Late Adolescents' Beliefs About Parental Monitoring of Online and Routine Behavior
Judith G. Smetana, Yuejiao LiABSTRACT
Introduction
Despite the amount of time adolescents spend online, relatively little research has focused on parental monitoring of adolescents' online behavior. The present study examined late adolescents' retrospective evaluations of parental rules and their right to know about routine versus online activities, beliefs about the costs and benefits of regulating online behavior, and digital parenting and its correlates.
Method
244 U.S. college students ( M = 20.29 years, SD = 1.27; 178 females, 107 Asians) completed an online survey in 2019 examining parents' rules, their acceptability, and parents' right to know about their routine activities versus online behavior when they lived at home. They also rated the costs and benefits of parental monitoring of online behavior, digital parenting and its acceptability, and parent‐adolescent relationship dynamics.
Results
Participants reported that parents had more rules, rated them as more acceptable, and viewed parents as having more right to know about routine than online activities. Parental monitoring of online behavior was seen as more privacy‐invasive than as facilitating adolescent development. Path analyses revealed that digital parenting was associated with more rules and more psychologically controlling parenting, whereas greater acceptance of digital parenting was associated with more negative parent‐adolescent relationships, more parental right to know, and beliefs that monitoring enhances maturity and safety.
Conclusions
Late adolescents acknowledged the benefits of parental monitoring of online behavior, but they also viewed it as privacy‐invasive and psychologically controlling. Findings reveal the tensions among adolescents' desires for autonomy, their need for privacy, and parents' responsibility to keep adolescents safe.