Author:

Keywords:

Television, Parental mediation, Latent Growth Curve, Longitudinal study

Abstract:

A longitudinal study was conducted, first, to describe trends over time in parental mediation of adolescents’ television viewing, and, second, to explore the relationship between changes in teenagers’ attachment to their parents and the mediation of their television viewing. A panel of early (N = 883) and a panel of middle adolescents (N = 651) rated three times, in three consecutive years, how often their parents used instructive and restrictive mediation strategies, and how often they watched television together with their parents. The results showed that parental mediation is not at all uncommon in adolescence, even among teenagers in twelfth grade. Latent growth curve analyses, on the other hand, indicated that each of these parental mediation strategies tend to decline throughout adolescence, at varying paces. In addition, paired latent growth curve analyses pointed out that the decreasing occurrence of instructive mediation and co-viewing appears to be related to the process of adolescent separation; the declining incidence of restrictive mediation in adolescence was not related to the separation process.