitoring behaviors to better characterize
those that might be construed by adolescents as snoop-
ing or invasions of privacy. As described earlier, ado-
lescents sometimes interpret unexpected parental
snooping, including on-demand inspection of devices,
as a violation of their privacy, and there is potential for
both increased secrecy and heightened parent–child
conflict (Hawk et al., 2008). Future research might
investigate whether, for instance, a mutual expectation
of regular phone inspection results in fewer negative
outcomes.
Relatedly, relatively few items measured how parents
encourage self-disclosure from their children. This
opposes decades of research that points to the benefits
of positive relationship strategies for promoting ado-
lescent safety (Kerr & Stattin, 2000; Tokic´ & Pec´nik,
2011) and shows that adolescents’ independent self-
disclosure is most effective at facilitating parental
knowledge of adolescents’ whereabouts, activities, and
well-being (Hunter etal., 2011). As a result, there is
significant potential for reconceptualizations of digital
parenting that incorporate basic tenets of parenting that
preceded the rise of digital technologies to ensure ade-
quate representation of positive parenting strategies.
Positive uses
An emphasis on risk prevention prevailed in the survey
research even among items that were less restriction
focused. For example, survey items that considered
instruction and support often focused on whether par-
ents teach their children to use the Internet safely or
support them when they encounter something distress-
ing online. Yet parents in focus groups and interviews
often focused on benefits of technology. This was espe-
cially prevalent among low-SES families who were
highly cognizant of the ways in which their adolescent
was potentially missing out on current and future
opportunities. More broadly, positive themes that

14 Modecki et al.
emerged specifically in the qualitative review included
discussions of good digital citizenship, identification
and encouragement of digital opportunities, and parent
role modeling of positive technology use.
The global idea of “being a good person” and how
this translates to the online space was described by
parents as an underlying tenet that they applied across
their interactions with teens. This goal reflects the pri-
mary responsibility of parents of adolescents, to assist
with a transition to independent young adulthood, hav-
ing inculcated youths with a prosocial identity and
value system (Allen etal., 1996). One could argue that
the goal of good digital citizenship reflects postdigital
parenting, in which adolescents’ values, character, and
identity are reflected as much online as offline.
Also critical for postdigital parenting is the recogni-
tion of prospects provided by new technologies and,
accordingly, identification and encouragement of digital
opportunities for adolescents. Parents discerned pros-
pects for professional skills and career pathways using
digital technologies and potential for academic and
social learning in a world in which virtual learning and
communication are increasingly the norm. Yet there
was minimal evidence of such possibilities in survey
parenting measures. Forward-facing future digital-
parenting studies should weave in positive expectations
associated with technology, such as enhanced educa-
tional opportunities and a wider breadth of career pos-
sibilities, to accurately reflect parental perspectives and
goals. Among families with restricted access to new and
emerging technologies, it will be especially important
to adequately capture parents’ expectations and hopes
related to future digital opportunities.
Outdated items
There were several areas in which a lack of qualitative
evidence indicated aspects of parenting that are not as
relevant to the current digital environment as they may
have been in the past. For example, hovering emerged
much less frequently in qualitative accounts than in
quantitative research. This suggests that such a parent-
ing strategy may be less feasible or useful in the era of
personal mobile devices. The common inclusion of
hovering items in surveys likely hearkens back to mea-
sures based on nonmobile and large-screened technolo-
gies such as desktop computers or televisions, which
could be casually monitored from a distance. Given that
handheld devices with small screens are increasingly
prevalent, quantitative measurement is arguably ripe
for an update.
A further example is parent–child social co-use of
technology (i.e., using the same device at the same
time), a pillar of Valkenburg et al.’s (1999) seminal
parental-mediation strategies for television viewing. It
was relatively absent in the qualitative findings, which
suggests that, like hovering, it may be less relevant
today, in the age of personal digital devices. Although
co-use may still be an appropriate parenting strategy
for technologies such as television and video games,
the premise of sharing time together to enhance ado-
lescents’ digital experiences on personal digital devices
is less clear-cut. That said, co-use need not be entirely
lost or irrelevant; at its core, this concept reflects an
effort to grow and maintain a positive relationship with
adolescents. Its benefits traditionally rested in spending
time together and being present positively in adoles-
cents’ lives, which is undoubtedly still important for
parenting in the age of the smartphone.
The way forward
Parenting adolescents has long been a complex task,
balancing adolescents’ need for independence and
exploration with appropriate scaffolding and safeguards
as they move toward young adulthood. Current research
that investigated parenting in the digital age has largely
focused on the latter, which reinforces a danger-focused
lens that emphasizes avoidance of technology-related
risks. This “spotlighting” on risk not only limits schol-
arly dialogue on affordances and benefits but also
reduces a multidimensional and complex set of parent-
ing behaviors into a single dimension that poorly cap-
tures the realities of digital parenting. Hence, not only
are researchers provided with a one-sided take on digi-
tal parenting, but also the complex interactions between
communicating trust and providing digital opportunities
and support to adolescents, alongside restrictions and
monitoring to avoid harm, are not usefully reflected.
Further adding to the complexity of digital parent-
ing is the nature of parent-adolescent relationships,
which are characterized by bidirectional influence
and two-way communication, including adolescent
self-disclosure (Smetana et al., 2005). Survey items,
however, often assume unidirectionality from parents
to teens. Moreover, adolescents’ behavioral responses
to parent rule setting are rarely considered, such as
technological workarounds (e.g., moving to social media
chat when texting privileges are removed and keeping
alternative social media profiles secret from parents).
Yet these behaviors tell as much about the effectiveness
of digital-parenting strategies as they do about parental
knowledge. Likewise, adolescent development neces-
sarily brings with it some degree of parent–child–
conflict, as both teens and parents negotiate a level of
separation (Allen etal., 1996). Boundary conflicts in
which parents set technology rules and recalibrate these
rules according to adolescents’ pushback or negotiation
are reflective of this normative developmental process
and need to be mirrored in the fields’ measurement.

Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X) 15
Among the most striking area of neglect in digital-
parenting scholarship has been the failure to illustrate
and address the different demands made of parents
across heterogeneous contexts (Huang et al., 2018;
Modecki etal., 2020). As a result, the most pressing call
to action for digital-parent scholars is the need to
account for differences in digital-parenting norms, val-
ues, and behaviors by SES and race/ethnicity. For exam-
ple, parents that lived in lower income settings made
clear in their interviews and focus groups that technol-
ogy can be a safeguard that keeps adolescents con-
nected and entertained indoors when neighborhoods
are unsafe (Gomez, 2017). In addition, parents and
adolescents both considered technology a pathway to
privilege because adolescents will need digital skills to
engage in a modern professional landscape. Thus,
more—not less—technology engagement may be part
of many parental agendas.
Finally, the qualitative literature underscored the
need to consider the role of grandparents, siblings, and
other extended family members in the caregiving orb.
This theme emerged most frequently in interviews with
non-White and/or lower SES parents but almost cer-
tainly applies to a broad range of families. Indeed,
parents often rely on a network of individuals—whether
family, friends, and/or schools—to monitor and support
their adolescents online. Parents may sometimes use
such individuals as proxies, and the ways that extended
networks maintain knowledge of adolescents’ outward
facing identity and behavior is a compelling question
worthy of future investigation.
Conclusion
Parental concerns about adolescents’ use of technology
have been likened to generational concerns that have
plagued parents across time, from telephones to televi-
sion to video games (Wartella & Jennings, 2000). When
it comes to mobile digital technologies, these concerns
are only amplified, given their personal use and immer-
sive nature (Orben, 2020a). But underpinning such wor-
ries is the eternal parental tension between protecting
adolescents’ safety and nurturing their autonomy.
Alongside potential risks of technologies such as smart-
phones exist real affordances for connection, creative
exploration, academic success, and career opportunities
(Modecki, Duvenage, etal., 2022). Although past digi-
tal-parenting measurement has zeroed in on concerns
regarding looming risks, largely neglected has been the
nature of adolescent development and the many advan-
tages new technologies provide.
To better characterize the state of the field and pro-
vide direction for future measurement and study, we
undertook two interdisciplinary systematic reviews of
digital-parenting measurement and experience.
Examining both quantitative and qualitative literatures,
we found that this approach provided a needed bridge
to narrow the chasm between understanding how par-
enting of adolescents appears “on the ground” and how
researchers have characterized parental monitoring and
support in the postdigital age. Decades of developmental
research have shown that parents can meet youths’
developmental needs by providing safeguards while
simultaneously allowing for a process of emotional and
physical separation (Allen etal., 1996). The online space
is no different, and our interpretation of the research
landscape highlights important oversights and opportu-
nities for novel, pressing multidisciplinary research on
digital parenting.
Transparency
Action Editor: Laura A. King
Editor: Laura A. King
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of
interest with respect to the authorship or the publication
of this article.
Funding
This work was supported by Society for Research in Child
Development and Jacobs Foundation.
ORCID iD
Kathryn L. Modecki https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9937-
9748
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