1. Dealing with the risks around children’s digital media use is now seen as an important part of ‘good parenting’

Setty et al. (2026) highlight how children’s digital media consumption is now presented to parents as yet another developmental risk that they are obliged to address. ‘Screen-time’ is now something that many parents instinctively feel that they are expected to be tackling as a ‘responsible’ parent.

For middle-class families in particular, managing children’s engagement with social media and smartphones has become part of what most people would consider ‘good parenting’ in the 2020s – a potentially risky and dangerous aspect of everyday life that parents need to maintain vigilance around. As such, many parents feel compelled to engage in various forms of ‘intensive parenting’ around their children’s device use – characterised by close oversight and structuring of children’s activities, and following ‘expert-led’ strategies and approaches.

In this manner, the past few years have understandably seen rising talk around the potential risks, threats and dangers implicit in young people’s exposure to smartphones and social media, alongside the growing prominence of media ‘experts’ such as Jonathan Haidt and their clear messaging around mental health ‘epidemics’, the need for device bans and screen-time limits.

2.  Even progressive parents feel the need to intervene and restrict their child’s digital media use

Many parents naturally feel uneasy about being too heavy-handed in their mediation of children’s digital lives. Indeed, many parents are well aware of advice around the long-term benefits of exercising a degree of trust, talking openly with their children around digital media, mutually agreeing on shared boundaries, and even making efforts to engage in shared uses of digital media with their children (Borchers et al. 2025).

Yet, as societal concerns become more prominent and governments enact bans and restrictions, it becomes increasingly difficult for parents to stick to these progressive impulses. As Setty et al. (2026) note, many parents’ stated desires to have nuanced conversations with their children around social media and develop shared digital literacies, eventually give way to blunter protective and interventionalist impulses – leading to bans, limits and other attempts at restricting children’s device access and use.

3. Concerns around children’s digital media use are often a case of parents projecting concerns around their own (over)use of digital media

Parental anxieties around children’s digital media use are likely to be shaped (and heightened by parents’ own struggles with digital media. Indeed, Setty et al’s (2026) study of parents’ mediation of young people’s engagement with digital news highlighted what they termed a form of ‘recursive anxiety’: 

“… where parents’ concerns about their own media experiences amplify their perceived responsibility to shield and guide their children, particularly in relation to social media and algorithmic influence” (p.1).

4. Social media is both a site and source of parental concern

Parents are bombarded with messaging about their children’s use of smartphones and social media. Ironically, much of this takes place on social media – with worries about the dangers of social media platforms being shared on many of the very same social media platforms. As such, social media is both a site and source of parental concern (Setty et al. 2026).

References

Borchers, N., Badermann, M., Shao, C. and Zurstiege, G. (2025). “I had to watch the commercial. That was annoying!” Audio-observing active parental mediation of advertising. The Communication Review, 28(1):48–81.

Setty, E.,  Boursinou, M., Roberts, T. and Das, R. (2026).  Parents’ news mediation in a risk society: Navigating trust, anxiety and digital literacy, The Communication Review, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2025.2601427