A mixed method research on increasing digital parenting awareness of parents

As children spend more time in the digital world, numerous researchers have studied access to and use of the internet. They pointed out the positive and negative consequences of that. However, despite the importance of children's conscious use of the internet and parental guidance, the awareness and needs of parents in this area have not been discovered. In order to provide a correct and healthy counselling service, it is useful for the person providing it to be aware of the need for the service to be offered and then to examine his or her self-efficacy in this area. To address the gap in the relevant literature, in this embedded mixed-methods study, we first interviewed parents (n = 40) to explore their digital parenting and identify their needs. We then developed a digital parenting training program to address these needs and sought to raise parents' awareness. We tested the effect of the program we developed using the experimental design pretest-posttest-follow-up-tested control group. We used the risk protection subdimension of the Digital Parenting Awareness Scale as a data collection tool. At the end of the training, we found that parents in the experimental group (n = 14) showed a significant increase in protection from risks in digital parenting. In a follow-up measurement three months after the end of the training program, we found that the scores of parents in the experimental group had not changed significantly in terms of protection against digital risks, i.e., this change persisted. As part of the findings, we made professionals who provide family education and counseling aware of the digital parent training program and suggested that they use the program we developed in the family trainings they organize.

Automated summary

As children spend more time in the digital world, researchers have examined the positive and negative consequences of internet use. However, little is known about the awareness and needs of parents in this area. This study aims to explore parents' digital parenting and develop a training program to address their needs.