1 Introduction

Most American kids spend more time on digital media each day than they do in the classroom [1]. Moreover, in the past 5 years there’s been an explosion in mobile devices, games and apps marketed to very young children, extending the potential for chronic media immersion to infants and toddlers. In 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published remarkable findings on digital media use by low-income children aged 6 m–4 yrs. [2]. Use of smart mobile devices was “almost universal”; proficiency in device usage was surprisingly widespread among toddlers, and almost a third of these very young children were regularly put to bed with a mobile device. After over 3 decades of calling for no screen time at all for kids under two, and no more than 1–2 h per day after that [3, 4], the AAP abandoned its guidelines in 2016. Instead, parents are now offered an online “toolkit” with extensive information around technology health risks, references to media resources, and various tips and tools (e.g., a time-use calculator) intended to help parents make decisions in their role as family media managers [5]. Struggling with family media management has been called a challenge of “unprecedented proportions” [4] and “one of the most difficult parenting issues we’ve ever faced” [6]. Yet parents—and families, for that matter—are already “busier than ever”, thank you very much [7, 8]. So what are parents to do when—as one parent we interviewed put it—“even the experts can’t keep up with the new technology”? And how can we help them?

This paper summarizes a set of findings from an extended research project on family dynamics around digital media use, and in particular, on parental concerns and practices in managing their children’s media use. Here we focus primarily on qualitative results from a nationwide online survey and follow-up interviews that enrich and extend previously published quantitative findings [9], and permit a more nuanced understanding of this major yet neglected socio-technical landscape. We then challenge the design community to re-imagine parental control technologies (PCLs) as collaborative self-regulation training tools.

2 Methods

A wealth of data was generated for this project between 2014–2017, primarily from a nationwide online survey and from formal follow-up interviews with survey participants.

The online survey explored parenting styles, family dynamics, family media use and parental concerns and practices around managing media use by their children. It consisted of: (1) 50 rating-scale (1–7) items, (2) a large comment box, where parents were asked to discuss specific concerns, approaches and experiences at some length; and (3) ~15 demographic items. English and Spanish versions of the survey were posted on Surveymonkey; recruitment was primarily through Craigslist ads posted nationwide between Sept 2014–Dec 2015. The survey was completed by over 472 parents, ~30% of site visitors. Almost 77% were female; median age was 41 years. Over 64% were partnered, ~11% were “single”; divorce/separation rate was 35%. Median number of children was 3; their median age was 12 yrs. Annual household income ranged widely, with a median of $65 K. Straightforward quantitative analyses were performed on survey rating-scale items. Content analyses of open-ended survey comments involved both qualitative thematic analysis [10] and quantitative analysis of the frequency of keyword/topic mentions. Keywords were both pre-determined (e.g., media types, parenting style, parental control technologies (PCLs)) and derived from themes emerging from the data itself (e.g., addiction, lack of control).

Formal follow-up interviews were conducted with 18 survey participants, in person at home (if local) or via Skype or phone (if remote). Interviews were conversational and semi-structured, lasted 1–1.5 h. and were audio-recorded. Other family members were included in the interviews (sometimes together, most often separately) whenever possible. Interviewees were primarily recruited via email; all survey respondents who indicated an interest in participating were contacted. Eight interviewees participated as volunteers without pay; 10 more were randomly selected for paid participation. Most interviewees were mothers, 3 were fathers; 13 were white and 5 were Hispanic, black or mixed-race. Other demographics were similar to those of the survey as a whole. The interviews were analyzed primarily through thematic analysis, informed by the survey findings.

We note that our work on this project was also informed by the following: 1. Both authors are psychotherapists who have worked for years with children and families, largely from disadvantaged households. 2. Both authors are also mothers, who engaged in a wide variety of informal, ethnographic-style experiences, interactions and conversations with other parents, children and educators on the topic of family media management, in our local communities (in Northern California and Bamburg, Germany) and elsewhere.

3 Findings

Our survey results document the increasingly predominant use of smart mobile devices from infancy through young adulthood. The mobile phone was by far the primary device parents said their kids used overall, and across childhood age spans. Tablets have also become quite common, at home and increasingly at school, especially for younger children and in more advantaged households.

3.1 Parental Concerns

When survey respondents were asked to describe specific concerns around media use, the topics of sex and violence came up, but also such issues as commercialism, poor role modelling and disparagement of women. Parents, especially those with very young children, said they occasionally look up media ratings (e.g., using Common Sense Media), though admittedly not as often as they might. Easy—and sometimes inadvertent–access to pornography is troubling. One mother complained that kids do not come to parents for information around sexuality anymore; instead, “pornography is the new Sex Ed”. Fears of sexting, cyberbullying and sexual predators were mentioned in comments and interviews, but fairly rarely and largely in the abstract. Interestingly—though with notable exceptions–most parents seemed to feel that their own children were made aware of online identity, privacy, and safety risks both at school and at home, and for the most part were fairly confident that their preteen and teen children “have pretty good heads on their shoulders”. Still, taking some steps to protect children from these risks was seen as a part of their job as parents. This largely included discussing with their kids the “digital trail” left by all online interactions, and encouraging them not to post identifying information online, to use privacy settings on social media and to avoid online interactions with strangers. Some “checking up” on texts and Facebook posts was reported, most often for tweens upon first obtaining a smartphone (typically between 10–12 yrs.), or when they started using social media. Otherwise, and as reported elsewhere, most parents, especially with teens and from more advantaged households, tended—with some ambivalence–to try to respect their kids’ “right to privacy” [8].

The primary parental concern, voiced across all demographics, and for children of all ages, was around excessive use of, or so-called “addiction” to, media/technology use. (Note that—with a few notable exceptions–the term “addiction” is used here colloquially, not as a clinical diagnosis; a discussion around clinical addiction and excessive technology use is provided in our previous paper). Concerns were voiced around the effects of “too much technology” on kids’ physical wellbeing—e.g., eyesight, brain development, quality of sleep; their cognitive development—e.g., focused attention, reading, executive functioning; and, increasingly, their social/emotional development—e.g., emotional regulation, empathy, conversational skills and deep connections to family and friends. Half of our survey respondents’ ratings characterized one or more of their children as “addicted to technology”. (As expected, for males, addiction was associated primarily with games (and later—and to a lesser extent, porn); for females, overwhelmingly with social media). Still, the same percentage viewed their kids’ media use as “pretty much like that of most kids of their age and gender.” Moreover, almost as many parents also rated themselves—and/or their partner—as addicted. The qualitative data confirm and extend these results, strongly supporting the notion that this focus on addiction—again, with some exceptions–reflects a vague but deep unease with the degree to which media and technology in general intrude into our lives these days. How much is too much? Not even the AAP will say anymore! Consistent with previous reports [8, 11], many of the parents we encountered felt that the pervasive pull of technology is “out of control” yet “inevitable”—in their kids’ lives, in their own lives, and in the culture at large.

Three-quarters of survey comments and many of the interviews reflect a palpable sense of lack of control in a heavily demanding and burdensome role. Parents feel strong social pressure to be “good parents” (not too permissive, not too strict) around media management, and to pass on “family values” around technology use, but they are also “overwhelmed”, “stressed out” and unable to devote the time and energy that due diligence requires. The march of technology diffusion in our society appears relentless, and fighting it is an “uphill battle”. One mother noted that she “didn’t want to lend my child to this giant social experiment”, but added that “resistance is futile.”

The demands and burdens parents described include keeping informed about constantly changing media and media content, making and revising limits and other discipline decisions, maintaining constant vigilance and consistent modelling and discipline despite other responsibilities and their children’s persistent whining, tantrums, battles and “get-arounds”. Lower-income parents may take on multiple jobs to make ends meet, while higher-income parents might be required to work long hours, travel extensively, and—most commonly–to have an online work presence even during “off hours.” Other challenges include being a single parent, limited financial or family resources to help with childcare, strong differences between parents on appropriate media management and parenting styles, child vulnerabilities/co-morbidities such as ADHD, autism or anxiety and depression, and the increasingly online nature of schooling (from posting assignments and grades online to providing tablets for students).

One father of teen boys complained that parental media management requires “too much responsibility with too little authority—just like my job!” This then negatively impacts family dynamics, especially around issues of trust (that kids are following the rules and not taking huge risks) and respect (for parental authority and teens’ “supposed rights” to privacy and self-determination). Parents complain of the inability to “really tell” what their kids are doing online (especially as mobiles are often used behind closed bedroom doors), a sense of exclusion from what their kids are “really doing” and a feeling of being left out, left behind and even disrespected if not “tech-savvy” enough. One fairly prototypical devolving dynamic, especially in more advantaged households, starts out with a preteen begging for a smartphone and arguing that “everyone has one and they’ll be left out”, parents recognizing the usefulness of a phone for “emergencies” and schedule “co-ordination”, parents then giving the child a phone with initial warnings and admonitions around its use, followed by the child assuming sole ownership, and vehemently asserting privacy and “always on” “rights”, especially in the teen years.

3.2 Parental Controls and Media Management Strategies

The media management strategies most frequently mentioned by parents in the survey involved the use of time limits and filtering/blocking of specific content, sites or apps (i.e., forms of monitoring and restriction). Parental control (PCL) software to implement these strategies is now available on most devices, and some, like Microsoft Family Safety, are cloud-based and intended to work across devices. Wifi routers are the most typical PCL hardware. Analyses of survey results by age of first child shows that PCL use at home begins early, with 27% of children aged 0–2 yrs. Use peaks at 62% for 9–11 year olds, then falls to 46% by ages 15–17. A similar pattern is found for mobile device-based PCLs, although peak PCL use for mobiles occurs somewhat earlier (ages 6–8), and declines rapidly thereafter. Satisfaction with PCLs dramatically declines across the age span, as addiction ratings rapidly rise. Overall, the quantitative trends suggest that many parents—especially in more advantaged households where there are at least some older children–adopted PCLs fairly early on, but over the teen years, PCL use became so unsatisfactory (with battles, backfiring, etc.) that they “gave up”, at least on controlling devices used by those teens [12,13,14]. Of course, these are not longitudinal data and, in part, must reflect cohort effects. Still, this interpretation is strongly supported by comments and interviews characterizing experiences over time with children that are currently older teens or young adults. PCLs—especially cloud- and router-based controls–were described as extremely cumbersome to use, inflexible, unintegrated, and noticeably slowing performance. They were also seen as frustratingly unreliable and with poor customer support. Inherent difficulties in filtering (e.g., “you can’t block everything”) were noted, as were innumerable logistical problems. For example, turning off cellphone data access or implementing revised PCL settings on laptops and tablets typically requires restarting the device.

In addition, simple technical solutions such as absolute time limits easily become complex and problematic when, say, game companies penalize players who must leave the game when timed-out before completing a battle. And does downloading a game update “count” as time online? It is also noteworthy that in many households, the PCLs are effectively controlled by one parent (often the father) while the other tends more often to be at home, “in the trenches”. Several mothers confessed in the interviews to wanting to “soften” or be “more flexible” on rigid rules implemented via PCLs. Moreover, many less technical parents do not fully understand how their PCLs on their kids’ devices work. Indeed, most interviewees who said they used PCL restrictions on their children’s smartphone access could not accurately describe how they work. Several did not appreciate that their smartphone restrictions did not apply to wifi use. All of this can lead to inconsistencies in parenting, and disappointing dynamics of deception, manipulation and mistrust between parents and children.

By far the most common complaint against PCLs placed on devices used by teens concerned how easy it is for kids to learn to get around them; that is, they “backfire”. For example, one interviewee said “there’s not a single [PCL] my 12 yr. old son can’t get around—easy-to-follow instructions are posted on YouTube!” Passwords can be changed (or figured out), phones can be reset, and kids can “flip between tabs” to pretend they are working. Then there’s “incognito mode” search, history clearing, hidden accounts, “stealth mode” vpns and emulators, and so much more. Some parents resorted to physically removing wifi routers to limit surreptitious gaming. The tweens and teens we interviewed fairly uniformly—and cheerfully–reinforced the notion that their parents “have no idea” of the real extent of their media use. While some parents viewed PCLs as a way to “de-personalize” discipline around media management, their kids increasingly saw them as a challenge to work around.

The parents we interacted with tended to view media management in the larger parenting context of promoting increasing maturity through self-regulation [15, 16]. Analogies to “childproofing” [17] are often made, but the task is far more complex, dynamic and uncertain in the digital environment. Parents may feel misgivings about courses taken when problems arise, and principles all-too-often yield to pragmatics. Still, most parents—and families–seem to muddle through. The obvious “pull” of digital media has made access control (imposing or relaxing restrictions, sometimes with PCLs) a core discipline tool for both offline and online behaviors. Access control is not only used to punish excessive media use, but also to reinforce desired activities (e.g., high grades, completing homework or chores, participation in sports, reading, music practice, in-person socializing), and even to promote family cohesion (e.g., media off for family dinners, on for movie nights; videogames for father-son bonding; increased access to reinforce more—or more consistent–family communication). Other common approaches include modelling, conversational advice and guidance (active mediation), co-use (e.g., friending on Facebook, watching TV together), participatory learning (e.g., programming together), and various forms of parental awareness, supervision and monitoring (e.g., using timers to “keep track and make sure he doesn’t play forever”; locating game consoles or TVs in a public space for casual oversight; reading texts and posts; using PCLs to track phone locations or monitor online activities.)

A wide variety of other values-based parenting strategies were also mentioned, some quite common (“keep them busy!”, “homework first!” grades-based approaches and “the not rules” (e.g., not at dinner/restaurants/in the car/with relatives/in your room after bedtime) and others, more family-specific (“drop everything and read!”, “media Sabbaths”, “TV is toxic!”). The “keep them busy!” strategy might involve anything from occasional coercion to “go outside and play” to collaboratively creating alternative activities. A common version of this approach, especially in more advantaged households, is to indirectly limit time available for media use through intensive scheduling of more “worthwhile” enrichment activities and sports pursuits. While this can generate a “calendaring and co-ordination nightmare”, especially for mothers, it has the advantage of being fairly effective without the need for parents to explicitly “come down too hard” and appear strict or authoritarian—i.e., “not a good parent.” In fact, several mothers we talked with who relied on this approach saw themselves as rather “laissez faire” about their kids’ media use, despite phone tracking and continuous texting around co-ordinating schedules, etc.

In short, parents bring to bear a panoply of concerns and practices, both on- and offline, on the challenging task of media management. This is done in the more general parenting context of promoting self-regulation, and approaches may vary as resources, creativity, specific kids and situations and the complexities of modern family life allow. Methods simplistically classified in earlier work as inherently “preventative” or “reactive” [8] are in practice customized, blended together and applied flexibly for the purposes at hand. This is most obvious when parents, in effect, try to use PCLs as behavioral training tools—providing clear limits and rewards, and fairly immediate, targeted reinforcements contingent on the performance of desired behaviors [18]. Of course, tools should be effective, usable and useful. And even the best tools and rules require some buy-in and collaboration to be effective, especially with teens. (Joint media contracts are often recommended, but success can be short-lived; this can be attributed to insufficient “scaffolding”, or targeted, immediate and feedback and persistent, adaptive support [18, 19].) As our results demonstrate, the widespread need for better media management tools is palpable.

4 Implications for Design

Attracting and retaining users is a digital media design requirement, and PCL design isn’t exactly sexy. As one engineer, father and interviewee put it:

[Digital media] is addictive by design…of course it’s hard to resist! [PCLs] make parents feel like they’re in control, but kids soon learn the truth… Parental controls are an afterthought at best at worst, an oxymoron!

As members of the design community, we share some responsibility for the social effects of our products. Some authors have called for improving the design of our technologies to promote social values [8, 11, 16]. For example, Sherry Turkle [16] suggests promoting more intentional transitions and interactions, “unitasking” (as opposed to multi-tasking), and increased time offline (to reflect and converse). We applaud these efforts. We also recognize the importance of ongoing work to incrementally enhance the usability and usefulness of PCLs. But beyond this, and more fundamentally, we challenge the PCL design community to recognize and respond to the creative opportunity our results suggest. Parents are concerned about excessive technology use by their children, but feel a sense of burden and lack of control in managing media use. Better PCL tools could help. Especially if PCL functionality were re-imagined beyond simple surveillance and control (and battles and backfiring).

Here’s one blue-sky scenario: PCLs could become integrated, adaptive, and increasingly collaborative self-regulation training tools, instantiating best practices—perhaps even via AI agents. Helping parents become more effective media mentors and managers, and supporting their kids in the process of becoming aware of, discussing and learning to manage their own media use as they mature. Perhaps featuring collaborative construction of media contracts, with revisions based on feedback over time. Kid-friendly graphical activity–even bio- and neuro-feedback–displays with immediate, targeted feedback to promote awareness, self-reflection and self-regulation. Collaborative co-creation and gamification to promote engagement and partial opacity to respect teen privacy [20]. More targeted behavioral training (e.g., star charts and token economies) as needed to motivate and reinforce progress. Easy connection to communication and calendaring tools, with appropriate alerts, warnings, reminders, count-down timers, etc. Voice-control and thumbprint security. Maybe even links to CommonSenseMedia reviews, or games and apps designed to train specific skills. Self-regulation apps and related technologies have been called “the wave of the future” [20]. Application to media management for and by kids will be a challenge, but the need is real and the promise is clear.