Privacy-protective behaviors in the mediatized domestic milieu: parents and the intra- and extra-systemic governance of children’s digital traces

Davide Cino; Ellen Wartella

doi:10.6092/issn.1970-2221/13276

Authors

Davide Cino Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano

Davide Cino, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano. His main research interests concern children’s online presence, digital skills, and digital parenting, which he studies employing different methodologies and through an interdisciplinary lens.
Ellen Wartella Northwestern University

Ellen Wartella is the Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor of Communication, Professor of Psychology, Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, and Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University. She also directs the Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern University. She is a leading international scholar of the role of media in children’s development.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1970-2221/13276

Keywords:

sharenting, digital parenting, children's social media presence, social media literacy, online privacy

Abstract

This paper reports on findings from a survey administered to a sample of 290 parents of children aged 0-12 living in the United States, focusing on parents’ intra- and extra-systemic governance strategies adopted to steward their children’s privacy online when adults post about them on social media, here intended as a proxy for social media literacy. Intra-systemic strategies are aimed at controlling parents’ own sharing behavior when sharing about their children; extra-systemic strategies the behavior of people from surrounding systems (i.e., relatives). Based on descriptive statistics and results of a series of logistic regressions, this work reports on factors influencing the adoption of privacy-protective behaviors for digital-footprint management in the mediatized domestic milieu and advances considerations to promote educational and social media literacy interventions for parents.

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Privacy-protective behaviors in the mediatized domestic milieu: parents and the intra- and extra-systemic governance of children’s digital traces

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