Digital parenting in the 21st century: Development and validation of a new digital parenting scale

Around the world, adolescents are more digitally connected than ever, and access to digital devices has become a lightning rod of conflict in many homes. To date, research on best practices in digital parenting has been hampered by the absence of a well validated measure that reflects the realities of parenting in the contemporary digital age. Here, we developed a digital parenting scale across three separate samples (N = 1,050). The digital parenting scale (DPS) was shown to be a reliable and valid measure of six distinct types of digital parenting strategies, aligning with six analytic factors: regulation (i.e., using rules and restriction to regulate adolescent use of technology), boundary negotiation (i.e., balancing adolescent and parent needs and goals with respect to adolescent technology use), co-use (i.e., parents and adolescents using digital devices together), mediation (i.e., teaching and offering guidance related to safe use of technology), monitoring by proxy (i.e., using friends and family to monitor adolescent technology use), and technological monitoring (i.e., using technology to assist parents in monitoring adolescent technology use). We found broad associations between each of the six factors of the digital parenting scale and well-established measures of general parenting practices, suggesting that digital parenting is an extension of one’s general parenting strategies.