The role of parenting styles and parents’ involvement in young children’s videogames use

Abstract

With growing numbers of younger children engaging in videogame use, and children using videogames at an increasingly younger age, parents’ responses are becoming increasingly complex. The sample in the present study were 699 parent–preschooler dyads. Subjective reports were used in this research to examine children’s videogame use, parents’ involvement in this, and related parenting styles. Among them, the objective and motivational aspects were measured with the Video Game Status Questionnaire and the Survey of Children’s Engagement with Videogames, respectively. The parents related factors were measured with the Questionnaire of parenting styles and the Parents’ Involvement in the Children’s videogame use. The results find the separate and interactive predictions of the parents’ related factors, and the parenting styles predicted the children’s videogame use partly through the parents’ involvement in the children’s videogame use. In addition, these results suggest that parents’ involvement benefits young children by protecting them from excessive use or by enhancing their positive experience during videogame use. Moreover, democratic parenting was found to have the healthiest influence on children’s use of videogames.