Parent empowerment can change media education

Abstract

A crucial role in the primary socialisation is played by parents who are upbringing and educating children about various aspects of life. They also significantly influence child’s knowledge and experience of the digital media through examples, conversations and experiences. However, the process of media education has become a challenging task for parents to achieve. As current fastpaced processes of digitization are constantly changing, adults themselves are often faced with figuring out and adopting new ways of digital media related behaviours and attitudes. In past decade expert recommendations and guidelines on screen exposure and media education of children have been widely disseminated aiming to support parents in their choices in conducting media education of their children. In this article we confirm that parent’s familiarity with the expert recommendations regarding the use of media for children results in a significantly lower screen exposure of their preschool children and in higher frequency of implementing beneficial media education practices.

Keywords

• media education
• media literacy
• parents
• preschool children
• screen exposure
• digitalisation