Exploring Parental Mediation in the Digital Age: Linking Literacy, Citizenship, and Attitudes
Exploring Parental Mediation in the Digital Age: Linking Literacy, Citizenship, and Attitudes

Summary/Abstract: Nowadays, children’s interaction with digital technologies has kept growing, thus knowledge of how family dynamics affect their online behaviour represents a crucial topic. The present paper explores parental digital mediation, and through a sequential framework, investigates how it supports children’s digital maturity and, hence, their growth as responsible digital citizens. This study proposes that in the development of children’s digital skills, technical, critical, and ethical, which in turn support online civility, parental digital mediation might have a role. To investigate how digital literacy, digital citizenship, and attitudes towards technology relate to the mediation strategies they use, the present study investigated 318 parents of children aged 6 to 11 years. Higher digital literacy and stronger citizenship values seem to correlate with parents who are more likely to use active and participatory mediation techniques. These findings highlight the need for intergenerational effects on digital citizenship and imply that ethical and civil digital participation is greatly promoted by both parental support and children’s competencies.

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