When digital natives instruct digital immigrants: active guidance of parental media use by children and conflict in the family

Based on the premise that children are active agents who influence their parents’ media use, this study investigated child–parent digital media guidance. Children often introduce new media into the family and influence parents’ media adoption and use. This study also investigated whether this child–parent digital media guidance is associated with media conflicts in the family. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 187 parent–child dyads in Flanders, Belgium. Paired samples t-tests and multiple linear regression analyses were conducted. The results showed that both children and parents reported that children guide their parents how to use digital media, especially for newer media forms such as smartphones, tablets, and apps. Families where there was more child–parent digital media guidance reported more conflicts about media. These relationships were comparable in the parent and child reports.

"Children perceive themselves, and are perceived by their parents, as agents teaching their parents how to use digital media. Child–parent digital guidance occurred mostly for smartphones, tablets, and apps. This study investigated the relationship between child–parent digital media guidance and parent–child media conflicts. Media conflict was reported by a large part of the sample. Only 19% of the parents and 23% of the children reported that there were never any media conflicts in their family. This indicates that when children teach their parents more about digital media, there appears to be more media conflict between those parents and children. Although the sociodemographic control variables had no predictive power, families with more overall conflicts also have more media conflicts. Additionally, the younger the children, the more media conflicts there were. Potential explanation could be that these children are annoyed or frustrated with their parents’ lack of knowledge of technolgy." (Nelissen & Van den Bulck, 2018, pp. 8-9)