FamiLync: facilitating participatory parental mediation of adolescents' smartphone use

Abstract

We consider participatory parental mediation in which children engage with their parents in activities that encourage both parents and children to participate in co-learning of digital media use. To this end, we developed FamiLync, a mobile service that treats use-limiting as a family activity and provides the family with a virtual public space to foster social awareness and improve self-regulation. A three-week user study conducted with twelve families in Korea (17 parents and 18 teenagers) showed that FamiLync improves mutual understanding of usage behavior, thereby providing common grounds for parental mediation. Further, parents actively participated in use-limiting with their children, which significantly increased the children’s desire to participate. As a consequence, parental mediation methods and parent-child interaction in relation to smartphone usage changed appreciably, and the participants smartphone usage amount significantly decreased.